Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism 9780226473048

Citation preview

Becoming a New Self

Becoming a New Self

Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism

Moshe Sluhovsky

the university of chicago press chicago and london

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978- 0-226-47285- 0 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978- 0-226-47299-7 (paper) ISBN-13: 978- 0-226-47304-8 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226473048.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sluhovsky, Moshe, 1958– author. Title: Becoming a new self : practices of belief in early modern Catholicism / Moshe Sluhovsky. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016045900 | ISBN 9780226472850 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226472997 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226473048 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Devotional literature— History and criticism. | Catholic Church. | Christian life. Classification: LCC BX2177.5 .S59 2017 | DDC 248.4/6088282— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045900 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In Memoriam My paternal grandparents Mowszy and Liba Słochowski, their daughters and son (my aunts and uncle), and their grandchildren (my cousins), annihilated by the Nazis, November 1942–February 1943, mostly in Treblinka ‫יד‬ ‫ משה וליובה סלוחובסקי‬,‫לסבי וסבתי‬ ‫ גיטה ורבקה‬,‫ לאה‬,‫חיים‬-‫ יוסף‬:‫בנם ובנותיהם‬ ‫נכדיהם ונכדותיהם‬ ‫שנרצחו בידי הנאצים בטרבלינקה במהלך חורף תש”ג‬

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations

xi

1.

Introduction

2.

Directing Souls

29

3.

Spiritual Exercises

67

4.

General Confession

96

5.

Examination of Conscience

121

Epilogue

142

Notes

147

Bibliography

181

Index

207

1

vii

Ack now ledgments

T

his book took a very long time to write, as administrative responsibilities at my university spirited me away from it time and again. During these many years of digestion I have accumulated many debts, and it is a pleasure to recognize the contributions of individuals and institutions to Becoming a New Self. The Shelly Davis Center for Historical Research at Princeton University and the Advances Research Initiative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York offered me two years of uninterrupted time and fi nancial backing to write most of the book. I thank Phil Nord and Don Robotham, the directors of these research centers respectively, as well as the fellows who read versions of chapters or heard me discussing my ideas. Audiences at Duke, Columbia, Brown, Princeton, and Tel Aviv Universities, and at the Committee for the Study of Religion at the Graduate Center, generously shared their opinions, as did participants in the 2008 annual meeting of the American Historical Association and the 2011 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. I thank Brian Stock and John O’Malley for their generous comments during these sessions. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has always been generous with both time and money. I have never stopped marveling at the intellectual rigor and sophistication of my colleagues and students at the Hebrew University. Chapter 4 is a much-revised version of an article I originally published in the collection Religion and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Honor of Michael Heyd, edited by Asaph Ben-Tov, Yaacov Deutsch, and Tamar Herzig (Brill, 2013). This is the opportunity to recall Michael Heyd’s immense contribution to my intellectual development. Like all who knew and studied with him, I miss him tremendously. A different version of chapter 3 was published in the Catholic Historical Review. I ix

x

Acknowledgments

thank Brill and the Catholic Historical Review for the rights to incorporate sections from the published versions in this book. James N. Green read numerous versions of the entire manuscript, while Tamar Herzig, Robert A. Maryks, Julia Smith, and Susan Whyman commented on specific chapters. I am extremely grateful to Jonathan Garb and Wietse de Boer, who were kind enough to take time off from their work and administrative duties and read the penultimate version of the book. Their wise criticisms and helpful suggestions improved the fi nal version immensely. Michelle Molina and another reader for the University of Chicago Press offered valuable insights and convinced me to fi netune some of my arguments. Conversations with Peter and Betsy Brown, Natalie Zemon Davis, Dagmar Herzog, Nimrod Levin, and Guy Stroumsa have enriched me a great deal and in their own mysterious ways became absorbed into this book. I also thank Guy Evron-Yadin for his assistance, Sara Tropper and Barbara Norton for their careful editorial work, Eitan Gavson for his meticulous indexing, and Doug Mitchell and the staff at the University of Chicago Press for escorting the book through the publication process. The book was published with the support of the Israel Science Foundation.

Abbr ev iations

AHSI

Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu

IHSI

Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu

IJS

Institute of Jesuit Sources

MHSI

Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu

xi

Ch apter One

Introduction

B

ecoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism offers close examinations of a number of early modern Catholic penitential and meditative techniques and posits tight ties between these practices and the project of self-formation as a subject. The practices the book discusses, namely the examination of conscience, general confession, and set of meditations known as spiritual exercises, promoted and cultivated a sense of becoming a new self by way of “knowing oneself”: acquiring comprehension of the practitioner’s unique past, the content of one’s interiority, and his or her ability to set individual future goals. The fruit of this labor was one’s “true self” or “truth.” Taking part in this enterprise of discovery in turn enabled a growing number of early modern Catholics, including laymen and -women, to experience in new ways their subjecthood as well as their connection with fellow Christians and with God. Despite the burgeoning interest in such practices, we ought not to exaggerate their scope. Only a small minority of Catholics were ever practitioners of spiritual exercises of belief. Furthermore, they were likely to be urban rather than rural, educated rather than unlettered, middle- and upper-class rather than peasants. And yet, it was spiritual and devotional dedication rather than social, economic, or political status that determined participation in this elite group. Practitioners achieved these complex transformations of the self by acquiring skills of imagination and enacting procedures of scrutinizing their thoughts, emotions, and sensory experiences. “Self-transformation specialists,” known as spiritual directors and spiritual advisors, helped the practitioner to actualize St. Paul’s dictum (Ephesians 4:22–24): “put off your own self [hominem], which is being corrupted by its deceitful

1

2

Chapter One

desires . . . put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” The early modern period saw many forms of self-cultivation. In this volume I engage with techniques that consciously did not consider the self as an endgame. The goal of these practices was not to acquire selfknowledge either for its own sake or for the sake of self-mastery. My inquiry will be directed toward procedures that assisted the practitioner to act in accordance with divine love as it was discovered and experienced within his or her self. This work of the divine love within the human self was understood as the key to salvation, and it was experienced affectively rather than as an intellectual endeavor (cognitio Dei experimentalis). Knowing one’s self meant constructing life in Christian terms; shaping one’s life to conform to a set of propositions about the world. Such work, which we might call “conversion”— or, better, “self-conversion”—led not to transcending this world and fi nding consolation in a mystical union with God, but to knowing God’s love experimentally in this world; as Jean Gerson articulated in the early fi fteenth century, “to feel is to know.”1 God, in his charity, supplied human beings with the ability to enhance their participation in his gift of love by means of devotional practices. Becoming a New Self addresses not only early modern Catholic notions of selfhood and subjecthood, but also subjugation and the place of agency and desire in early modern Catholic imaginations. And since its focus is the early modern era and changes in theology, the book also contributes to the ongoing discussion about the beginning, legitimacy, and characteristics of modernity. I should like to clarify, however, that the practices I consider here were not early modern inventions. All were in fact inherited or reconfigured from earlier spiritual practices, mostly but not exclusively Christian. But unlike Stoic exercises of self-care, which attempted to achieve autonomy through mastery over the body; the spiritual and physical regimens of rigorous exercises that characterized monks and nuns; humility and obedience to authority (human as well as divine) as means for overcoming the self; or even the Cartesian philosophical cultivations of self-exploration, which aimed to acquire mastery over the world, the practices discussed in this book aspired to design a self that submits, without recourse to human (i.e., priestly) mediation, to the divine. And unlike medieval and early modern mystical methods of spiritual self-transformation, which desired to transcend the created world and achieve perfection by annihilating the self altogether, these exercises were meant to help practitioners fi nd consolation and active repentance (metanoia) here on earth.

Introduction

3

The traditions upon which early modern practices of belief and of becoming a new self drew had been around for over a millennium. Typically, however, such traditions had been acquired and practiced as separate techniques, serving different goals and pursued by different individuals— though almost always by members of religious communities. Nonetheless, each and every activation of a tradition involves adopting and adapting, choosing and rejecting, and above all reinterpreting. I suggest that the reinterpretation of traditional techniques in the cultivation and transformation of practices of belief in early modern Catholicism entailed such a signi ficant broadening of the spectrum of practices and of their availability to new and growing segments of the population that one can justifiably speak of a new stage in the history of Christian methods of self-formation and subjectivation.2 Importantly, as we shall see, the popularization and growing diffusion of these practices were accompanied by controversy and debate. Clerical authorities debated the making of such practices available to women or to the laity at large, the supervision of practitioners, and ways to ensure that the self being formed would not escape its mandatory submission to direction. From Jacob Burckhardt and Max Weber on, philosophers and historians of modern selfhoods have claimed that the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation either created or witnessed the birth of the modern self. There are many portrayals of this modern (and in fact always implicitly Protestant-and-always-already-becoming-secular) self in the scholarly literature. And as is the case with every historical topic, historians disagree as to the precise characteristics and genealogy of this self. Yet we might describe it as an entity that is unique, self-possessive, and self-conscious (by means of introspection) of its uniqueness. This Western self has been often described as possessing a unique degree of self-reflection and being cognizant of its cognition. It also possesses innate attributes and psychological depth. Politically, this self is autonomous and able to make and remake itself at will while also always being subjected to societal, political, judicial, and psychological rules. This individual modern self claims, on the basis of its own self-legitimization and self-creation, sovereignty over many of its activities in both the public and the private spheres, a right to privacy (in both the psychic and the social domains), and a right to pursue its own goals. In return, this individual recognizes the same rights in others and assumes responsibility for his or her actions. Charles Taylor summarized the configuration of these features of the modern person as somebody who possesses “a notion of the future and the past, can hold values, make choices; in short, can adopt life-plans.”3

4

Chapter One

One major additional characteristic of this modern self is its continuous trajectory toward liberation from social and metaphysical restrictions and the ties that bind its predecessors (and other formations of selfhood in other cultures) to social networks and/or theological cosmologies. This last element I challenge in this book. The early modern Catholic self (and this was equally the case with early modern Protestant selves), was, I argue, part and parcel of the reconfiguration of modern selfhoods. And for this new self the process of subjectivation, of acquiring a sense of unique selfhood, did not necessitate the dissolution of ties with other persons or with God. On the contrary, for the devout early modern elites I discuss in this book the cultivation of a sense of selfhood and the practices of selfformation analyzed below were means of getting closer to God, enhancing the awareness of one’s lack of autonomy, and fi ne-tuning one’s desires to follow a prescribed set of behaviors, practices, and beliefs that connected the person to larger frames of reference. Sovereignty, for devout early modern Catholics, meant sovereignty to submit to subjugation. The way to achieve this autonomy/subjection was by acquiring, exercising, and mastering devotional practices. When viewed from the vantage point of modern secularity, the modern self that I identify in the texts and practices examined in this book is full of contradictions. But by incorporating the Catholic route to modern selfhood into existing narratives of subjecthood and self-formation in the modern era, my goal is to widen the scope of potential configurations of modern selves, and in so doing to remind ourselves that modern selfhoods (in the plural) are less unique and less secular, and that their trajectories have been less teleological, than one might gather from the literature. With its focus on practices, this book is also part of an ongoing shift in the humanities and social sciences from metaphysics to (French) phenomenology, from examination of norms to examination of practices lived, and from prescriptive texts to people’s experiences. Within the field of religious studies this shift has involved a major challenge to traditional assumptions about the relations between belief systems and creeds on the one hand, and actual experiences of the self and the divine on the other. But while practices are at the center of the following discussions, a main argument of the book is that devotional practices cannot be disconnected from the beliefs they sustain, enhance, and—most important— embody. By foregrounding belief I call into question the prevailing prioritizing in anthropology, the sociology of religion, and religious studies of practice over belief, as well as the position, which has gained popularity over the

Introduction

5

past twenty years or so, that belief exists only as embodied practices and results only from practice. This volume employs a rich lexicon of philosophical, theological, and psychological terms, and in this introduction I offer working defi nitions of some of them. However, two caveats are in order. First, I use terms such as self, modernity, subjectivity, subjecthood, agency, desire, imaginations, and so on, in a heuristic and pragmatic sense rather than an analytical one. Here, they are the tools of the cultural and social historian and not those of the intellectual historian, philosopher, psychologist, or theologian. Scholars in other fields will certainly put the same terms to different use and elucidate their meanings more precisely.4 Secondly, this book and my working defi nitions alike are marked by an unavoidable tension, namely that which exists between two distinct historical and temporal settings: the one I describe and analyze, and the one in which I am situated. Thus, metaphorically speaking, the book is bilingual. It speaks both the language of the disengaged twenty-fi rst-century historian of religion and the language of the early modern exercitants of the spiritual practices that are the focus of the book. Put differently (and using terminology that mixes both lexica), two distinct desires operate in the following discussion: the desire of early modern devout individuals to introspect and then transform themselves in order to experience God’s love within their selves and to better themselves, on the one hand; and my desire to comprehend their efforts in my own postdevotional, postmodernist, and post-Freudian world and language, on the other. As Steven Justice has pointed out, “bracketing” the matter of the protagonists’ beliefs regarding what they were doing and what they were thinking they were doing is simply to opt out. One ought to respect the protagonists’ experiences of belief whether one shares or rejects their cosmology and belief system.5 Making sense of practitioners’ commitment to God and to self-transformation requires that we respect the ways in which they configured their universe and relations among humans, the world, and God. Reading the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s engagement with self-formation as a religious subject in both early Christianity and early modern Catholicism, one cannot but be struck by the relative absence of God from his discussion. As will become clear, Foucault’s theorizing of subjecthood, subjection, and subjectivation, his attempt to write a genealogy of spiritual direction, and his lifelong research on modes of confession in the West have all shaped my own attempt to discuss practices of self-formation in early modern Catholicism. There is simply no way to

6

Chapter One

think outside Foucauldian articulations of relations between power and knowledge, truth and subjecthood, autonomy and subjugation. And yet, by relegating God, Satan, and the human condition in the prelapsarian age to the margins of his discussion, Foucault obscured rather than clarified some crucial facets of the process of self-formation, among them the place of anxiety and desire in early modern practices of belief. In order to make sense of early modern Catholic embodied practices of devotion, I suggest, one must also (and perhaps fi rst of all) grasp the belief system that shaped and was shaped by these practices. This being said, selfhood, desire, interiority, consolation, spiritual abandon, and subjectivity are for me forever framed in philosophical and psychological post– early modern (and postChristian) configurations; the self “outside” of Freud, Lacan, and Foucault is impossible to imagine.6 Hence the language of this work shifts back and forth between early modern cosmologies, ontotheologies, anthropologies, and topographies of the self and contemporary articulations of the same concerns. In the rest of this introduction, therefore, I explicate how my engagement with early modern Catholic practices of enhancing belief also applies to different late twentieth-century and early twenty-fi rst-century theoretical and historical scholarly concerns.

WHAT IS BELIEF? WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BELIEVE? Over the past fi fty years praxis and practices have emerged as a central topic of philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and historical inquiry.7 My discussion has been shaped to a large degree by French theoreticians of practice, fi rst and foremost Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel de Certeau, and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as by the incorporation of these (and other) theories of practice into the anthropological study of religion in the works of Talal Asad, Webb Keane, and Saba Mahmood, among others. The latter scholars have made an incontrovertible contribution to a full-scale reconsideration of religious practices and their relations to religious beliefs. Yet, in the rush to prioritize embodied experiences over prescribed theologies and practice over belief, along with a parallel (and closely related) move to “provincialize Europe,” to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s provocative yet apt term, there has also developed a move away from— or at least a cautious stance toward—using the Christian paradigm as a model for understanding religious phenomena in other contexts. This has led some scholars to be too quick to dismiss or diminish the notion of belief.8 In the following pages I engage with the recent transition from belief to practice and then explain my return to a notion of belief as a precondition

Introduction

7

for its own embodiment. Crucially, I here refer only to Western Christianity. I have neither the expertise nor the intention to discuss other religious cultures. What do we mean when we say we “believe in” something? What do we mean, for that matter, when we use the word belief? For Ludwig Wittgenstein the answer was clear: “the expression of belief  .  .  . is just a sentence, and the sentence has meaning only as a member of a system of language.” Echoing Wittgenstein, the philosopher Rodney Needham stated that “‘statements of belief’ are the only evidence for the phenomenon; but the phenomenon itself appears to be no more than the custom of making such statements.”9 This line of argument does not, however, take us very far in making sense of what believing people actually feel or experience. For earlier generations of anthropologists such as William Robertson Smith, Edward B. Taylor, and Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, and to philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer, it was manifest that religion is fi rst and foremost a set of intrinsic beliefs. For them, rites, which often accompany belief, are nothing but the external expressions of the modes of apprehension we call belief.10 The past fi fty years, however, have seen a total collapse of the alleged self-evidence and universality of this notion of belief and of the primacy (both temporal and metaphysical) of belief over practice. Following in the footsteps of his uncle, Émile Durkheim, who argued in The Elementary Forms of Religion (1912) that religion is a social phenomenon and that “the cult is derived from the beliefs, yet it reacts upon them,” the anthropologist Marcel Mauss asserted the crucial importance of habitus, the embodied performance that shapes beliefs. Working in the mid-twentieth century, Mauss was also among the fi rst scholars to talk about technologies of the body as basic mechanisms of control, self-control, and subjecthood.11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to the body further emphasized the degree to which emotions and cognitive process are always embodied. It is only through our bodies, he contended, that we experience ourselves and others. Our subjectivity is always situated within social norms, concepts, and practices and is therefore always historical, political, and conditional. Mauss’s concept of habitus was reworked and popularized by Pierre Bourdieu.12 For Bourdieu, habitus is a mechanism that produces the social unconscious and lays the ground for rule abidance. It functions by inculcating societal rules and inscribing them through bodily gestures and practices to such a degree that these modes of action become “natural.” Speaking explicitly of religious beliefs, Bourdieu argued that “belief is not a ‘state of mind,’ still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doc-

8

Chapter One

trine (‘beliefs’), but rather a state of the body.”13 Belief is acquired through a bodily familiarity with our social surroundings and is always grounded in social practices. We acquire belief by imitating the people around us, and we learn to experience belief as an “inner feeling” as part of our communication with them. Working in a different tradition, Clifford Geertz reached similar conclusions. Religion, he asserted, is a symbolic system of meanings acquired through ritualized performances.14 As such, it is social before it is personal. This dismissal of belief as a mental concept that is a primary mover of practice has come to dominate the anthropological study of religion. Talal Asad denied the applicability of the notion of belief to most religious systems other than Western (Protestant and Protestantized) Christianity and traced the precise historical setting that created them to the uniquely Western Christian notion of religion as an abstract “set of propositions to which believers [give] assent.” He and Malcolm Ruel, and their students and followers, have proposed that acts and practices not only precede belief but constitute it. Thus, Saba Mahmood argues in her discussion of contemporary female Islamist piety in Egypt that “it is the sequence of practices and actions one is engaged in that determines one’s desires and emotions. In other words, action does not issue forth from natural feelings but creates them.”15 One comes to experience belief only by engaging in devotional practices. Rebecca Lester concludes as much in her analysis of nuns in twentieth-century Mexico.16 An argument might be made that these scholars are echoing Christian tradition, which maintained a distinction between religio and fides or doctrina, or between faith as a state and faith as an activity. The seventeenthcentury Jansenist author and philosopher Blaise Pascal, not known as either a posthumanist or a postmodernist, was one among many theologians to try his hand at explaining the relations between the two. He claimed in his famous Wager that practices beget belief, and that the imitation of other practitioners is as sure a way as any to acquire belief: “Follow the way by which [other believers] began. That is, in acting entirely as if they did believe, in taking holy water, in having Masses said, and so forth. Naturally enough, this will make you believe and will derationalize you [vous abêtira].”17 Together with modern anthropologists, the Jansenist philosopher seems to argue that belief is a disposition that ought to be cultivated by means of practices, and that there is no belief prior to its embodiment in cultural and ritualized actions, fi rst and foremost bodily techniques of self-discipline. Pascal and twenty-fi rst-century critics of Western-centric normalizing theories seem, then, to agree that practice precedes belief.

Introduction

9

However, this is not the case. Pascal is in fact heir to a long tradition of debate within Christian theology on the relations between belief and practice. The doctrine of “implicit belief,” according to which fulfi llment of the church’s rituals and obligations could lead to salvation, maintained a tension between the two components that tends to be obscured in contemporary scholarly discussions. Pascal does not argue that practice forms belief or that belief is achieved through practices. His is not the “fake it till you make it” pop-psychology approach. If God existed, he tells us, he would reward humble and charitable practices with the gift of belief. This is a traditional understanding of the difficulty of acquiring belief. Belief is a divine gift and at the same time an effort, a practice. “The act of believing is an understanding act that asserts divine truth by the empire of the will, moved by God through grace,” explained Aquinas in the Summa (II-II, q. 2, a. 9). Belief demands an activity, namely human assent to a truth that had already been set in the mind by divine grace. Faith is a gift of God (Ephesians 2:8, 9), but it requires a human response of assent and trust (Aquinas II-II, q. 6, a.1). This approach has been referred to as volitionalism.18 The consent to believe in the truthfulness of specific creeds materializes in acts and utterances, fi rst among them the statement “I believe (in),” which cannot be judged by any evidentiary exterior form but only by outward practices, which demonstrate the alleged inward state of belief. People are therefore both receptive and active in their acquisition of and adherence to belief; and since, alas, we do not have windows into people’s hearts, the church has always maintained that implicit faith, namely following the liturgy and obeying the church (“performing” and “practicing” religion), is as good as faith itself. As we have seen, Pascal follows in this tradition. The performance of religious practices requires, I submit, a preexisting set of propositions, assumptions, and social imaginations (“beliefs”) about the constitution of the world, the existence of divine powers, and the ability or willingness of these powers to participate in mutual relations with the practicing human who performs acts of devotion. This is especially the case in Christianity, a religion that continuously understands itself in relation to a past that can be comprehended only by means of hermeneutics, of textual interpretations. Admittedly, at the very core of Christianity lies a mystery that is beyond any empirical truth and cannot be proven; it is a shared social and cultural conviction whose veracity the people who hold to it take to be self-evident.19 As shared imaginations, the core beliefs of Christianity are always social activities, socially learned and socially absorbed. And it is indeed the case that for a large number (maybe a major-

10

Chapter One

ity) of practitioners, the sedimentary process of habituation to belief is nonreflective but rather occurs through sheer practice. There is no way, then, to separate the social from the personal in the inherent tension and interconnectedness between belief and practice. But for some Christian believers, including the devout practitioners of spiritual exercises that I discuss in this book, embodiment was volitional and secondary to faith. Even when belief was a situated activity, practices for them always followed a premeditated cognitive and/or psychological decision made by a desiring agent to pursue behaviors and exercises that gave shape to an interiorized preexisting sense of assent to belief. Some sense of the meaning of the practices they performed was always already present in practitioners’ minds; some personal motivation, embedded in personal history, memories, associations, and preexisting desires, had ignited the “new” desire to practice new forms of devotion. As such, a set of assumptions about the world, the divine, and the interaction of the two preceded the embodiment of such desire. It was what gave weight to some human practices over others and ascribed transcendent, cosmological, or salvific meanings to particular practices. This is not to deny Bourdieu’s important reminder that this meaning (for the exercitants discussed here, as for all practitioners of religion) is never innate or purely individual, but rather is always culturally, historically, and socially constructed, and that practice could intensify the weight ascribed to its performance. It is, however, to suggest that practice in and of itself, devoid of its “theory” (“belief”), was for them meaningless. I will argue that while the practice of crawling on the ground is the same in military training when a soldier moves through the mud and in prostrating while offering a tribute in a temple, it is only a set of assumptions about the relations among humans, gods, and sacrifice that differentiates the latter act from the former. At least, this was the way the protagonists of the practices analyzed below made sense of their world. Body practices structure ways of believing; they may even be the only thing that constitutes them as objects existing in the world. The body does not simply signify preexisting belief but embodies it and gives it existence. Wilfred Cantwell Smith goes as far as to state that believing is acting and not a state of mind. To a certain degree he is right: the mind is always embodied. I agree, therefore, with Michel de Certeau, who asserted that it is impossible to separate belief (orthodoxy) from practice (orthopraxis). Belief, he contended, always refers to practice; but practice is always the transparent objectification of an actually existing belief. Belief is always the generator of somatic action, and embodiment always results from intentionality.20 In a recent article the anthropologist Webb Keane

Introduction

11

affirmed that it is in fact plausible that belief is not predetermined by practice and might even precede it. Nevertheless, in his view only concrete activities teach doctrine.21 This is obviously true as long as we agree that the utterances and practices believers perform—what Keane calls the “material forms of religion”— convey and communicate rather than create preexisting intents, meanings, and imaginations. But a preexisting “it” must exist for these acts to be able to carry out “its” meaning. Assuming otherwise turns exercitants of devotional practices either into apes, who mimic practices for nothing but the sheer joy of imitation, or into social beings, who perform acts they do not comprehend merely for the social benefits of belonging to a community of equally ignorant practitioners. Moreover, religious practices would be turned into either an aesthetic inventory of meaningless gestures or a form of normalizing social regimen. The “weight”—the valuation or singularization of the practices—the arduous investment in performing them correctly, the rigorous training that goes into acquiring them, and the scrupulosity that is an inherent part of the importance ascribed to them should prevent us from separating them from the meanings with which they are imbued and (only then) embody. As I hope to demonstrate in this book, spiritual, mental, and imaginative dimensions overshadowed physical aspects in a significant number of late medieval and early modern practices of introspection and the cultivation of a Christian self. Arguably these were practices more of belief than of religion. The embodied forms they assumed were secondary to the meditative and imaginative practices, which took place in the mind. And while one might point out, rightly, that mental and cognitive practices too are embodied and take place in the brain—which is, after all, a part of the body—this meaning of practice is much wider than the one used by anthropologists and other scholars of religions when they discuss the relation between praxis and belief. Admittedly, practices of spiritual exercises and the preparation for and articulation of a general confession always involved physical embodiment. One sat down, prayed, read, did penance, wrote, knelt, and wept, and one was instructed to employ all five senses in order to experience the spiritual growth taking place within one’s self. But often these embodied aspects were the least significant facets of the practice, or, at minimum, the least discussed. The exercitants who took upon themselves a regimen of spiritual techniques and whose activities interest me here enacted practices that were fi rst and foremost mental, cognitive, intuitive, and emotive. The bodily manifestations were secondary to the spiritual (as opposed to physical) exercises the practitioners pursued.22 The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, for example, undoubtedly the

12

Chapter One

most important collection of spiritual exercises in Catholicism (and the topic of chapter 3), leaves it to the individual to determine which bodily gestures to adopt while practicing them. The 1599 guidelines of Father Everard Mercurian, fourth superior general of the Jesuits, are instructive in this regard: “the posture can be kneeling, prostrate, standing, sitting decently, walking about, or any other position compatible with decency and reverence which allows the greatest devotion and attention.”23 It is less the practice, he seems to say, than the interior mental and affective processes of gaining introspective attunedness that determine the success of the enterprise. Following the recent work of anthropologists such as Tanya Luhrmann and ethnographers such as Arnaud Halloy and Vlad Naumescu, I suggest that religion and faith involve mental, cognitive, emotive, perceptual, material, and performative processes as well as conceptual and ideological ones. Irreducible to any single one of these registers, religion and faith are always set within historical, cultural, and social parameters, which in turn generate and shape the bodily techniques and other exterior representations of these processes. Religion and faith are therefore also always political. Sensorial visualizations and actualizations of belief, which usually include ritualized embodied and emotive practices, in their turn further condition and shape the mental and cognitive assumptions. It is this circular relation of interiority and exteriority, as well as that among practices, linguistic statements, and mental and cognitive apprehensions, which affords structure to both belief and practice. It is only by considering the interrelations among practice, imaginations, perceptions, emotions, desire, cognition, sensory experiences, and, last but not least, individual agency that we can account for the multifaceted experience of acquiring self-awareness as a believer and of the process of fi ne-tuning oneself to recognize an interior essence (divine love) within the self.24 We are talking, then, about a complex state of comprehension that cannot come about without a process of learning.

LEARNING BELIEF? LEARNING PRACTICE? Why and how does one activate the assent or acquire the cognitive habituation to believe, to experience faith, to find consolation, love, and quietude? And why and how does one learn the embodied practices that perform, enhance, or serve as a manifestation of these states? How do actions performed in accordance with an existing protocol of norms and

Introduction

13

traditions activate affective and cognitive changes in the mind, as recent cognitive studies of religion have conclusively demonstrated?25 How can the mechanical recitation, memorization, and mumbling of verses in an unknown language, as has historically been done in Christianity and Islam (and to a lesser degree in Judaism), create piety and increase faith?26 Theologically sanctioned knowledge requires a supporting pedagogy and habits of cognition. In the Christian context, scripture and meditations (“prayer”) participate in the creation of such knowledge, permeating and structuring the apparatuses of cognition and memory. Neither of these, however, is a storage space. They are, as Mary Carruthers argued about memory and Tanya Luhrmann about cognition, engines that generate chains of associations and modes of comprehension. Memory is never photographic; it is always plastic rather than fi xed, to use Ann Taves’s apt observation. Mental images activate memory according to patterns shaped by religious texts, and thus they always discipline the mind. And since processes of learning are both relational and dialogic, the learning of belief and practice is a social process that involves relations of intimacy, desire, danger, and power. Becoming attuned to one’s sensations and spiritual experiences in prayer entails a process of learning a situated theory of mind.27 Of course, the activities of absorbing faith take place within precise sociological, cultural, and political contexts and within a specific historical setting. Religious learning, like all learning, is “situated learning.”28 Religious learning experiences are shaped through training the body, the senses, and the imagination. The training aims to cultivate patterns of feeling, perceiving, and imagining. It might be observed that there is already a body of historical knowledge on learning religion in early modern Europe, namely the history of education, from catechisms to the histories of the disciplinary mechanisms of the state and the church. But, following Carlo Severi, I claim that memorizing a creed and following the church’s rules is one thing, while achieving the emotive and cognitive changes that characterize believing is something else entirely. Religious “absorption,” a term I borrow from Tanya Luhrmann, involves more than acquiring mnemonic techniques and mechanically memorizing and performing utterances or actions. It is also more than the practice of material forms, as Keane seems to say.29 It is unlikely that practitioners’ memorization and recitation of questions and answers from a catechism book, or the act of praying nearly incomprehensible prayers in church (usually mumbled in Latin), led to the emotive experience that created “new selves,” even though these practices

14

Chapter One

surely contributed to the social and devotional identity of the practitioners and to their sense of belonging to a belief community, and even if, from the church’s point of view, these acts were deemed sufficient for salvation. Thus, while I do not deny the potential of catechisms, images, and other belief aids to support the acquisition of faith, these should not be confused with the acquisition of “something else” (something emotive, affective) that distinguishes learning religious practices and utterances from learning other (“mundane”) acts and utterances. This something else, what Lambek calls “seriousness” and “learning to mean it,” is the core concern of this book.30 As we shall see, by meditating on God’s Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection, and love; by learning to be attuned to God’s movements within the self and to comprehend such movements as a form of communication and circulation of love; by training the senses to hear, see, smell, and feel God’s presence; and by discussing these experiences with “interiority experts,” early modern devout Catholics, men and women, laity and clergy, learned to experience themselves as individuals, In other words, pious Catholic men and women, lay and clerical alike, learned to experience themselves as people who utilize the presence of divine grace they had already learned to improve themselves and to acquire additional consolation and grace. This process of training has been the focus of much scholarly discussion. Anthropologists have emphasized above all participants’ willingness to sacrifice, to relinquish agency, and even to suffer in order later to (re)gain what they viewed as a better state of being. For Talal Asad, the practitioner is like a stage actor, who tries to “set her (own) self aside and inhabit the somatic world of her character  .  .  . her action is at once her own, that of the dramatist who has written the script, and of the director who mediates between script and performance through a tradition of acting.” She is not acting out her own story, but neither is she a passive object. In “emptying” herself to act out a script written by an author other than herself and to do so according to a particular acting tradition, the actor does not erase her agency but activates it. Mahmood takes the example of the virtuoso pianist, who “submits herself to the, at times painful, regime of disciplinary practice, as well as hierarchical structures of apprenticeship, in order to acquire the ability—the requisite agency—to play the instrument with mastery . . . her agency is predicated upon her ability to be taught.”31 In the chapters that follow we will encounter the early modern Catholic avatars of these actors and pianists.

Introduction

15

SUBJECTHOOD, SUBJECTION, AND SUBJECTIVATION I have so far used the terms autonomy, agency, subjecthood, and subjectivation as if their meanings were self-explanatory. It is time to defi ne what I mean by them and what analytical work they perform in the book. It is also the time to recognize the specter of Foucault’s later work, a specter that hovers over this entire book. As I noted above, modern subjectivity presumes an autonomous, unitary, self-contained, rational, self-reflective, and (relatively) sovereign individual. This individual possesses psychological depth and is independent (to a degree) and self-created (to a degree). As such, the individual is capable of pursuing agency, which is the ability to behave as one who takes responsibility for his or her actions. The notions of subjecthood and agency presuppose that this individual has a stable identity or essence that is continuous and self-conscious, and therefore that he or she is able to set and pursue goals. These notions also presuppose that the person in question enjoys a degree of political freedom that allows her or him to set such goals. We are modern insofar as we conceive of ourselves as our own selftransforming and self-creating agents. As I shall elaborate, however, to be a subject also carries the sense of “being subjected to.”32 This polysemic temporarily notwithstanding, the common use of the term subject assumes our ability to liberate ourselves from subjection (to) and to acquire subjectivity in the sense of being in control and having an awareness of our own actions and thoughts. Put differently, in becoming a subject we activate the fantasy of becoming the sole sub-jectum, the underlying reality on which our own life is dependent. The liberal categories of personhood and subjectivity have been roundly criticized for the illusion of autonomy that sustains them, for their Eurocentrism and masculinism, and for the politics of exclusion (of women and other nonfree persons) that enable their continuous existence. Asad reminds us in addition that the notion of agency as the capacity to act consciously and voluntarily upon the world completely ignores not only more traditional notions of the individual (more on that later), but also the modern Freudian notion of the human inability to gain control over the self. Furthermore, as Foucault and numerous other critics of humanist subjecthood have rightly argued, a subject is always produced through subordination to an order, to rules, to normalizing mechanisms, and to historical circumstances.33 The production of subjects is therefore directly related to processes of governability and structures of domination.

16

Chapter One

In the second and third volumes of his History of Sexuality and in the lectures at the Collège de France from the late 1970s until his death, Foucault shifted from seeing subjects as merely being subjected to exterior powers to seeing them as individuals who actively participate in the production of their own subjugation. The interiorization of self-subjugation, he proposed, fi rst appeared in the early centuries of the common era and emerged directly from the development and success of new Christian notions of selfhood and care of the self. A new interpretation of the self now argues that the subject’s subjection comes from inside, from his or her voluntary submission to a superior entity. This subjection is the guarantor of future salvation. Equality of free male citizens in the Greek polis (with its own set of normalizing mechanisms of subjectivation) was replaced in Christianity by subjection of the person to the inner voice of the transcendent authority he or she wished to obey. Early Christianity, especially in its monastic setting, gave birth to a number of practices of the self that produced notions of interiority and identity. There is a truth within the self that can be unveiled through exercises of truth-telling. The revelation of the individual’s truth connects the practitioner with the truth of Revelation. For Foucault, there was a huge gap between parrhesia, the Greek term that means “to say everything” in a political and ethical sphere, on the one hand, and the need to confess everything in the Christian avatar of truth-telling, on the other. Alas, his sudden death prevented him from explaining the essence of the difference. However, in the Christian version, argued Foucault, “knowledge of the self is entailed and required by the fact that the heart must be purified in order to understand the Word; it can only be purified by self-knowledge; and the Word must be received for one to be able to undertake purification of the heart and realize selfknowledge. There is then a circular relation between self-knowledge, knowledge of the truth, and care of the self.”34 Central among these technologies of subjection were the examination of conscience, spiritual exercises, spiritual direction, and above all confession. The Christian self became a site of practices through which the individual came to recognize him- or herself as a subject who is tied to his or her core identity. Around 1981 Foucault coined the term “subjectivation” to denote this process of constitution of subjectivity by the subject him- or herself, which he described as the process which “enables us to become the subject who tells the truth and who is transfigured by this enunciation of the truth, by this enunciation itself.”35 The subject, then, is the object of his or her own self-examination, and he or she achieves subjectivation by submitting him- or herself to a regime of searching for his or her own indi-

Introduction

17

vidual truth, which is, of course, being created through the very spiritual transformation that is alleged to merely unveil it. Subjectivity and subjugation are therefore interwoven and historically constructed, and the notion of the subject is no longer a philosophical abstraction and the foundation of all philosophy and anthropology but rather a temporal constitution. Foucault’s articulations of the relations between subjection and subjectivation open the door to thinking of more complex configurations of human agency. In subjectivation there is always an active subjecthood, even if this process is always determined by its own historical setting, and even if it always involves this active subject’s being constituted as a passive subject too. In fact, subjecthood, self-transformation, and self-creation can thus be found (or perhaps can only be found) in adhering to a system of thought, in choosing to improve oneself and act as an individual in compliance with a given set of rules and requirements. To think otherwise is to restrict our notion of individuality to a naive and fantastical defi nition of freedom and agency and to a very limited sense of human psychology.

AGENCY The specific historical subjectivity and agency that are the topic of this book differ from modern liberal subjecthood in two distinct ways. The fi rst of these is their setting: my protagonists’ subjectivity functions together with, and does not exclude, additional active agencies, which function with (and in fact within) the autonomous self. The second concerns my protagonists’ desire to subjugate themselves to a greater power. The devotional practices I discuss, whose motivations are the desire to connect with God by means of love, and to fi nd in his love the consolation for and affirmation of their previous decisions, make sense as vehicles for selftransformation and subjectivation only within a context in which the desiring agent (the practitioner) recognizes and wants to submit to a higher agency, namely God— an authority that to some degree is always already present within the practitioner. By employing devotional exercises, willing subjects recognize and cultivate their singularity and individuality. They do so at the very same time that they discover within themselves the presence of a controlling divine agency that activates their recognition of its presence and that is itself being activated by this discovery. Introspection and subjectivation are impossible without God’s participation, without grace. In the postlapsarian world in which the men and women whose practices of belief I examine in this book lived, human desires for spiritual

18

Chapter One

growth or improvement could never be fulfilled without divine participation. The desire for self-formation and re-formation was, in a way, a desire to erase history and to re-create, on an individual basis, the harmony between God and humanity prior to the Fall. Relinquishing agency was a small price to pay for fulfi lling this fantasy. Discussing Quakerism, Phyllis Mack put it succinctly: autonomy, for Quakers, was not the freedom to do what one wanted, but the freedom to want and do what was right, and what was right was defi ned not by the individual but by the religious system. This form of agency (the agency to do what is right) “inevitably means subduing at least some of one’s own habits, desires, and impulses,” and it is therefore a degree of self-negation and even self-annihilation at the same time that it is self-formation. Overcoming superficial desires for carnal and other forms of self-gratification opens the way to act rightly and morally in a manner that enables the activation of more meaningful desires.36 Relatedly, and writing on Catholicism, Rebecca Lester and Michelle Molina have pointed out that we ought not to conflate the desire to submit with notions of passivity or lack of agency. Catholic practices of self-formation are a slow process of acquiring and negotiating an agency whose goal is surrender. They form a historically specific form of subjecthood, one in which there is no contradiction between subjectivity and subjugation.37 I have already signaled an additional difference between early modern Catholic subjecthood and modern configurations of secular and liberal subjectivities: the agency one gains through devotional exercises of introspection and subjectivation is a joint agency, one in which the practitioner discovers that God is already present and active within the self. But this agency is only one of several, the most prominent among them divine or demonic spirits or energies. It is only by subduing and quieting some of these other agencies that are active within the self, including spirits, desires, temptations, inclinations, and uncontrolled movements, that the practitioner can master his or her self and find consolation and love. And this self-mastery is the only thing that creates the condition for the cultivation of interiorized relationships with the agency of divine love. In other words, renunciation of autonomy is not renunciation of a preexisting freedom. Rather, it is the substitution of one form of subjugation by another: specifically, the substitution of the state of being controlled by sin and evil desires by a “better” and voluntary submission to divine grace and love. The desire of late medieval and early modern people of all stripes to gain mastery over their selves in order to submit to a higher power, and by so doing to gain divine love and salvation, differs markedly from the mod-

Introduction

19

ern liberal notion of gaining mastery over an allegedly “complete” autonomy from external powers. I have already articulated this difference, but it bears repeating. The devotional culture of the period promoted a sense of self, of self-formation as an agent, and of techniques of self-interrogation and self-cultivation by means of introspection that enabled maturation into subjecthood and individuality while maintaining dependence upon other entities, both human and divine, and while striving to achieve demastery and complete submission to God. This devotional culture also implied its own sense of freedom, another concept dear to secular liberal notions of subjecthood. Writing in the early years of the seventeenth century, François de Sales, the most important spiritual director of his generation and a man whom we will encounter time and again throughout this book, described this Catholic notion of liberty within subjugation: “Our free will is never as free as when it is enslaved to the will of God, nor ever as enslaved as when it serves our own will. It never has so much life as when it dies for itself, and never so much death as when it lives for itself.”38 A nonteleological historical investigation of modern selfhoods ought to include this additional mode of coming into subjecthood by means of introspective imaginative, sensory, and semantic practices, whose goal is to form the self as a vehicle for growing subjugation to divine will. What were the contours of this Catholic subjectivity that was being molded, cultivated, and encountered in the pages of this book, and what were its relations to other selfhoods, past and present? It was both like and unlike other configurations of early modern interiorities. Unlike mystics, whose goal was to annihilate the self altogether and become absorbed into the divine, the exercitants of spiritual exercises, examination of conscience, and general confession were practicing in order to achieve the more mundane goals of temperance and quietude. They did not pursue mystical experiences or even reach the stage of contemplation. Visualization and meditatio, let us not forget, are forms of prayer and do not (or at least are not supposed to) proceed beyond it. There is no renunciation of agency in these practices but the recognition of the joint action of human and divine agencies within the soul. “It is absurd to think that we can enter Heaven without fi rst entering our own souls, without getting to know ourselves,” warned Teresa of Ávila. 39 The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, for example, inside his self encountered nothing but his own self, and for Descartes the autonomy of consciousness was the defi ning feature of the self. But there was a wonderful paradox at the very core of Catholic practices of self-knowledge, self-formation, and introspection. “The fi rst disposition to reach a union

20

Chapter One

with the divine is to penetrate into the depths of one’s interiority,” explained Jean-Joseph Surin, one of the most original mystics and spiritual directors of the seventeenth century. The celebrated French theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet put it succinctly in the opening paragraph of his treatise On Self- Knowledge and the Knowledge of God: “la connoissance de nous-même nous doit élever à la connoissance de Dieu”:40 one was to cultivate one’s own self before growing spiritually, becoming a new self, and acquiring knowledge of God and of God’s actions within the self. As such, while the techniques of self-knowledge discussed below indeed may recall modern practices of introspection (e.g., different types of dynamic psychotherapy, Westernized forms of Eastern meditation, and other New Age self-help techniques), their goal was far removed from that of the self-fulfi lling modern subject, who follows his or her own desires toward self-actualization. The topography of the early modern self was also different from the geological layering of the modern Freudian self. As we have seen, Foucault argued (and I concur), that the premodern self that interests us in Becoming a New Self was not a location where a preexisting truth was waiting to be extracted, its claim to the opposite notwithstanding. Instead, the self was a “self-in-formation,” a project of self-imposed introspective exercises and practices of self-cultivation that led to self-formation.41 Additionally, the early modern self was a sacred space where the divine presence was present and encountered at the same time that it was a demonic space of malice, darkness, and disorder. It was both the summit and the abyss. Like the Freudian self, this early modern Catholic self was controlled by libidinal desires. But unlike the modern geological lava of the unconscious, a site of very personal and self-generating uncontrolled and potentially destructive desires, the early modern libidinal agency originated outside the self rather than deep within it. The internal energies were activated by evil inclinations that resulted from the Fall: the jealousies, lies, and temptations of demons and evil spirits, and the surrender of fallen humanity to these external forces. As tempting as it is to use Freudian terminologies and insights to make early modern Catholic believers more like us, we should overcome this desire. Early modern practitioners of introspective techniques, these devout men and women who voluntarily put themselves through regimens of self-investigation and self-interrogation, were like us in their desire to better themselves. But unlike us, they lived in a world saturated with Christian cosmology that was fi lled with invisible enemies who fought tooth and nail against practitioners’ attempts at self-

Introduction

21

improvement. Last but not least, my discussion of freedom, subjectivation, and submission (as well as the theorizations of Asad, Mahmood, Lester, and Molina, to name just a few) has presented a somewhat naive picture of believer and God interacting with each other in a world devoid of human political power. Such context, of course, has never existed. Professional interiority experts, spiritual advisors, confessors, teachers, and other figures of authority, almost all of them (but not quite all, as we shall see) male, always participated in (and almost always controlled) the processes of learning, comprehending, and absorbing subjecthood. Submission to the divine plan by cultivating a sense of self, setting individual life goals, and overcoming one’s earlier subjugation to demonic desires functioned only through mediation of and obedience to male clerical authority. I will have more to say on this later.42 In fact, the very agents who were promoting self-formation and introspection among devout elites were also regulating these elites, contesting experiences, and ensuring that practitioners did not stray too far from a regulated path. Subjectivation, as noted earlier, entailed both subject formation and subjecting to authority.

HISTORY Tensions between belief and practice were especially high in the sixteenth century. During the Reformation debates European Christians held fast to the shared foundational tenets of the belief system they had inherited from the medieval church, fi rst and foremost belief in the Trinity, the Crucifi xion, the Resurrection, and the supersession of the Old Testament by a New Testament. But they fought bitterly and bloodily both over practices themselves, namely “what to do” and “how to do it right,” and over the meanings of rites: “What is real in the Real Presence?” “What gets transubstantiated in the transubstantiation?” “How does grace work?” The Protestant challenge to traditional Western Christianity is therefore an invisible but always present background to the development and dissemination of the beliefs and practices I analyze in this book. Writing about early modern transformations in religious matters immediately raises two temporal issues: the question of continuity and change in early modern Catholicism, and the matter of the transition to modernity and modern secularism and their connections to the Protestant Reformation. The history of modern subjectivity and of introspective self-reflective individualism is still being shaped by two paradigms. The older of these dates back to the binary division between Catholic ceremonialism, ma-

22

Chapter One

teriality, and, above all, exteriority on the one hand, and Protestant spiritualization of religion and interiority on the other. The second, the metanarrative of modern forms of interiority and subjecthood, does indeed credit Catholicism with a role in the transition to modernity and modern individualism but characterizes its role as thoroughly oppressive: Catholicism fi rst developed the theology of sacramental confession and created the nexus of confession, truth-telling, and salvation, and then participated, together with other early modern Christian confessions and the early modern state, in the creation of subjects who internalized control mechanisms that preserved the social order and produced obedient citizens. In what follows I elaborate on the historical formation of these arguments and on the ways Becoming a New Self challenges these grand narratives. From Max Weber to Jürgen Habermas and from Goethe to Georges Gusdorf and Michael Mascuch, the modern self has often been portrayed as rational, male, and, last but not least, Protestant and always in the process of becoming secular (and there is an inherent connection in the literature between Protestantism and the unstoppable march toward secularism).43 Thus, the history of the modern self can be separated neither from the history of modernity itself nor from the web of connections that gave shape to modernity, the capitalist market economy, secularization, and the “disenchantment of the world.” In the realm of ideas, these processes were part and parcel of the rise of both a philosophy of, and individuals who adhere to, moral rationality. These individuals, as previously stated, were therefore (or were striving to become) their own autonomous agents, whose cultivation of individual practices of self-examination and notions of self-fulfi llment and individual responsibility were integral to their Protestant (in particular Calvinist, Puritan, and German Pietist) identity. According to this argument, growing anxiety concerning one’s salvation once the Catholic sacrament of penance was abolished, the elimination of the priestly role of mediation and absolution, and new notions of individual accountability created new psychological concerns and promoted a new awareness of self-actualization and a new sense of whoam-I-ness. In the privacy and loneliness of his (and it is usually his) own religious anxiety, lacking the traditional mechanisms of confession to a priest, the new Protestant male subject cultivated new techniques of selfpossession, self-knowledge, interiority, and individual agency. In its most popular and basic version, this set of affinities is of course, Weberian. The latter also connected this new self with the rise of capitalism and the mar-

Introduction

23

ket economy and offered a model of the dialectical relations between Protestantism and secularization and the connections between rationality and modernity. Interestingly, this set of affinities among philosophical rationality, agency, individualism, capitalism, secularization, and disenchantment also dominates Brad Gregory’s recent apologia pro Ecclesia sua.44 However, the narrative that equates Catholicism with premodernity and Protestantism with modernity goes even further. Individual, cerebral, and introspective Protestant religiosity allegedly replaced collective, emotive, and ritualized Catholic religion. Catholics, who perform communal and ritualized exterior acts of devotion and penance, lack the sense of selfpossession and individualism that characterizes Protestants (mostly of the Reformed tradition). The latter, by listening to sermons, confessing to fellow believers or directly to God, writing diaries, and doing penance in the heart rather than in exterior embodied acts have created the setting for  the  introspective modern self. Let us not forget that this distinction is as old as the Reformation itself, and one could argue that it is as old as Christianity itself, with Judaism being portrayed as having the same traits that later, in the sixteenth century, were attributed to Catholicism. But unlike other confessional polemical and skewed portrayals of the rival Christian confession, the alleged distinction between Protestant interiority and Catholic exteriority has not merely survived the early modern period but has given birth to some of the foundational insights and working assumptions of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century study of religion. From the Genevan “Enlightened” theologian Jacob Vernet in 1769 through Leopold von Ranke in his Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation of 1881 and Albert Réville, the fi rst holder of the chair of history of religions at the Collège de France (1880) and the fi rst president of the division of religious history (Fifth Section) of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, to Max Weber and Émile Durkheim in the early twentieth century, rituals (read also: Catholicism) have been posited as the opposite of sincere and “spiritualized” belief (read also: Protestantism, Puritanism, and Pietism).45 This narrative of self-formation of the bourgeois and rational male Protestant/secular free subject, I argue, is built upon the disavowal of a long history of practices of self-creation and self-examination as means of becoming a subject, a history that stretches from Greek and Roman philosophers and the desert fathers and Augustine through hundreds of years of developing methods of self-cultivation and self-examination in the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages.46 Becoming a New Self aims to contribute

24

Chapter One

to the dismantling of this five-hundred-year-old self-congratulatory Protestant edifice, of what Matthew Engelke nicely calls “Protestant idealism masquerading as a neutral analytic.”47 A second paradigm, as mentioned, does recognize a role for Catholicism in the transition to modernity and the cultivation of modern introspective selves. This narrative is associated, above all, with the names of Foucault and Jean Delumeau, and with the German confessionalization thesis. The early modern Catholic practice of sacramental confession, the argument of this school goes, did contribute to modernity. But its contribution was an unmitigated oppression. Modern confessional practices were guilt-producing mechanisms that functioned in the service of the disciplining regimes of state and church.48 They caused practitioners to internalize shame, guilt, fear, and submission to authority, thus creating docile citizens. For Foucault, as we have seen above, the modern self is nothing but an internalized mechanism of self-control and self-submission, a subject who is self-constituted and self-regulated by an internalized régime de vérité.49 In the sixteenth century, he argues, Catholic innovations created the modern techniques of examination and medicalization. Through the “double operation of penance” in confession and examination of conscience, “a double discursive fi lter through which one must pass all behavior, conduct, and relationships with others” came into being. All Catholics were required now to parade an “immense total narration of existence” before their spiritual directors and confessors.50 Foucault coined the term “veridiction” to denote the practice of telling a truth about the self as a precondition to salvation and self-formation, which he argued was instituted now as a mandatory and sacramental duty rather than a devout and voluntary practice.51 As we shall see in the following chapters, Foucault’s insistence on a major sixteenth-century rupture in and around the Council of Trent is wrong, as is his overblown presentation of early modern practices of selfexamination, self-formation, and introspection as nothing but mechanisms of government and governmentality (by the self and others). A brilliant rhetorician, Foucault was nonetheless known to use a bulldozer where tweezers would have been more appropriate. The consolation and the release from scrupulous thoughts that were gained by early modern Catholic practitioners of spiritual practices of belief get lost in his discussion, as does the dialectical process of liberation from one controlling agency by submitting to a different controlling agency—which, I argue, was the chief goal of the practices discussed below of becoming a new self. Only by learning techniques of scrutinizing their selves, they believed,

Introduction

25

could early modern Catholics comprehend their lives, connect acts to feelings, make sense of their own trajectories—past, present, and future—and transform internal chaos into a (relative) unified self. It was only this unified and self-possessing self that had it in its power to gain tranquility and divine love. Finally, the matter of continuity and change in early modern introspective techniques ought to be addressed. Again, the practices I discuss were not innovations of the early modern period. All had their origins in early Christian monastic communities (and, as we shall see, some forms of spiritual exercises predated Christianity). More immediately, all continued to develop late medieval spiritual practices of interiority, as well as the meditations and practices of Plutarch, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius that Renaissance humanists had uncovered. Catholic early modern practices of self-actualization and subjectivation as a devout believer were influenced, then, by both the monastic and the Renaissance traditions of spiritual growth and self-formation. A good example of the blending of both traditions was Girolamo Savonarola, the Florentine Dominican preacher who, in his Triumphus Crucis, promoted an interior reform of the self. Through spiritual exercises of meditating on the life of Christ and on the Crucifi xion, he argued, all people, lay as well as clerical, were capable of transforming their lives and overcoming sin. No other early modern religious order combined Catholic medieval traditions of Renaissance humanism into its teaching and practices more than the Society of Jesus. In the following chapters we will meet the Jesuits time and again as they systematize preexisting practices of belief and of self-formation. We will see them revising and popularizing general confession, promoting methodic spiritual exercises, and advocating daily examination of conscience. For the Jesuits, all of these practices of belief were connected. Thus, for example, the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises terminates with a general confession. Similarly, the confessor should instruct the confessants in how to discern motions within the self, thus practicing spiritual directing. In the chapters below I will address each practice, tracing its genealogy, the changes it underwent in late medieval and early modern Catholicism, and its impact on Catholic belief, devotional acts, and persons. But before turning to the early modern period, a short survey of Christian techniques of cultivation of the self in the Middle Ages is in order. The ancient language of personal and interiorized experience of the divine, present already in St. Augustine and Gregory the Great, was popularized in the twelfth century by Bernard of Clairvaux, and all notions of

26

Chapter One

church reform in the later Middle Ages emphasized internal reform and spiritual individual renewal. This was a major motif in mystical texts of the thirteenth to the fi fteenth centuries, as, for example, in the theologies of Meister Eckhart and Jean Gerson, to name just two of the leading authorities of the Western church during this period.52 The cultivation of inwardness was a central component of the new spirituality of the Low Countries, the Rhineland, England, and other parts of Europe. Thus, Jan van Ruusbroec said that the person who wants to live in the “most perfect” state of holiness must be “inward and spiritual.” He in turn shaped the teachings of Geert Grote, who met him around 1378 upon the latter’s conversion. Gerard Zerbolt, who together with Grote was a founding father of the Devotio Moderna (Modern Devotion) movement, further promoted the theology that meditation on things heard or read is the way to activate affections within the heart and to illuminate the intellect. A regimen of diligent spiritual exercises enables a reform of the faculties of the soul, calms doubts, overcomes temptations, and leads to inner tranquility. For Thomas à Kempis, spiritual exercises construct a homo internus who lives in a state of peace. Importantly, the practitioners of the new devotional practices associated with the Devotio Moderna movement did not necessarily try to achieve perfection and/or mystical union, but rather attempted to be “spiritual” in the world, to improve their lives and experience divine grace while remaining in society both physically and spiritually. As Ben Morgan puts it in his discussion of late medieval German spirituality, “Self-policing replaced self-abandonment as the individual’s ultimate aim.”53 This movement, as well as similar spiritual movements in other parts of Europe, contributed to the development of new techniques of “caring for oneself” (cura sui ipsius), techniques that promoted self-examination (exacuere in circumspectio sui) and introspection as means of experiencing interiority and self-awareness. These developments in turn had a direct impact on new notions of individual consciences and moral responsibility and led to new notions of freedom.54 I thus join Nicholas Paige, Jennifer Bryan, Ben Morgan, Michelle Molina, and others in arguing that an alternative narrative of the coming into being of the modern, individual, self-aware, and introspective self can and should be advanced. This alternative narrative does not necessitate a separation of this modern self from its Christian (and Catholic) past but on the contrary locates the birth of the modern introspective subject in late medieval and early modern devotional practices, which survived in both Catholic and Protestant variants. Admittedly, this reworking of the notion

Introduction

27

and the historical development of the modern self mandates more flexible categories of modern selfhoods, subjecthoods, and autonomies. Its advantages are, however, clear: such reworking liberates the narrative from a teleological trajectory and breaks up the monopoly of the Protestant-maleself-possessing model. By erasing the binary oppositions between premodern Catholicism and modern Protestantism and secularism, it also enables the coexistence of multiple modern Western subjecthoods. De Certeau, as mentioned earlier, argued that the separation of practice from belief makes no sense in the context of premodern belief systems. And since I have already expressed my agreement with this idea, the book’s subtitle, Practices of Belief, seems rather oxymoronic. But as we shall see, the early modern period was precisely when the Catholic Church— challenged (yet again) to articulate its stand on such matters as the relation of belief to unbelief, belief to practice, practice to unbelief, divine grace to human agency, and creed to human experience—promoted more than ever the diffusion among the laity of spiritual practices of enhancing subjecthood. Interestingly, and once again demonstrating the difficulty of separating belief from praxis when confronted on matters of belief, the church responded by cultivating practices. It is this promotion and diffusion of traditional monastic exercises, which now breached the walls of the monasteries and the convents and spread into the public square, the retreat house, and the mass gathering during missionary expeditions, that is the very essence of the religious transformation that Practice of Belief portrays. This transformation was part and parcel of Western Christianity’s sacralization of each and every individual, and as such was a crucial element in the grand narrative of the transition to modernity. Each practice discussed in Becoming a New Self contributed in its own way to the process of self-formation by means of introspection and subjectivation and led to the formation of new selves. And since the authors whose works I discuss participated in a common Catholic culture, I draw on sources from Spain, France, and the Italian peninsula. English- and German-speaking lands are neglected for the simple reason that much of the discussion of practices of introspection and belief took place in Romance languages. Chapter 2 deals with spiritual direction, the dialogic setting in which spiritual exercises of self-interrogation and self-formation were acquired and absorbed. It was through direction that practitioners learned how to perform spiritual exercises (the topic of chapter 3) and how to prepare and take general confession (the topic of chapter 4). These practices, in turn, were to be internalized and normalized within the self

28

Chapter One

to the degree that they became permanent mechanisms of self-scrutiny. The daily examination of conscience (chapter 5) constantly lubricated this scrutinizing machine. In the conclusions I revisit the general impact of these exercises on the formation of Catholic selves and on the early modern articulation of the complex relations between subjugation and subjectivity, between autonomy and obedience, and between belief and practices.

Ch apter Two

Directing Souls

S

piritual direction is the cornerstone of all modes of indoctrination in, and absorption of, religious matters. In its widest sense, the term spiritual direction encompasses everything from the transmission of ritualistic practices, either regulated (as in liturgical prayer) or ecstatic, to the teaching of sophisticated theological notions concerning relations between humans and the divine. Even the most physical and elementary religious practices must be imitated in order to be carried out; the director in such cases could be any person already acquainted with these rites. But the performance of religious practices presupposes at least some absorption of the meanings and goals of these practices. As such, even the most basic devotional rites demand a degree of explicit or implicit prior indoctrination. A teacher-student or advisor-trainee relation thus stands at the core of the social existence of every religious system. This is doubly the case in Christianity, a system of belief and praxis in which literary texts—the Word— and the enactment of their meaning are continually interpreted. Christianity calls for familiarity with and absorption of a set of beliefs and stories concerning personalities and events. This familiarity cannot be acquired without an initiation into the faith. (I leave aside the possibility of instant revelation owing to divine infusion of grace, a topic on which, as a historian, I have nothing to say.) Personal relations of Christian instruction and direction typically begin within the household setting, with a parent introducing a child fi rst to the personalities of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, then to the stories of Christ’s birth, life, and death, and fi nally to a set of religious practices (crossing oneself, kneeling). They might then be cultivated further in a classroom, with a priest leading young children in memorization and recitation of the catechism. In more advanced stages the director is 29

30

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usually an educated cleric, an abbot, or a theologian who imparts to the trainee an intellectual comprehension of more complex tenets of the belief system and serving, in his very existence and the manner in which he conducts himself, as a role model. (My use of the term “he” to designate the director is intentional. As we shall see, personal experience and setting a personal example, rather than scholarly education, drove the dynamics between advisor and advisee, thus enabling a few women, too, to direct souls. But this was the exception to the rule, and these women were exceptional in more ways than one. I will address the matter of female directors in due course.) At this point I shall leave aside the habituation into ritual performance, as well as basic theological instruction at home and in school, and restrict my discussion to a narrower tradition of spiritual direction, namely the ongoing personal relationships between advisor and advisee, and a series of exchanges whose goal is to enhance the advisee’s spirituality. This form of spiritual direction could be carried out in face-to-face interactions between two individuals or through letters. It could be a lifelong engagement or a much shorter spiritual encounter. It could be institutionalized or informal, intentional or circumstantial, executed by reading doctrinal guides and manuals or by imitating the behavior of a master. It could even occur in dreams and visions, as happened, for example, to the Carmelite nun (and later abbess) Ana de San Bartolomé (1549–1626), who continued to call upon her mentor, Teresa of Ávila, to guide her even after the saint’s death.1 Spiritual counsel could be horizontal (as among friends) or hierarchical. It is either a part of a pastoral strategy of a religious order that commits itself to teaching, instructing, and directing souls, or a personal commitment on the part of one person to learn and acquire spiritual understanding from another. Spiritual direction tends to be multidetermined in that it often takes place alongside other forms of religious interactions, such as learning religious practices from one’s biological parent(s) while being advised in spiritual matters by a spiritual father or mother. It might become an enduring commitment between individuals, as in the relations between a charismatic master or a female living saint and his or her followers, or, conversely, take the form of an unexpected encounter with a spiritually enlightened idiot savant, as described, for example, by Surin.2 Thus, spiritual direction is highly adaptive, fluid enough to meet the many changing needs of individuals and institutions. 3 In late medieval and early modern Catholicism, spiritual direction usually meant an ongoing and long-term relationship between a director and an advisee, and this is the sense in which I will use the term. This was

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precisely the setting in which the acquisition of practices of belief took place: the student was a person who wished to advance spiritually, while the instructor was presumed to be competent to help the disciple in this pursuit. Importantly, the director aimed to instruct the advisee not in the performance of acts of piety and penance, but rather in how to recognize God’s actions within the self and employ his or her God-given resources to adjust the self to the divine plan and thus acquire grace. At its core, direction concerned maturation by means of introspection and enhanced belief, and not through the acquisition of intellectual knowledge; in that sense it was more about forming than informing. It was psychagogy, then, rather than pedagogy in which medieval and early modern spiritual direction engaged. St. Benedict distinguished between these two forms of instruction as early as the sixth century. An abbot, he explained, should teach by “showing all that is good and holy by his deeds more than by his words; explain the commandments of God to intelligent disciples by words, but show the divine precepts to the dull and simple by his works.” Despite such attempts to differentiate between these modes of counseling, the intellectual and the affective, we shall see that their boundaries were rather fuzzy. It is important to note, however, that the acquisition of deeper belief is operating here via deeds. For Benedict, belief and practice are entwined to such a degree that imitation of the master’s actions itself leads to a transformation of the trainee’s soul. The monk, in turn, is to reveal everything to his pater spiritualis. This act of truth-telling and selfexposure had nothing to do with sacramental confession (a crucial point, to which I will return). Instead, it was perceived as a symbolic manifestation of the obedience a monk owed his father and a technique of “healing wounds.”4 Spiritual direction, then, involved a mutual, voluntary agreement: the guide committed himself to train his follower, and the student committed him- or herself to imitate the master and heed his verbal and performative advice. On a theological level, however, things were more complicated. The Bible teaches that “God alone will be your shepherd” (Deuteronomy 32:12) and that “the children of God are those who are led by the spirit of God” (Romans 8:14). Spiritual direction was therefore triangular as well as dialogic, for the director was always a follower of the Director. As Marie de Beauvilliers (1574–1667), a former mistress of King Henry IV of France and later the mother superior of the royal abbey of Montmartre for fi ftynine years, put it, “spiritual instruction derives directly from God,” and it is a sign of vanity and self-love to think that one can discern one’s interiority alone or even with the help of a director who is merely human.5 His

32

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job title notwithstanding, the director’s role was not to direct. Rather, he was to help the trainee recognize and discern what God had already implanted in the trainee’s soul, a soul that was itself “the likeness of Christ,” as the twentieth-century theologian and mystic Thomas Merton put it.6 Thus, theologically speaking, a director is a translator, an interpreter, or a conveyer of a message that is not his own, while both pedagogically and practically he is the actual instructor or teacher. This tension is built into the collaboration between director and advisee, and it calls for the constant mutual scrutiny of behavior and humility. The director is judged implicitly by the level of his own recognition of his auxiliary role in the dialogic process taking place between the practitioner and God. Yet, this director, who is merely a passive discerner of God’s actions within the trainee’s soul, is meant to help the latter cultivate the capacity to attune to these actions. He does so by setting a personal example, by recalling God’s past actions within his own spirit, and by being attentive to similar divine movements in the present within the setting of the direction. The director’s own past experiences with divine and demonic movements, trials, and temptations endow him with an understanding of these occurrences and enable him to decipher them. The advisee acquires self-understanding of his or her own interiority, a passive type of spiritual knowledge that is activated not by the trainee but by God. As such, spiritual direction is not only a dialogue and a tri-alogue, it is also a monologue: a slow process by which the soul, benefiting from God’s grace, reveals its own secrets to itself. Spiritual direction is nothing less than an ongoing conversation of the soul with itself. Just as spiritual direction strives to form and teach each soul in its singularity, the director is meant to adjust his direction to the traits, spiritual state, capabilities, and needs of each practitioner. God’s gift to each individual is unique, God’s actions within each soul are unique, and each individual’s route to God is unique. These three basic theological and anthropological assumptions should have critically shaped the practice of spiritual direction. In reality, however, spiritual direction was both the most personalized practice of belief and, often, the most generic. The methods, advice, and instruction dispensed by spiritual directors were taken from manuals and rules that circulated in large numbers and promoted a formulaic manner of directing souls. Systematic training of spiritual directors by religious orders, fi rst and foremost the Jesuits, further regulated and standardized such encounters. As noted earlier, spiritual advice was often also dispensed in written form, such as circular letters that were addressed to entire communities rather than to a specific individual.

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One might ask, then, to what degree was spiritual direction a means of familiarizing oneself with one’s self or of enhancing a sense of a personalized route to grace? This is not a twenty-fi rst-century question imposed upon early modern believers. Spiritually inclined early modern individuals, as we shall see repeatedly in this chapter, asked themselves the same question, wondering about the usefulness of spiritual advising and often criticizing unqualified directors. As John of the Cross (1542–1591) put it in the sixteenth century: “The whole concern of directors should not be to accommodate souls to their own method and condition, but they should observe the road along which God is leading one; if they do not recognize it, they should leave the soul alone and not bother it. And in harmony with the path and spirit along which God leads a soul, the spiritual director should strive to conduct it into greater solitude, tranquility, and freedom of spirit. He should give it latitude.”7 John was here discussing difficulties encountered by people who were very advanced in their spiritual life and encountered God’s presence within themselves during contemplative prayer. Such mystics were, of course, exceptional persons. But his critique was not unique, nor was his solution radical. For John, the role of the director is restricted to confirming the experiences of the advisee. “Leave the soul alone” was in fact what spiritual directors were supposed to do: to let the spirit meet the Spirit. Of course, this passivity raised theological and practical concerns. Most believers who sought spiritual direction were not mystics, and all, including mystics, needed concrete guidance in spiritual matters. Directors— some of them qualified and some not—were eager to offer this. Whatever the qualifications of advisors and advisees were, spiritual direction was a joint psychagogical journey in which director and student traveled together to the uncharted territory that was the trainee’s soul. They mapped that territory by discerning its movements, resisting its temptations, and introspecting its hidden graces. And mapping, as we know, also means conquering. Along the journey students acquired tools for future self-exploration, techniques to fi nd divine love within themselves, and comprehension of how to put these discoveries to future use by forming themselves according to the divine presence that inhabited their soul. Advisor and disciple, then, share a single goal: for the advisor to lead the trainee, by means of mimetic personal example and psychagogy, to spiritual maturity. This maturity calls for familiarity not with the creed and dogmas of the church but with the interior acts of the divine spirit within the advisee’s soul. Unavoidably— and regrettably for historians and scholars of religion— because personalized and intimate spiritual direc-

34

Chapter Two

tion almost always took place in the form of face-to-face exchanges between two individuals, it rarely left archival traces. Prescriptive manuals for spiritual direction, exchanges of letters between advisors and advisees, and diaries and recollections of participants in direction fi ll parts of this gap. Much has been written over the past three decades on the history of spiritual direction on the basis of these fragments of knowledge. My discussion of spiritual direction in late medieval and early modern Catholicism is both shaped by and challenges what I regard as three major assumptions regarding the practice. A view that dominated the field thirty years ago and is still common among scholars of spiritual direction in Italy might be summarized as follows. In the early modern period the roles of the confessor and the spiritual director collapsed into one, making the spiritual director a major player in post-Tridentine disciplinary efforts. No longer merely a teacher or dispenser of spiritual counsel, the confessor/ director was now responsible for investigating morality, applying reprimands, and above all deciding whether and under what conditions to dispense penance. His directorship led to subjugation rather than to subject formation. As an investigator of interiority and a gatekeeper of penance, this figure engendered in practitioners of spiritual direction a new (or at least deeper) sense of culpability. As such, the early modern spiritual director-cum-confessor was a prominent agent of the interiorization of norms of self-discipline and obedience that shaped early modern people in the age of confessionalization and state formation.8 Spiritual direction, the argument goes, was one element in a major restructuring of a system of new disciplinary mechanisms that came into being in the early modern period. This system, we are told, was directly responsible for the cultivation by confessors and internalization by advisees of new repressive notions of normativity, guilt, and governmentality, as well as new practices of self-culpability.9 Some proponents of this view go on to argue that spiritual direction during the period under discussion had a specific goal, namely, to put an end to the prominence of charismatic female living saints. In the later Middle Ages such women served as spiritual guides to both men and women, and the relationship between the spiritual mother and her male spiritual director was horizontal rather than hierarchical. Because of the growing fear of such charismatic and powerful women prophets in the age of reformations, the women were placed under the authority and supervision of male clerics, who questioned the experiences and pronouncements of these women and curtailed their ability to lead. The spiritual capability of discerning the presence of the spirit that these women had claimed to

Directing Souls

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possess was restricted now to male clerics.10 Significantly, the term spiritual director itself dates from the sixteenth century.11 The third assumption of this school of thought is that this multiform process of turning spiritual directors into confessors, replacing dispensation of advice with dispensation of sacramental pardon, and restricting women’s ability to serve as directors allegedly reached its peak in the eighteenth century. Along the way spiritually inclined women such as nuns and devout laywomen were assigned confessors, having lost the right to choose their own spiritual directors. Horizontal relations of advising and directing disappeared, to be replaced by rigid hierarchies of gender, education, and professional occupation.12 By the time of the Italian bishop and theologian Alfonso Maria de Liguori (1696–1787), “the guide of guides and director of directors” (and since 1950 the patron saint of confessors), so the argument goes, the roles of confessor and spiritual director completely overlapped, female directors disappeared, and engaging in spiritual direction was no longer a voluntary pursuit but a mandated disciplinary mechanism that controlled believers’ (and mostly nuns’) religious experiences.13 These three assumptions have not gone unchallenged. Recent research has revisited the changes in spiritual direction that occurred in the early modern period, questioning the alleged collapse of the roles of spiritual director and father confessor into one and the disappearance of female directors. This line of thinking proposes a more stepwise process of modification and much greater variability of interaction among males and females, mentors and adepts, clerics and laity. The degree of episcopal control, it is now proposed, was always determined in situ.14 This revisionist body of literature has shaped my own reading of the historical process. In what follows I will argue that, while many spiritually inclined women did lose their ability to serve as spiritual directors, numerous others continued to dispense advice that was heeded by men and women alike. I will also suggest that by instilling a sense of self and of singular potentialities among their trainees and teaching them techniques for comprehending and forming themselves, spiritual direction cultivated practices of self-awareness and introspection, thus endowing advisees with a notion of subjecthood, of being agents of their own actions, and of being capable of setting goals and directing themselves toward achieving them. Finally, I will contend that since spiritual direction always took place in society, even the most confidential counseling had social dimensions and ramifications. The intimacy between director and advisee could not but generate (or at least had the potential to ignite) tensions between communal aspirations and the dialogic, individualized setting of spiritual direction. The personal is and

36

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has always been political. This pull between personal relations and communal solidarities and between abstract notions of spiritual conduct on the one hand and concrete mimetic practices on the other was inherent to spiritual direction. It was always a balancing act to maintain relations of spiritual direction while participating in other (possibly larger) concerns and relationships, such as pastoral care, liturgical activities, and household and monastic duties, and gendered and sexual dynamics between directors and trainees were unavoidable. Desires, dangers, competition, and suspicions were part and parcel of spiritual direction, and this has been the case from Socrates to solicitation in the confessional, as well as the early twenty-fi rst-century sex scandals in the Catholic Church. Such strains have prevented spiritual direction from being the one-dimensional mechanism of subjugation and self-discipline claimed by some recent scholars. One fi nal introductory comment is in order. As previously mentioned, much of the work of spiritual direction was carried out in epistolary exchanges. There are a number of problems with including this form of spiritual advising in our discussion. While undoubtedly the addressees of these letters benefited from the spiritual advice they contained, the letters could never achieve the individual specificity that characterized faceto-face interactions. In counseling by letter the author could not ask the trainee to be more specific in describing interior tribulations or doubts than what he or she had supplied already in the original letter asking for advice. Accordingly, directors’ epistolary responses were limited to general advice. Letters of spiritual direction thus tended to be generic and didactic, rather than personal or psychagogical, and for wide circulation.15 The same was true for the early modern habit of encouraging (and often ordering) nuns and other spiritually inclined individuals, mostly women, to write spiritual diaries. Like the epistolary direction of souls and standardized manuals for spiritual direction, these diaries are problematic sources. One might have expected spiritual diaries to provide readers unmediated access to authentic experiences, to spiritual direction as it was practiced rather than as it was prescribed. Alas, nuns and other writers more often than not imitated established norms of other women’s confessional and autobiographical writings.16 Imitation can certainly lead to spiritual maturity, a notion upon which the entire enterprise of spiritual direction was premised. Yet there was little in this body of presumably personal writings that was original. Quite the contrary—the erasure of individuality was one of the most prominent characteristics of the spiritual epistolary culture. Claiming and demonstrating singularity betrayed vainglory and a lack of humility.

Directing Souls

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EARLY CHRISTIAN AND MEDIEVAL DIRECTION OF SOULS At this point we might step back and ask: what was the nature of spiritual direction prior to its reconfiguration in the early modern period? Classical Greece and to some degree the early church as well espoused the notion that there is only one wisdom and one model to imitate (be it the Greek master or Jesus Christ). The teachings of such a master ought to be followed in similar manner by all of his followers, as he himself had followed his own master. In Athens, Rome, and late antiquity, both in the East and in the West, spiritual instruction was carried out in face-to-face encounters between master and student(s).17 And yet, the very unexceptionality of the master and his “pure” transmission, untouched by any innovation on his part, constituted the essence of the training. The trainee would learn by imitating the manner in which the master lived his life and conducted himself. The goal was replication, not originality. In early monastic communities spiritual direction continued to be practiced in the absence of any institutional guidelines regarding who might guide whom, in what manner, on which matters, and under what circumstances. As had been the case in Greece and pre- Christian Rome, the teacher’s charisma and reputation attracted followers. Unlike in the antique world, however, what was transmitted and taught was not knowledge, scriptural or otherwise, but conduct: the imitation of the master’s ways, his manner of conducting himself spiritually and morally, his struggles with temptation, and his method of attaining self-mastery. The master embodied, in his daily life and his dispositions, the ultimate role model: the penitent. As such, the director, who was likely to be an abbot or an experienced monk, taught his trainees how to perfect their lives and how to combat their temptations. At the same time, this advisor served as a director of conscience, listening to the advisee’s struggles and maintaining an ongoing dialogue of spiritual psychagogy. Thus, even if the teacher’s conduct, rather than the student’s, was the focus of the interaction, the joint effort to comprehend and to improve the latter’s control over his own soul created an intimate relationship between the two.18 The Summa Magistri Pauli of the Dominican Paul of Hungary (1220) supplies us with one of the earliest job descriptions of the spiritual director. He aids his penitent with prayer, alms, and other good works. He calms the trainee’s fears, consoles him, gives him hope, and, when the need arises, reproves him: “Let him be inclined to correct kindly, and to bear the weight himself. He must be gentle and affectionate, merciful to the faults of others. He should act with discernment in different cases. . . . Let him show compassion in his words

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and teach by his deeds. Let him take part in the sorrow, if he wishes to share in the joy. He must inculcate perseverance.”19 The inherent tension between communal obligations, on the one hand, and spiritual dialogic dynamics between two individuals who are part of a larger community, on the other, might have contributed to the fact that very little was written about individual spiritual direction in Western medieval monasticism. This may or may not point to a lack of interest in the practice of personal spiritual direction (and it is unlikely that we will ever have a defi nitive answer to this intriguing question). We do know, however, that the monastic rule became the most important guide to one’s conduct and holiness. Often perfection was to be sought by submitting oneself to fraternal correction, obeying the rule of the order and of the abbot, and striving for humility, which often meant the erasure of personal traits.20 Practices of belief were thus acquired through embodied and mimetic acts. In this respect Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) was innovative in his insistence that spiritual instruction be tailored to the advisee. He stressed especially the importance of guiding novices. Without direction, Bernard warned, the novice, who lacks the ability to discern interior inclinations, is subject to falling into sin. Bernard here fused the two elements that were to shape the direction of souls for the entire later Middle Ages and the early modern period, namely counsel (consilium) and discernment (discretio). He who thinks that he can direct himself, Bernard warned, “makes himself the disciple of a fool.”21 Recalling his own spiritual experience, he praised the discretion and honesty of a monk named Humbert who had served as his director: “I had so often the opportunity of placing my head on his breast. But I am not the only one who knew him in this way . . . who is there who . . . did not learn the sources and remedy from his mouth? He knew so well to penetrate into the corners of a sick conscience that he who went to confess to him might have believed that he had seen everything, been present at everything.”22 In a point that is germane to a discussion later in this volume, here (and elsewhere) Bernard uses the term confessio to indicate not sacramental confession, but spiritual colloquy. Bernard, however, was exceptional in his insights. Spiritual direction in the mendicant orders continued to be marked by a lack of personal advising, where it was part and parcel of cura animarum, one of the main responsibilities of superiors. The practice remained a form of sporadic spiritual advice rather than a continuous relation with a follower, and the advice was only rarely tailored to the trainee.23 Face-to-face spiritual guidance, when it did take place, was only one element in a series of techniques, among them sermons and frequent confessions, that led to pen-

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ance and instructed people in how to conduct their lives in accordance with a general set of rules. However, the continuity should not overshadow two important novelties concerning spiritual direction introduced by the mendicant orders. One of these, as we shall see shortly, was the expansion of spiritual advising to include pastoral individual relations with laypersons, usually with a patron or a spiritually inclined person who sought out the friar. A second innovation concerned spiritual mothers, whose pastoral duties were enhanced by prophetic powers and mystical experiences. These women attracted followers, male and female alike, who submitted themselves to their guidance24 When the setting was the intimate one of personal spiritual direction, the cure of souls (cura animarum) and the administration of the sacraments, especially that of penance, managed an uneasy coexistence. Theologians, confessors, and spiritual directors therefore took pen to paper to fi x an inherently unstable overlap of roles. Bernard, as we have pointed out, distinguished between the two responsibilities, as did, for example, Guy de Montrocher in his Manipulus Curatorum (ca. 1330), possibly the most popular manual for parish priests in late medieval Europe. Relations of spiritual direction, even when practiced in monastic communities and where it was an obligation of the abbot or abbess, were highly intimate, with mutual exposure the guiding principle. The notion of the equality of all believers as sinners, pilgrims, and penitents has always been a component of the Christian belief system. But in this singular setting it was situated front and center as the mechanism that activated the entire enterprise of spiritual direction. An atmosphere (or illusion) of “spiritual friendship” surrounded spiritual direction. In fact, one can easily imagine advisor and advisee changing places, with an advisee becoming a role model for a person who had served as his or her spiritual director. Monastic fraternal correction had exemplified this reciprocity. Strikingly different was the relation between confessor and confessant. Not only was there no space for the cultivation of reciprocity, but the hierarchical relation between the participants was of cosmic, not just social, significance: the confessor held the keys to the confessant’s salvation. Moreover, the core of confession is forgiveness, whereas direction is characterized by advice and psychagogy. Yet the theological and pastoral distinctions between the roles of confessor and spiritual directors went further. Confession, mandatory in nature, entailed complete exposure on the part of the confessant and complete amnesia on the part of the confessor. The director, for his part, exerted a moral, pedagogical, and charismatic—but never legal or sacramental— authority over the advisee. Spiritual direction (at least until the Council

40

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of Trent) was a voluntary endeavor, and the content of the discussion was determined by the advisee. It was recommended, though not required, to open one’s soul to the director as one might open a book for him to read. The director, in turn, was to offer advice based on the commonality of all sinners, as well as on the unique experiences described to him by the individual advisee. In stark contrast to the confessional experience, the director was expected to remember the content of previous contacts with the advisee, for each exchange was presumed to be only a single encounter in an ongoing spiritual engagement. And while confession dealt with the past, spiritual direction often dealt with the topography and movements of the soul in the present and with the means of acquiring self-knowledge and self-mastery and of becoming a better Christian in the future. Finally, in this form of relationship, unlike in confession, a male could submit himself to a female’s spiritual authority, as sometimes did indeed happen between female spiritual guides and their male devotees in the late Middle Ages and the early modern era, a point to which I will return. This reversal was impossible in the sacramental bond that joined confessor and confessant. Important as they are, such distinctions between the confessor and the spiritual director should not be overestimated. Confession, while dealing with the past, also took into account the present and the future (i.e., conversion). Similarly, both confessor and spiritual director were likened to physicians of the soul, a comparison that went back at least to the earliest Dominican constitution (1220). The Florentine Dominican preacher Giovanni Dominici (1356–1419) used this image in his Regola del governo di cura familiare, and his student, the moral theologian and archbishop Antonino of Florence (1389–1459) employed it later in his popular guide for confessors, Summa Confessionalis, curam illios habes of 1472.25 The second-generation Jesuit Bartolomé de Medina (1528–1580) was probably familiar with one of the very many variations and renditions of Antonino’s Summa when, in his Breve instrucción de cómo se ha de administrare el sacramento de la penitencia (1579), he too compared the confessor to a physician and assigned him not only the responsibility for hearing confession and granting absolution but also for examining and correcting the spiritual life of the penitent. For Antonino, only such correction can ensure the full benefits of the sacrament of confession. The image then made its way into the Roman Ritual of 1614.26 In chapter 4 I will deal with the Jesuit promotion of a monthlong retreat from the world to pursue spiritual exercises under the supervision of a director. Retreat, in this context, has distinct medical connotations: this is the space in which the wound of

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postlapsarian separation between humans and God is being treated and healed. Antonino of Florence was also responsible for expanding access to spiritual direction to the laity. It should be carried out by their confessors, he advised, who should use confession to teach their lay confessants basic Christian tenets, especially those concerning sin.27 This suggestion, made by some theologians and pastoralists, to use confession as a forum for spiritual instruction was to inform not only spiritual direction but also the  practice of general confession, another introspective practice of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period (and the topic of chapter  4). The late fourteenth and fi fteenth centuries were characterized, however, not by the overlap of the two roles, but by the growing popularity of spiritual directors who were not confessors, and in some rare cases not even members of the clergy. The “fraternal” and nonhierarchical nature of the reciprocal relationship between spiritual advisor and advisee, as well as the growing popularity of the direction of souls, was the exchange of counsel among laypersons who established horizontal relations of instruction. The circle of friends around Geert Grote in the late fourteenth century was one example of the extension of this form of spiritual brotherly friendships from the monastery into lay society. Such relationships of charitable admonition and fraternal reproach (caritatiue ammonicione et fraterna correctione) among the lay Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life drew their legitimacy from Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between private and public forms of instruction and exhortation, with the former allowed even to women. In some houses of the movement of the Devotio Moderna, members also gathered on Sundays and feast days for mutual counseling conversations, irrespective of whether the moderator was a priest. Women, too, could correct and give spiritual advice to fellow sisters (but not to brothers).28 The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (1379/80–1471) is perhaps the foremost such manual of spiritual advice compiled for a mixed lay and religious audience. “What hinders you more than your own affections not fully mortified to the will of the spirit? Truly, Nothing . . . and it should be our daily desire to overcome ourselves, so that we may be made stronger in spirit and go daily from better to better,” Thomas taught (1:3). The four short pamphlets that together make up the book combined sayings and proverbs, discussing how to improve spiritually and how to resist sin. The fi rst of the pamphlets is titled “Admonitions Useful for a Spiritual Life,” and the second, “Admonitions Leading to the Inner Life,” demonstrating that exhortation was a central goal of the entire collection. Charity

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rather than learning is the route of self-cultivation, and mastery of the self cannot be gained without learning to discern internal affects. “My son, take good heed of the motions of nature and grace, for they are very subtle and very contrary one to the other, and they can be recognized apart with difficulty, unless it be by a spiritual man who is inwardly illuminated,” Thomas instructed his readers (3:54; see also 2:5).

THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF THE LAITY The Common Life sisters and brothers have acquired a somewhat mythical stature in discussions of late medieval lay spirituality and the cultivation of interiority. Yet they were not alone in their endeavors. Similar voluntary circles of “spiritual friends” existed in other parts of Europe on the eve of the Reformation. The Lollards, for instance, cultivated a similar spirituality, as did the laypersons who gathered around two charismatic Dominican spiritual directors, Giovanni da Crema and Leone Bartolini. In 1519 Giovanni Battista da Crema (ca. 1460–1534) took on the spiritual directorship of Gaetano da Thiene (Saint Cajetan; 1480–1547), the future founder of the Order of the Theatines. A decade later da Crema became a maestro dell’anima of the noblewoman Ludovica Torelli, countess of Guastalla (1500–1569). He helped Torelli and (future saint) Antonio Maria Zaccaria (1502–1539), another of his spiritual advisees, to establish the community of clerics regular of San Paolo in Milan, better known as the Barnabites (1533), and its sister congregation, the Angelic Sisters of St. Paul (1530). Under da Crema’s spiritual guidance, Torelli turned her small court into an austere religious community, and da Crema imposed a regime of intense spiritual exercises, frequent Communion and confession, and asceticism on its members. Like that of other spiritual directors, da Crema’s spiritual direction was mostly carried out orally and has not reached us. But da Crema also wrote a few tractates. In 1525 he published in Venice a book of spiritual instruction for the laity that was heavily informed by Savonarola’s teachings. In the Via de aperta verità, a compilation of four short treatises, da Crema addressed himself to both religious and lay audiences. Crucially important for the history of spiritual direction was da Crema’s view that all Christians ought to engage in spiritual combat and are capable of re-forming themselves. In the short treatise Del modo di acquistare devotione et conservarla, he promoted the idea that individuals have the capacity, through charitable acts, humility, and a permanent interior struggle against sin, to achieve salvation. This in and of itself was not controversial, but da Crema took it a step further by suggesting that these

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human efforts offer a surer route to salvation than buying indulgences or participating in ceremonies of the church, including even “processions and other similar fantasies that create nothing but chaos.”29 From 1525 on da Crema’s writings were scrutinized for their alleged semi-Pelagianism (i.e., asserting too much human agency in the attainment of salvation). The suspicions did not prevent him from publishing or directing souls, but in 1532 the focus of the attack against him shifted to his living arrangements. Da Crema had been permitted by Pope Clement VII to live in the community Torelli had established in Milan, where the founder herself also resided. His enemies now used this (indeed strange) setting to spread rumors of sexual activity. Da Crema died before the suspicion turned into an official accusation, and the process against his “spiritual family” later ended in acquittal. His books fared worse. They were reexamined shortly after his death and then again in the 1550s, when they were fi nally put on the Index of Forbidden Books. It was now argued that they shaped the unorthodox opinions of the Angelic Paula Antoinette Negri (1508–1555), the divina madre maestra, who had replaced him as the spiritual director of the Compagnia die Figlioi e delle Figliole di Paolo Santo.30 A similar group of spiritual advisees gathered around the Bolognese Leone Bartolini (?–1577). He too was a product of Dominican (and probably Savonarolan) spirituality and its cultivation of lay confraternities. Between 1552 and 1554 Bartolini, who had already served as a spiritual director to a confraternity of young men in Bologna, widened the scope of his spiritual activity and gathered aristocratic laywomen around him. To this by now traditional (mostly mendicant) form of “standardized” spiritual direction, which centered, as we have seen, on exhorting and preaching against sin and teaching believers which behaviors and thoughts were sinful, he added personal meetings with individual female advisees. 31 The women’s participation was voluntary, but Bartolini insisted on total obedience. He regulated each and every aspect of his devotees’ lives, including their activities in the public sphere, demanding that they act only in ways that increased their “spirituality.” Like a confessor, Bartolini investigated sins; unlike a confessor, he taught his followers how to identify movements, temptations, and inclinations in their souls. Bartolini in fact distinguished between the mandate of the confessor and the advisory role of the spiritual director. Spiritual growth ought to be carried out by people experienced in spiritual matters (something most confessors are not, he lamented), and it should take place in a space separated from the church. Sacramental confession and spiritual direction were viewed by him as two

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parallel, perhaps complementary, tracks to the same goal, namely attaining spiritual maturity and divine grace. But Bartolini’s demand for utter obedience and his method of intense intimacy with the spiritual advisee raised suspicion and opposition. It directly challenged the authority of fathers and husbands and blurred the boundaries between direction and confession. According to Gabriella Zarri, who published Bartolini’s voluminous correspondence with his own spiritual director as well as with his devotees, it was probably rival confessors who initiated the inquisitorial investigation of his activities (384–86). Bartolini was cleared and went on to serve as spiritual director of nuns in Florence and then of nuns and laywomen in Bologna.32 As the examples of the Devotio Moderna and the Dominican circles in Italy show, the diffusion of spiritual direction into the laity was accompanied by mistrust and opposition. The posture of intimacy raised a range of suspicions, from the sexual, as in the case of da Crema, to the theological, as in the case of the Lollards in England and Bartolini in Bologna. This was also the case with the spiritual direction of the lay circles of the Alumbrados in Spain.

ALUMBRADISMO AND THE SHAPING OF THE JESUITS’ DIRECTION OF SOULS Spiritual direction among members of different spiritualist groups in the Iberian Peninsula has been researched to exhaustion, and I will not address it here. Suffice it to recall that both Franciscans and Dominicans in the peninsula encouraged practices of “Recollection”—meditations whose goal was the gathering of the soul to a union with God. In this method of silent prayer, followers were taught to attune themselves to their interiority and disconnect from physical and bodily sensations. The method was Illuminist (hence Alumbradismo) in the sense that it assumed an unmediated enlightenment of the soul by God; individualistic, as it encouraged private pursuit of communication with God; and unorthodox, in the sense that it reduced the importance of clerics as mediators of grace. 33 Some theologians found this spirituality suspect, and by the 1520s and 1530s most of its proponents had been put on trial, punished, and silenced. It was against this backdrop that two of the greatest mystics of the Christian tradition sought to develop a nonsuspect method of spiritual direction that would promote spiritual growth and private meditation. Both attempts were carried out in Spain and were heavily influenced by the Iberian debates on forms of spiritual direction and self-formation that had

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been attacked during the campaign against Alumbradismo. Both Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) and Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), the luminaries whose methods of direction we will now examine, established new religious orders that were to shape not only spiritual direction but all practices of interiority, introspection, and subjectivation in early modern Europe. Both fell under the gaze of the Inquisition but managed to convince the office of the orthodoxy of their techniques and that their devotees would not likely to fall into the abyss of unregulated and vainglorious Illuminism. Their methods, once approved, became foundational for later generations. Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises were addressed not to the practitioner but to the spiritual director, who was to assign them to the exercitant in accordance with the director’s discernment and the practitioner’s progress. We will deal in detail with the relations between the director and the exercitant in Loyola’s work in the next chapter. Here I shall simply mention that Loyola designed a hierarchical yet collaborative model of spiritual direction, and that this form of spiritual friendship was to become extremely popular in both early modern and modern Catholicism (and Christianity in general). In Loyola’s view, the director does not dictate to the trainee any particular manner of conduct or way of experiencing God. In fact, God, rather than the director, is the spiritual director in this model, “disposing [the soul] for the way which will most enable the soul to serve Him better in the future” [15]. In Loyola’s spiritual direction, one fi nds God within him- or herself independently, in a process that is merely mediated through the director.34 The director, then, is to passively listen to the exercitant’s description of the experiences during the meditations, after which he questions him as to the inner movements within his soul. If he notices that the exercitant is not experiencing any spiritual motions in his or her soul, such as consolations or desolations, or is not being moved one way or another by different spirits, the director should question the retreatant much about the Exercises: Whether he or she is making them at the appointed times, how they are being made . . . and if the giver of the Exercises sees that they one making them is experiencing desolation and temptation, he or she should not treat the retreatant severely or harshly, but gently and kindly. The director should encourage and strengthen the exercitant for the future, unmask the deceptive tactics of the enemy or our human nature and help the retreatant to prepare and dispose himself or herself for the consolation which will come. [6–7]

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At the core of direction, then, lies the discernment of internal spirits, and an entire section of the Spiritual Exercises is devoted to this practice [313–36]. The director’s ability to discern interior movement stems from his own experiences and from divine grace, for this is not a knowledge acquired by scriptural learning. The Jesuit director is to be experienced, humble, cautious, and discreet—both a master and a friendly confidant, an active participant and a passive observer of God’s own actions within the exercitant’s soul. Importantly, his involvement with the trainee does not end with the termination of the Exercises. He should leave the penitent with instructions concerning spiritual progress in the form of daily meditations and examinations of conscience and should encourage him or her to attend confession frequently and to maintain an ongoing relationship with an experienced spiritual director. Loyola explicitly recommends that “where possible, it is better for someone other than the person giving the Exercises to hear his confession.”35 And while he never discusses whether the figure who assigns the Exercises should be the trainee’s regular spiritual director, it is clear that the roles of confessor and spiritual director were clearly demarcated in Loyola’s mind. In blending unmediated recognition of the presence of grace within the soul with a spiritual direction whose linchpin was discernment, and in proposing relations that were hierarchical and yet almost horizontal, Loyola combined the early sixteenth-century Spanish tradition of infusion of grace with the midcentury demand for clerical involvement in all forms of spiritual pursuits. Such a balance likely helped legitimize Loyola’s spiritual exercises, which had been under attack by the new order’s many enemies. This hostility of rival orders probably also figured into another early Jesuit innovation: systematization of the education of spiritual directors of souls. In Weberian terms, while discernment of interior spirits remained a divine gift, as contemporary treatises never tired of reminding their readers, in reality institutionalized training replaced charisma. 36 This, and the fact that Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises were highly laconic regarding the directing of souls, led as early as the second half of the sixteenth century to a proliferation of Jesuit elaborations of the Ignatian mode of direction of souls. Sanctification of souls, both lay and religious, was a pillar of the Jesuit mission, but such sanctification could take place only if directors were well trained and followed the rules. Unsurprisingly, they were to instill in their followers the idea that “sanctity does not consist in performing outstanding things, but in performing outstandingly mundane things,” as articulated by Alonso Rodriguez (1526–1616), author of a tremendously popular (and tediously detailed) guide for Jesuit spiritual direc-

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tors. Alonso here echoed the fear of “extravagant” spirituality so typical of his time and place. He went on to remind his readers that in order to perform mundane things outstandingly, directors must instruct by personal example. “Example has more power over men than all the words in the world,” he stated, following the leading Spanish theologian Francisco de Osuna (1492 or 7–1540) and many other spiritual directors. They too should avoid spiritual virtuosity. 37 Juan Alfonso de Polanco (1517–1576), Loyola’s secretary and confidant, further expanded on the collaborative effort that should characterize direction: “The director should take care that both he and the exercitant prepare themselves to cooperate fully with God’s grace, striving earnestly to do all they can: the director to bring down God’s grace and the exercitant to receive it.” Significantly, grace here cannot be discovered within the exercitant’s soul without the director not only discerning it, as Ignatius argued, but also “bringing it down.” Since he himself is only an instrument of God’s will, the director should act with charity and “adapt himself to the exercitant.” Learned people will likely need less elaborate instructions, while the less spiritual (and note the shift from learning to experience) should be supplied with more explicit rules. The exercitant is to disclose to the director the complete details of his progress (or lack thereof) during the exercises: “In this way, if he has failed to understand anything fully, he can be instructed. His insights and illuminations can be subjected to scrutiny. His desolations and consolations can be discerned. And he can be helped with advice on any penances he does or temptations that beset him.”38 The direction of spirits will only work in the context of traineedirector collaboration and obedience of the former to the latter, with both parties humbly cooperating with the acts of God within them. A few years later, in 1599, an Official Directory of the Society of Jesus was compiled by committee and published under the authorship of Father General Claudio Acquaviva (1543–1615; general from 1581). The General’s goal was to put an end to the diffusion of slightly different versions of Loyola’s original Exercises and other foundational texts of the order. This proliferation of versions resulted from different disciples recording different traditions and different Jesuit teachers and masters adding or deleting exercises. Acquaviva reiterated Ignatius’s recommendation that “in most cases it is better that the director not be the one to hear” the exercitant’s general confession.39 In the chapter regulating the director’s mandate, the Directory mentions that he ought to “cooperate with God’s movement, not anticipating but following it.” His role can be likened to that of a broom or snowplow: “to dispose the exercitant’s soul . . . by clearing away

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impediments, i.e. error, deception, and inordinate affections and inclinations.”40 In his official Industriae pro Superioribus Societatis jesu ad curandos animae morbos (Resources for Therapy for Illnesses of the Soul) of 1600, Acquaviva further elaborated his theology of direction, instructing less experienced superiors and spiritual directors how to “assist souls . . . because there is no other art in which failing is more dangerous and is fraught with more serious harm for others.”41 The souls that Acquaviva had in mind were those of Jesuits themselves, and the temptations and inclinations that needed correction by means of spiritual direction were the ancient trials of monks and friars: vainglory and pride, doubts and scrupulous anxieties, lack of generosity and goodwill toward fellow Jesuits, and, of course, sinful thoughts and acts. The cures too were traditional and included prayers, meditations, mortifications, and penance. Rehearsing the comparison of the cure of souls to the cure of bodily afflictions and the director to a physician (1:1–8; pp. 4–17), Acquaviva’s prescription is based on his own experience of many years, years in which he had noticed how often he himself and others had erred (Preface; p. 3). Many patients don’t recognize their spiritual illness owing to self-love and pride or merely because of a lack of spiritual awareness, he lamented (1:7–8; pp. 15–17). The fi rst step in the healing process is to make these persons cognizant of their illnesses. This should be done with “paternal moderation and love” (1:12; p. 14). In order for the cure to succeed, the director ought to “be strong and yet kind” (2:1; p. 19), to exhibit compassion, zeal, discretion, and mildness in rebuking. (1:6; p. 13; and 2:2; p. 22) More important, his remedies should “consider the disposition of the patient and whether he is sanguine and jovial or melancholic and sad, choleric and impetuous or slow and remiss” (1:8; p. 17; see also 1:6; p. 13). Once the malady has been diagnosed and the superior has gained the patient’s trust, the cure can start. The fi rst step is to assign spiritual readings: the mysteries of the Passion and the Rosary and prayers of petitions (3:2; p. 36). By praying, taking the sacraments, and meditating, the patient participates actively in the healing process (3:4; pp. 38–39). Meditations, spiritual exercises, and repeated examinations of conscience will further strengthen the patient in the effort to regain God’s love (17:15; p. 164). Acquaviva here cites other directors, particularly the desert fathers and Jean Gerson, and rehearses long-established traditions. Yet we fi nd a vivid and refreshing point in the attention the director is adjured to pay to the personal traits, needs, and psychological circumstances of the advice seeker. General rules are important, befitting all believers, and should be the foundation for all spiritual direction. Directors, however, are to fi ne-

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tune these rules for every encounter. Each spiritual direction is a singular dialogue between two individuals and requires attunement to delicate psychological movements of love, fear, anxiety, anger, aversion, abjection, and shame (all mentioned explicitly by Acquaviva). Crucially, the advisee must participate in the process of self-examination and acquiring selfawareness (17:11; p. 159). Through the processes of imitation, absorption, and trust, he or she will develop the ability to recognize the affections and temptations within his and her own soul, overcome them, and become one not only with the director but, through the director, with God. Acquaviva’s Resources for Therapy of the Soul became the standard guide for spiritual directors who were themselves members of the Society of Jesus or educated in the Society’s seminars. Among them it is worth mentioning Pierre de Bérulle and Louis Lallemant, two prominent French directors and teachers, whose spiritual doctrines, in their turn, molded the devotional lives of both clerics and laypersons in early modern France and beyond. Following Acquaviva, Bérulle (1575–1629) explained that direction is a science that is learned not from books but from the book of life and by means of adherence to the Cross, to Jesus, and to his love. It is a practice rather than a theory, and a practice of love rather than of the intellect or the body.42 The Spiritual Doctrine of Lallemant (1578–1635), a compilation of his exhortations, was gathered by his student Jean Rigoleuc (1596–1658). In its discussion of direction, which deals solely with the spiritual instruction of novices, the work follows closely Acquaviva’s guide. Lallemant fi rst reminded his readers that experience and prudence, rather than knowledge from books alone, are the key to good direction. People who have already gained purity of conscience, detachment, and self-control are united with God in their spirit, and can therefore guide others, or, to be more precise— Lallemant retracts and corrects himself—“God guides others through them.”43 Chief among the director’s tasks are to grasp the advisee’s level of spiritual growth and maturity and to gain his trust and affection. Once the novice starts to advance spiritually, the advisor should suggest frequent confession. It is clear that Lallemant expects the director to also function as the confessor: he goes on to explain that reprimands ought to be delivered with prudence and tenderness. The direction should inspire the advisee’s spirit of penance and encourage public acts of pardon and private acts of physical mortification.44 The advisee, for his part, “should reveal [his] conscience to a superior and to a Spiritual Father . . . as if [he] could have [his] entire interiority in [their] hands to show it to them.”45 Thus, both Loyola and Acquaviva insisted on the splitting of the tasks of confession and spiritual direction. This, however, was a matter of dis-

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cretion, not theology. As we have noted, some Dominican and Franciscan friars in the late Middle Ages had already widened the confessor’s role to include spiritual guidance, and some early modern Jesuits also praised the benefits of having the confessor dispense counsel and serve as a spiritual guide to his confessants, even though Loyola himself had recommended keeping the two roles distinct. Francisco de Osuna (1497–1540), in his Third Spiritual Alphabet, warned against following the advice of people who do not have official church authority to dispense advice (20:6). His warning echoed the intense anxiety felt by spiritually inclined Spaniards concerning the threat of Alumbradismo, of which Osuna himself had also been accused. Osuna was followed in this regard by some Jesuits. The Savoyard Pierre Favre (1506–1546), one of Loyola’s original disciples and the fi rst Jesuit missionary to Germany, elaborated on the importance of collapsing into one the roles of spiritual advisor and confessor. In an important circular letter to his own disciple Cornelius Wischaven (1509–1559), the fi rst Flemish Jesuit (and later the novice master in Rome and Messina), Favre presented the fi rst systematic attempt to develop a theology of confession as spiritual direction. It is not enough to ask the penitent to recount sins, he explained: “You should also examine him carefully as to his personal obligations and actions to which he is bound by his state in life.” The confessor and the penitent together should examine the causes, circumstances, and locations of specific sins in order to “bring about their removal.” Importantly, the joint investigation of the soul is not restricted to examining the past: “It is essential to ask [penitents] about their intentions in life, their activities and goals, their social contacts, studies, and conversations—their entire life.” They should be queried as to their general life goals as well as their particular plans of study, travel, or business. This intimate investigation reveals to confessor and confessant alike the motivational energies, temptations, and inclinations that are active within the latter’s soul. Through this familiarity, the penitent can take control of his or her sinful inclinations. This is precisely where the director as role model assumes prominence: “The penitent [needs to be] introduced to a new and better way of life. Once he has been shown a better way of life . . . he will become more steadfast in his efforts to maintain a course that opposes his sins.” The confessor should also advise the confessant concerning frequency of confession and Communion. Last but not least, the penitent should be taught how to “apply prayers,” that is, to imbue them with meanings, visualizations, and meditations. Confession, according to Favre, then, is much more than just feeling

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remorse, recalling sins, and being absolved. Spiritual direction, for its part, is not only concerned with comprehending present movements and inclinations within the soul. The two activities, confession and direction, are two ways to re-form and in fact re-create the subject. The process of spiritual direction– cum– confession asserts the penitent’s control over his or her soul and endows him or her with the tools to “improve their life in the future.” Among the tools for this self-transformation are “a method for examining themselves on a particular sin” in the future and additional ways of growing in virtue through good works.46 Introspection, then, acquired by imitation of a spiritual director and by following his advice and confessing to him, leads to conversion, which, in turns, is sustained by frequent future confessions and direction. The far-reaching implications of this new penitential theology will become clear as this volume unfolds. Suffice it to point out now that imposing satisfaction and pardoning the sinner, while obviously crucial to the sacrament, is overshadowed in Favre’s discussion by the attention to the re-formation of a sinning soul and transforming it. While Favre wrote for and instructed fellow Jesuits, his fellow Jesuit Gaspar de Loarte (1498– 1578) dispensed similar advice to lay readers, whom he encouraged to pursue the ideal confessor, one who will not only absolve them of sins but will also enable them “by his counsul to governe the whole of your life and al thine actions.” Within a decade de Loarte’s compilation of 1574 was translated into all the major European languages, shaping, as one example among myriad, the spirituality of Teresa of Ávila.47 In the context of the campaign against Alumbradismo and the fear of unsupervised and ecstatic spirituality, as well as in the face of ongoing accusations of Pelagianism, the Society of Jesus defended itself in the second half of the sixteenth century by restricting spiritual direction to confessors. Ignatius of Loyola’s fierce commitment to separating the roles of confessor and spiritual director is here put into sharp relief. The change was related to the growing clericalization of spiritual life, a process that emerged in the 1520s and was accelerated by the Reformation and the Council of Trent. By the seventeenth century a Jesuit consensus was reached according to which it was recommended that the tension between spiritual direction as a means of facilitating personal growth and spiritual direction as a means of control be resolved by merging the practice of spiritual direction and sacramental confession. Before we examine these changes, however, we shall consider briefly the position of women in this process, in particular as it is set out in the works of Teresa of Ávila on spir-

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itual guidance. As we shall see, Teresa’s view of women’s offering spiritual direction was far from clear even in her own mind, and her ambivalence was formative for Carmelite spirituality in Spain and later in France.

TERESA OF ÁVILA AND OTHER CARMELITE DIRECTORS Teresa begins with the idea that spiritual direction is essential for all, clerics and the laity alike, and that “even for people who are foreign to the religious state it will be very advantageous to have a spiritual guide so that they will follow his advice and do nothing of their own free will, because the latter is the cause of our destruction.”48 It is always better to seek counsel than to suffer from scruples (Life, 15:14). Obedience to authority and avoidance of relying on one’s own discerning capabilities, then, are crucial for spiritual growth, which can only take place following voluntary submission to spiritual guidance. Here, too, one may hear echoes of the anxiety caused by Alumbradismo, an anxiety that haunted all forms of sixteenth-century Spanish spirituality. All the more interesting, then, was Teresa’s choice to relieve her heart not to a learned male but to Doña Guiomar de Ulloa, “because she was a suitable person for such confidences,” including things “on which learned men were ignorant” (Life, 30). However, Teresa does not disclose the content of these conversations, and she does not use the term “spiritual direction” to describe them. The authority she had in mind when discussing the benefits of spiritual direction was very likely clerical (26:3), and she probably did not regard her consultations with Doña Guiomar as “official” direction. This being said, it is noteworthy that the Avilan mother recalled that her best director had been not a priest but a married man, Don Francisco de Salcedo, who “directed all he did to the great good of the souls with whom he held converse” (Life, 23:6– 8, translation modified). After him, it took her twenty years to fi nd a new qualified master (Life, 4:7). Teresa was frank about the difficulties of fi nding a good director and of the damage that could be done by incompetent and inexperienced male clerics who serve in this capacity. Interestingly, Francisco de Osuna, who had highlighted the dangers of engaging lay spiritual advisors and of following one’s own heart, and who emphasized that only in clerical guidance is there divine participation, preceded Teresa in noting the injury caused by clerical directors who gave bad advice (Third Alphabet, 8:4). Juan of Ávila (1499–1569), the popular Spanish theologian and spiritual guide, also warned against relying on one’s own spiritual experiences, yet claimed that only one in a thousand spiritual directors is qualified for the responsibility.49

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Teresa elaborated further on this difficulty. Matters of prayer, she said, are always difficult to understand, especially in their earlier stages (meditations). The practitioner therefore ought to “be guided by the discretion and opinion” of a director, who should be a man of experience in meditation. Otherwise, he will make a great many mistakes and lead souls along without understanding them or without allowing them to learn to understand themselves; for the soul, knowing that it is a great merit to subject [itself] to its director, dares not do other than what he commands it. I have come across souls so constrained and afflicted because of the inexperience of their director that I have been really sorry for them. And I have found some who had no idea how to act for themselves; for directors who cannot understand spirituality afflict their penitents both in soul and in body and prevent them from making progress.50

There is an interesting triangular dynamic being set forth here. The soul communicates directly with God in meditation at the same time that it wishes to subjugate itself to priestly authority. It does so not because this is necessary for the attainment of the recognition of God’s presence, but because of the inherent merit of obedience and submission. Therefore, between pursuing its own unmediated contact with the divine and its volition to obey, it fi nds itself afflicted by unnecessary pain. Shifting from the psychological to the social sphere, it seems that the travails of the soul here parallel the difficulties of Illuminist spirituality in Golden Age Spain, struggling to carve out a place for itself between individualized mysticism and inquisitorial anxieties and harassment. The ideal director is both experienced and learned; but following a long line of authors, among them Gerson and Osuna, Teresa posited that learning from personal interiorized experience is more important than learning from books (Life, 13 and 39). Directors who have not undergone spiritual ruptures and higher forms of prayer do not understand their advisees (Life, 20–21). But the exercitants themselves must also employ discretion and not choose a director who teaches them “to be like toads, satisfied if our souls show themselves fit only to catch lizards” (Life, 40:8). The trainee, then, is an active participant in the process of judging the quality of the trainer, and he or she must have preexisting tools, whose nature Teresa does not explain, to evaluate these qualifications. “God will not fail” practitioners who do not fi nd a director.

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And, in fact, Teresa did not restrict her intervention to a general warning against unqualified directors. She also inserted herself between male directors and their female Carmelite advisees when she felt that the latter were given wrong advice. Thus, for example, when Sister Ana de San Bartolomé was warned by her confessor that her mystical experiences were likely to be demonic in origin rather than divine, the sister approached Teresa and “told her everything that had happened to me. And she told me not to worry, that it was not the devil and that she had gone through that same stage of prayer with confessors who did not understand it. And I was consoled to hear this and I believed that what the Saint told me was from God.”51 Teresa herself served as a spiritual director to a large number of men and women, including male confessors and spiritual directors. John of the Cross, as we shall see shortly, was the most famous of her followers, and the French Jesuit Jean Pierre Caussade (1675–1751) also recommended her (by then printed) spiritual direction in his very popular Treatise on Prayer from the Heart.52 Teresa herself, however, referred to her work not as spiritual direction but as “helping souls” (Book of Foundations, 6; Peers ed., 3:31–32). “I lack neither love nor the desire to do all I can to help the souls of my sister to make great progress in the service of the Lord,” she pronounced (Way of Perfection, prologue; Peers ed., 2:1–2). Indeed, she explained, a prioress, who is familiar with the nun’s character and the manner she carries herself and practices her daily routine obligations, is in a unique position to discern the nun’s interiority and to help her grow spiritually. She should therefore meet once a month with each nun and listen to her as the latter describes her manner of prayer and practices of penance. In addition, novices should give the novice-mistress “daily accounts of the progress they are making in prayer, of how they are proceeding with the mystery on which they have to meditate and of what benefit they are deriving from it. She will instruct them as to how they are to carry out this exercise, and also how to act during periods of aridity, and show them how they must themselves gradually break in their wills, even in small matters.” The sisters themselves shall give a similarly detailed account to the prioress each month, and “if they are not doing well, His Majesty will give her light to guide them.”53 Like Teresa, John of the Cross suffered from bad spiritual direction. His discussion of spiritual direction, its challenges, and the harms unqualified directors might cause followed closely Teresa’s own engagement with these matters. Interestingly, John begins his work by ascribing the difficulties to the advisees’ own intransigence. People who are just beginning

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their spiritual ascent are so fervent that they become complacent and vain. The devil then increases their pride and presumption, and when spiritual directors, confessors, and superiors try to instruct them, they refuse to listen.54 They want to impress their directors and be praised by them, and once they fail they “quickly search for some other spiritual advisor, more to their liking, someone who will congratulate them and be impressed by their deeds; and they flee, as they would death, those who attempt to place them on the safe road by forbidding these things” (Dark Night, 1:2:7). Obviously John did not have much respect for beginners. Yet his comments inform us that it was the advisees themselves who determined who should be their directors and when and if decide to quit direction. Who are these directors and how trustworthy are they? First, let’s note that John of the Cross talks of “spiritual directors, confessors, and superiors” as three distinct categories of persons. Secondly, while it was undoubtedly true that many advisees were bothersome, it was in all probability equally true that many directors were mediocre. It is therefore crucial to choose the right director; otherwise, “the disciple will become the master.” Besides being learned and discreet, a director should have experience in spiritual matters—inexperienced guides do not understand much beyond the very fi rst stages of prayer and therefore do not wish for other souls to pass beyond these beginnings, thus causing much damage (Living Flame, 3:30–31). Such directors, rather than interfering in matters they do not understand, should “reflect that they themselves are not the chief agent, guide, and mover of souls in this matter, but the principal guide is the Holy Spirit” (Living Flame, 3:46; cf. 3:53–54; 3:61– 63; Ascent of Mount Carmel, Prologue, 4).

BETWEEN SPIRITUAL DIRECTION AND SUBJECTION Let us pause here for a moment and ask: what, then, was the nature of spiritual direction in the waning years of the sixteenth century? First, it is worth repeating that the early modern period did not, pace Foucault, witness an “invention of techniques” of self-formation.55 Rather, it was a time of growing popularity, propagation, and modification of existing practices. Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, John of Ávila, John of the Cross, and their adepts were all cultivating, appropriating, and promoting a technique of psychagogy that was as old as the church itself. And this process was taking place at the very same time that spiritual direction was becoming both more popular and more suspect. I have already remarked on the growing interest of laypersons in spiritual direction from

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the fi fteenth century on and pointed out the growing anxiety the diffusion of this spiritual practice among laypersons (as both trainees and trainers) caused among some segments of the church. With the increasing popularity of spiritual inclinations among laypersons came dangers: the danger of uncontrolled and unmediated spiritual experiences, the danger of individuals claiming their own prerogatives to experience divine grace in untraditional ways, and, last but not least, the danger of unqualified people serving as spiritual guides to misguided individuals. Spiritual direction had to be reconfigured, and the challenge was how to channel these new (lay) spiritual energies and desires. The goal was to safeguard and even encourage such impulses while ensuring that they did not escape clerical control and traditional theological understandings of pastoral care, with its embedded tension between subjugation and freedom. Propagation of the new spirituality, especially lay spirituality, then, was fraught with ambivalence and risk. New spiritual movements, practices, and individuals were never immune from backlash, inquisitorial investigation, and even punishment and censorship. Yet neither the notion of the laity’s access to advanced forms of spirituality nor the importance of the spiritual direction of the laity was ever questioned. Writing about spiritual direction in the early church, Foucault described a complete submission of a person to the authority of another, to such a degree that the director makes all decisions for the advisee. Subjection to the discerning authority of the director, according to Foucault, is the only route to subjectivation, to becoming a subject and gaining subjecthood. Tranquility, perfection, and “the formation of a relation [rapport] of the self with itself” cannot be achieved unless one subsumes one’s own will into the will of the director.56 Referring specifically to the early modern method of spiritual direction, Foucault discussed the creation of a “constant discursive fi lter of life,” a technique of exposing one’s innermost self, by means of verbalization, to examination and (later) medicalization through the scrutiny of a “witness who is both a judge and a doctor.”57 Against such a reductionist reading of spiritual direction in general, and of its early modern avatar in particular, as an instrument of total and ceaseless submission, governmentality, and new techniques of disciplining individuals and inculcating within them internalized mechanisms of self-control, subjection to clerical authority, and the manufacturing of interiorized truth as the essence of the self, I wish to stress the church’s markedly mixed response to the laity’s thirst for spiritual direction. The quest for spiritual direction often started from the bottom up, with lay

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believers who strove to advance spiritually, to meet God, and to re-create themselves. The sixteenth century saw a growing demand for direction as well as a restructuring of the technique such that it maintained greater clerical control over direction. Routinization of encounters between director and advisee also became the rule in monastic communities and among devout laypersons. The meetings, which were held daily, weekly, or monthly, became part of a spiritual regimen (so much so, in fact, that they raised acerbic comments by some contemporaries, as we shall see). The Jesuits and the Reformed Carmelites, as well as members of the secular clergy who were trained by them, were instrumental in this process, the Jesuits making the spiritual direction of souls central to their apostolic overseas mission. In both types of mission—the one to uncharted exotic lands and the other to uncharted territories of the soul—the goal was conversion. Again, however, early modern religious orders trained spiritual directors in response to a growing demand from the laity, and not as an imposition of new norms from above. It was the shortage of qualified directors that led religious orders to start producing secular priests capable of directing souls, not the other way around. In fact, in this century, and at the very same time that spiritual direction was being standardized and normalized, it also became more individualized than ever before. Not only in monastic communities but also among segments of social elites and urban lay populations, intimate and often face-to-face dialogical encounters between advisor and advisee replaced the dispensing of general pastoral advice. The spiritual director was expected more and more now to discern and gauge the specific personality traits of the trainee and then calibrate the direction to these personal characteristics. Trainees criticized  and even dismissed directors. Directing souls was a techne, a practice and knowledge that was more experiential and contextual than textual and was crafted each time anew to adjust to circumstances and dynamics. Rather than a monolithic, all-powerful interaction of authority and obedience, à la Foucault and the literature on the monolithic disciplinary campaign of postTridentine Catholicism, spiritual direction was always a negotiated and collaborative effort in which the advisee was progressively empowered to read her or his own soul. Thus spiritual direction fostered, rather than diminished, self-authority.58 Importantly, many trainees were women, and spiritual direction empowered them to discern their interiority and gain a level of control over it. Spiritual direction, let us recall, was about not pedagogy but rather

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psychagogy. The authority of the director derived neither from any sophisticated textual knowledge nor from his ecclesiastical position. Personal experience was the key to successful guidance, and at the very core of this experience lay the director’s own battles with temptation. Spiritual direction was a humbling practice of psychagogy, in which the director acquired his expertise in directing through his own experience of being directed, through his own tribulations and, often, failures. It was also a process that demanded that the director scrutinize his own motivations, lack of self-control, temperament, and temptations, and in which defeat was as likely as triumph. Put differently, the shared humanity of all believers as sinners was the basic anthropology of spiritual direction and the key to its success, and it was assumed in this anthropology of spiritual direction that crises were an imminent part of the believers’ quest for perfection. In fact, it was precisely in these crises that the example set by the director was crucial. In these moments of personal struggle, self-doubt, and potential defeat, when the devil did his best to take over the advisee’s soul and misdirect it away from its spiritual pursuit, consolation by the director, who recalled his own failures, was the key to the possibility of salvation. By revealing himself in times of crisis, the advisor gained the advisee’s trust. This in turn led the latter to submit to the authority of the master and imitate him. Together they discerned the spirits that were active within the trainee’s soul, and together they unveiled God’s presence within this soul. Despite its promise, early modern Catholic spiritual direction was certainly a mixed bag. Suspicion of lay spirituality was rife, and female and lay directors were a vanishing breed. Moreover, the widely diffused printed guides for direction (for directors but also for trainees) were perforce generic in nature. Standardization and homogenization of spiritual direction were part of the popularization of the practice. Yet most interactions between directors and directees continued to occur on a face-to-face basis, and even if both participants had access to a printed text, it facilitated but did not replace dialogue. Last but not least, as I have noted, was the growing push toward using confessors as spiritual directors. This conflation of roles, which made practical sense, was theologically confusing and made conflicting demands on both participants—fi rst and foremost among them a lack of clarity regarding what and how much the confessant/advisee ought to reveal to the confessor/director and regarding who had the authority to rule on this question. Its growing standardization notwithstanding, the practice of training souls and cultivating spiritual growth among growing segments of Catholic society by means of spiritual direction could

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not but advance individual self-formation, introspective capabilities, and a sense of unique subjecthood. Like other forms of subjectivation I will examine, spiritual counsel exposed permanent and inherent tensions within early modern Catholicism between submission to authority and the cultivation of individuality, and between the encouragement of spiritual maturity, on the one hand, and anxiety over believers’ spiritual independence, on the other.59

FRANÇOIS DE SALES AND DIRECTION BY WOMEN Nowhere was the dual nature of spiritual direction as both a mechanism of control and as a method of cultivating individual Christian liberty and self-formation as evident as in the writings and practices of François de Sales (1567–1622), arguably the most influential spiritual director of early modern Europe. De Sales’s philosophy and practice of direction encapsulated the practical and psychagogical developments of the previous three hundred years, crystallizing and popularizing the methods of spiritual direction in a manner that made the practice easily accessible and hugely attractive. Like his predecessors, François de Sales strove to teach the trainee how to align his desires with those of God, and how to join divine impulses within the soul with human desire. Director and directee labored to make God’s plan and the trainee’s desire work in tandem. Two sets of relationships activated the process: God’s love toward his creation and the bonds of friendship that united spiritual advisor and spiritual advisee.60 De Sales was a product of the Jesuit educational system. Between 1583 and 1588 he studied at the Society’s college in Paris, and later, while a student in Padua, he had the indefatigable Jesuit missionary, papal legate, and polemicist Antonio Possevino (1533–1611) as his spiritual director. His Introduction to the Devout Life of 1608 (augmented 1609–10) was addressed to a devout female reader, a beginner in all matters spiritual, the generic Philothea. The Introduction was published in more than forty French editions during the seventeenth century and was translated into all the major European languages. In it de Sales incorporated the Jesuit systematization of spiritual formation, the democratization of devotion and spiritual exercises that had been advocated and practiced by the Dominicans and Theatines of sixteenth-century Italy, into the ascetic (as compared to mystical and ecstatic) spirituality that was burgeoning in the second half of the sixteenth century. The book follows closely the organization and structure of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (which will be examined in chapter 3), and was also shaped to a large degree by the spirituality of Teresa of

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Ávila.61 But unlike Loyola’s Exercises, which were composed for directors of spiritual retreats and were not distributed to practitioners, de Sales’s book was written for a woman, his cousin Madame Marie de Charmoisy, whom he had directed between 1603 and 1607. It supplied her with a toolbox that would allow her to discover, while being supervised by a spiritual director, God’s movements within her soul, to develop her sense of self, and to attune herself to God’s desires concerning her. By giving the exercitant direct access to the spiritual techniques of encountering God within herself, de Sales permitted individual practitioners to use the book as they liked: to read and skim it at will, and to adapt it to their social position, personal development, needs, and previous spiritual experiences. In other words, de Sales’s method—while insisting on submission to a spiritual direction— enabled practitioners to become their own spiritual directors. According to de Sales, the fi rst step toward God is “purification of the soul” by way of confession and submission to direction. Each person needs a spiritual director (1:4): “you would love to have our beloved Jesus as your own director,” he wrote to Madame Jeanne-Françoise Frémyot, Baronne de Chantal (1572–1641), his most prominent advisee and the cofounder of the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary, in the fi rst letter of a lifelong exchange of mutual spiritual advice. Alas, “He does not want us to avoid the direction being offered to us by his servants when it is made available.”62 De Sales here expresses his and his period’s preference for guided cultivation of spiritual experiences over suspicious unmediated mystical experiences. The ideal director is charitable, knowledgeable, and prudent (1:4). Like many of his predecessors, de Sales lamented the fact of widespread incompetence among spiritual directors. “It is difficult, my very dear sister, to fi nd well-rounded spiritual people who can discern clearly to an equal degree in all matters; nor is it necessary to have people like that so as to be well directed. There is no harm, it seems to me, in gathering from many flowers the honey which we cannot fi nd in one alone,” he wrote to the formidable Angélique Arnauld (1591–1661), reformer of the convent of Maubuisson and abbess of Port-Royal.63 De Sales goes on to recommend that the confessor and director be the same person, but he was aware of a distinction between the two roles and in fact turned down a request from Madame Barbe Acarie (1566–1618), the mystic who brought the Reformed Carmelites to France, to be her spiritual director because he had confessed her numerous times. He also regretted not being able to share with others what he had learned from her because this knowledge had been acquired under the seal of confession.64 His ambivalence concerning the relations between the two jobs was far from resolved.65 But whether the director

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is the same person as the confessor or not, the advisee ought to tell him or her everything that takes place in her conscience, and do so naively, straightforwardly, and honestly. In order to facilitate the recollection of sins, de Sales, following the tradition of late medieval confessionals and Jesuit teachings (see chapters 3 and 4), offers a series of meditations on the Creation of the world and humankind, divine graces, sins, death, judgment, hell, and paradise (1:9–18). The practitioner is then encouraged to move from the general to the particular, and review her own gifts and sins, a process of self-examination that terminates with the practitioner’s consecrating herself to God (1:19–20). But this truth-telling practice should include not only sins, but also “the state of your inclinations even if you had not been led to sin but only to torments of sadness.” Here again, attention to and discernment of one’s interior movements is the key to the entire dynamic of spiritual direction. By the end of Part One of the Introduction to the Devout Life, the practitioner has acquired familiarity with her inner self and her sins and has meditated on her betrayal of God’s grace and mercy. She is now ready to begin cultivating her purified relations with God. These relations are the re-formation of the self. They take place not through good works and other embodied practices, but within the soul. In fact, at this stage the spiritual director has completed the major part of his work. It was through submission to his instructions that the trainee acquired a set of meditative exercises that enabled her to visualize and encounter God at all times, to “retreat into the solitude of her heart at will” (2:12). She can now create a space of subjectivation that is both within the world (where she resides and acts) and without it (an imaginary space of retreat) “while physically you are in the midst of conversation and business; and that mental solitude cannot be hindered by the crowd of people around you, because they are not around your heart but only around your body.” This sanctuary of retreat from the world and its distractions, however, leads back to the outside world: Philothea’s meditations lead her to “resolutions” that impact her behavior. She acquires a new self, which will now direct her dealings with the outside world. De Sales’s spiritual instructions lead not to the solitude of the mystical encounter with God or to the annihilation of self, but rather to a renewed commitment to unite oneself with both the Creator and his Creation. De Sales served as a spiritual director to a very large number of women and also to a few men, and his spiritual correspondence fi lls ten volumes of his collected writings. In some of these letters we glimpse his practical direction. In March 1604 he fi rst met the Burgundian widow the Baronne

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de Chantal, who had already taken a vow of chastity following her husband’s sudden death. Surprisingly, Chantal recounted later in her life that until she was about thirty, “she had never heard about a director or spiritual master or nothing that resembles it” and had not, in fact, known what she had been searching for.66 When she was thirty, she went on, God instilled a previously unrecognized and incomprehensible need for direction within her, and, knowing nothing about direction, she approached the fi rst director she found. Like the fi rst directors of Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, this figure, too, was unqualified for the role. He made her take oaths to obey him and to keep ties of secrecy between them, and she followed him in learning “prayers, meditations, speculations, actions, methods, practices and different observances,” including prayers in the middle of the night, fasts, bodily mortification, and other scourging of the flesh. All these practices of belief did not lead Chantal to a greater tranquility or toward a better comprehension of herself. In enumerating this list of futile practices, Mother Françoise-Madeleine de Chaugy, Chantal’s fi rst biographer, juxtaposed the mode of direction employed by Chantal’s fi rst director to the systematic, beneficial, and less extravagant mode of direction taught by François de Sales. It was not self-evident that de Sales would agree to insert himself into the existing spiritual dynamic between Chantal and her advisor. But he realized that “there is no reason to think of it as anything but God’s will.” It was God who had fi rst placed Chantal under the guidance of the unqualified director, and it was God who now matched her with de Sales. God fi lled de Sales with “tremendous love” for Chantal’s soul. Under his guidance, her soul “changed completely, and was delivered from the interior captivity in which the advice of her fi rst director had kept her until then.”67 In a deposition written in 1627 for de Sales’s canonization process, Chantal described the director’s adherence to the tradition according to which direction was based on personal example and on self-exposure of the director’s own shortcomings and struggles: “To give me strength to bear a difficulty of my own, he told me that when he had not been at college in Paris, he had been vexed by a state of extreme mental anguish, fi rmly believing that he was doomed to go to hell and had no hope of salvation. This made him so cold with fear.  .  .  . However terrible his state of mind, he held fast in the depth of his soul to his resolution to love and serve God with his whole strength while life lasted.”68 Like de Sales, Chantal dispensed spiritual direction, both epistolary and face to face, throughout her life. It is only by obeying spiritual directors that one can reach perfection, she taught. Addressing members of the

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Order of the Visitation she and de Sales had established, she explained that a Visitandine must “give herself so completely to the hands of those who direct you that they may twist you as they will, as we do with a handkerchief.”69 The director will help the practitioner resist evil inclinations, habits, and propensities. And yet, he or she must instruct by example, because “if your good example does not speak along with you, the remonstrances you make will be fruitless. One cannot give to others what one does not have oneself. So you must be zealous about your own perfection and closely united with God so that your good example will attract your sisters to their own duty.”70 In both individual letters of advice and general instruction Chantal insisted on the (female) director’s obligation to get to learn the traits of each member of the community prior to dispensing spiritual advice. Thus, for example, “as for this young woman of Vendôme,” she advised Mother Superior Anne-Marie Rousset of Bourges, “we have to wait until time and additional proofs will give you a thorough familiarity with her spirit, because often there is much deceit hidden among excellencies.”71 Chantal’s active direction of both women and men and her letters to mother superiors of her order instructing them on how to direct spirits raise the question of whether early modern spiritual direction by women was indeed curtailed, as has been argued by some historians. These historians related the clericalization of spiritual direction to an alleged or systematic silencing of women’s access to forms of spirituality. As previously mentioned, some scholars have presented the transformation of spiritual direction in the early modern period as an attack on female prophetism and authority as spiritual guidance. A more nuanced interpretation, advanced by Alison Weber, Jodi Bilinkoff, Barbara Diefendorf, Patricia Ranft, and others, emphasizes the vagaries of the gender dynamics of spiritual direction in the period.72 In a detailed study of Barbe Acarie as a spiritual director, Diefendorf convincingly demonstrated the extreme fluidity of the spiritual director’s job. Acarie, the mystic who founded the Discalced Carmelite Order in France, conducted the souls of her biological and spiritual daughters, advised them as well as other elite women, and “made herself in some fashion a director.”73 Following Teresa of Ávila’s original Constitution for the Carmelite Order, she managed to preserve the mother superior as the main authority in spiritual matters within the convent. While in Spain, as Alison Weber documented, male clerics restricted the independence of Carmelite mother superiors,74 the Parisian founder insisted on the nuns’ own authority and on the independence of the prioress and the mistress

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of novices in running the daily spiritual life of the convent. Personal, patronal, and familial connections and prestige often determined the degree of implementation of Tridentine reforms, including whether women’s authority in a specific setting decreased, survived, or even increased. The tradition of spiritual guidance of women by women was maintained among fellow Carmelite French prioresses. Madeleine de Saint-Joseph de Fontaine (1578–1637), the fi rst prioress of the convent of the Discalced Carmelites in Paris, taught novices “that they must tell [their mother superiors] everything that is in them, whether temptations or excessive feelings of distress, consolation, disorders, or imperfection. In short, they should conceal nothing voluntarily, it being necessary for a soul to be entirely transparent to she who directs it and for the Carmelite to carry her soul in her hand.”75 Madeleine de Saint-Joseph also counseled men. In a letter of spiritual direction to a priest who consulted her, she explained that in directing souls, it is crucial not to follow the guide’s own inclinations but “to submit to the Divine Spirit.” Be patient, and let the soul grow at its own rhythm and according to its own inclination.76 Madeleine de Saint-Joseph, as well as many other Carmelites, Visitandines, and other prioresses, gave advice to laypersons who came to the grille to consult them.77 Prioresses and abbesses regularly instructed their disciples, defending their right to do so by invoking St. Benedict’s distinction between teaching and setting an example. They often also employed Aquinas’s distinction between teaching in public and teaching in private, deeming the convent a private space. We have already encountered Teresa of Ávila’s advice on how to begin one’s spiritual ascent. In another context she responded to “these sisters of mine” at the reformed Carmelite convents of St. Joseph in Salamanca, who had asked her to instruct them about the treatment of nuns who have a tendency to melancholy. Like many of her predecessors in spiritual direction, Teresa went on to compare the advisor to a physician, while María de San José Salazar (1548–1603), prioress of the Sevillian Carmelite convent, went one better, arguing in her On the Instruction of Female Novices (1602) that “sometimes when great doctors are ignorant about women’s ailments, women [healers] fi nd a cure, and although it may be the kind of simple home remedy women generally use, it might be just the right thing [ya podría ser que acertases].”78 The rule of the Reformed Benedictines of Paris similarly exhorts the abbesses to teach “all that is good and sanctified more by example and good works than by verbal instruction.”79 Another abbess who directed souls was Marie des Anges Suireau (1599–1638), abbess of Maubuisson and Port-Royal. According to her biographers and hagiographers, sisters St. Candide Le Cerf and

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St. Eustochie de Brégy, Mother Marie des Anges understood better than others that each soul has its own route to God. She therefore developed her own method of “conducting souls.” The Mother’s method is remarkable in at least two ways respects. First, she tailored her interactions to fit each nun’s personality and needs. Second, she led them into conversation by bringing up her own faults. By humbling herself she gained their trust, and by using charity and patience she waited for them to be led by their own “movements” to decide when to talk. The nuns of Maubuisson were divided among themselves, with a group of elite nuns opposing the reforms the abbess introduced into the community. And yet she gained their trust, and all confided in her their spiritual joys as well as their tribulations.80 According to the highly popular Jesuit spiritual director and preacher François Guilloré (1615–1684), women should not direct, but rather should be directed. In fact, even that is a challenge, as their intelligence “makes them incapable” of profiting from direction.81 Mother superiors, however, continued throughout the early modern period to instruct both within the walls of their religious communities and outside them, addressing mostly women but also some men. The restructuring of spiritual direction during the early modern period did not eliminate women’s direction of souls, and there is no indication in contemporary sources that restricting spiritual women was ever its goal. The survival of spiritual direction by women should not come as a surprise. Spiritual direction was never about absolving sins. From its inception, it was a process of psychagogy, of constructing or re-forming identity. As such, there was no theological or ecclesiological reason why women should not perform it. Spiritual direction was not a sacramental practice, and attempts to merge the roles of confessor and director into one, as we have noted, caused theological confusion. Admittedly, early modern documents, especially Jesuit guides for spiritual direction, often refer to the exercitant as a penitent. But the exercitant was a penitent in the broadest sense of the term, as all human beings are penitents. Pursuing their pilgrimage from damnation to redemption, spiritual directees acquired specific practices of belief and of introspection. Their route led them into their selves and into the recognition and discernment of God’s actions within their selves. The spiritual directors who participated actively in this pursuit were, strictly speaking, mere mediators; they trained and counseled the exercitant on how to attune to an ongoing dialogue between God and her soul. Thus, the spiritual director walked a fi ne line between directing and being himself or herself attuned to God’s own actions within the advisee’s soul, as well as being guided himself or herself by God. Much of the director’s own authority

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derived from his or her exposure to the exercitant: recollection of prior struggles and shortcomings, of failures and defeats. Spiritual direction was a dialogue between sinners. Their shared humanity ensured that the director comprehended the struggles of the advisee, and this comprehension was experiential and did not derive from textual knowledge. Even when directors were influenced by books, the notion that grace, attunedness, and compassion are the keys to successful direction was ever present. And because compassion and attunedness were not restricted to one gender or the other or to the clergy, the clericalization of the direction of souls was never (and was not intended to be) total. While it promoted discipline, selfdiscipline, and submission to authority, it was always also a negotiated personal relation between individuals in which the spiritual well-being of the trainee was cultivated by examination of the troubles of the trainer. In spiritual direction, subjugation went hand in hand with subjectivation and self-empowerment. The practice of spiritual direction was a method of acquiring attentiveness to one’s own soul, and it is for that reason that I have insisted that it should be viewed as psychagogy rather than pedagogy. But how did it actually work? In this chapter I have paid much attention to the setting of direction and to the obligations and expectations of participants. But what were the precise practices of belief that infused a soul with a new notion of subjecthood? What did it mean to imitate a director? How did re-formation of a self take place? And how did subjection and subjectivation interact in early modern practices of belief? In the following chapters we will discuss some of the practices of belief that characterized self-formation in early modern Catholicism, practices that were absorbed during the ongoing interactions that took place during spiritual direction.

Chapter Three

Spiritual Exercises

F

or the prominent German Jesuit Karl Rahner (1904–84), Ignatius of Loyola’s “immediate experience of God” in his Spiritual Exercises marks the beginning of the modern era in the church. Appropriating Ignatius’s fi rst-person voice to present what is allegedly Ignatius’s theology but is clearly Rahner’s own reading of it, Rahner goes on to argue that Ignatius, together “with Luther and Calvin, is one of the great figures at the beginning of Christian modernity.” That he is a forerunner of modern Christianity is demonstrated in his Spiritual Exercises, which are built on the notion that Christianity is at its core an individual mystical experience of God, and because he transformed this experience into something that is no longer a “special privilege of a person chosen for an elite,” but rather a grace that is available for all human beings and a feature of normative life.1 Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises are modern because they enhance—to use radical, non-Catholic, and non-Rahnerian language— a potential priesthood of all believers, and because they offer an “immediate encounter of the individual with God” to everyone.2 Like many other articulations made by Rahner, a highly regarded but also controversial theologian, this assertion advanced an uncommon interpretation of established perceptions. It implicitly claims the primacy of immediate experience over other forms of interactions with God, such as indoctrination by means of pedagogy or by philosophical discussion, and it even sets unmediated experience above liturgical prayer. No less important, the reading celebrates modernity and intimates that the value of Loyola’s Exercises derives from their relevance to the modern age rather than from their orthodoxy. Last but not least, experience is in its very essence an individual event, and in claiming its centrality in Ignatian spirituality, Rahner implies that this spirituality regards the individual subject as its focus. The 67

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audacity of Rahner’s “fi nal spiritual testament” goes still further.3 The Exercises, he reminds his readers, had been given to believers before the Basque pilgrim set foot in Paris and while he was still theologically untrained. Theological training, we are to understand, is secondary to the experience of grace. And since “the devout person of the future will either be a mystic . . . or will cease to be anything at all,” the Spiritual Exercises, which train people in how to become “mystics” in this normative sense that Rahner employs, are the key to the survival of Christianity in the modern age.4 There is no denying the huge, unbridgeable gap between Rahner’s reading of the Spiritual Exercises and Ignatius’s own intentions in compiling the collection. There is no less a distance between Rahner’s interpretation and traditional post-Tridentine Catholicism, a Catholicism that insisted on the primacy of indoctrination by the clergy, the situating of the church as sole mediator between humans and the divine, and the careful scrutiny of the laity’s access to mystical and spiritual texts. And yet, Rahner’s existentialist and very modern twentieth-century take on Loyola’s masterwork enables us not only to investigate the Spiritual Exercises for their contribution at the time of their composition, but also to trace (admittedly, teleologically) their potential modernity. For Michel Foucault, similarly, spiritual exercises of the second half of the sixteenth century marked a major transition toward modernity. It was only in this period that Christianity (by which he meant Catholicism) came “to defi ne each exercise in its specificity, to prescribe the ordering of these exercises in relation to each other and their temporal succession according to the day, week, month, year, and also of the individual’s progress. At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, a truly pious person’s life . . . was literally carpeted and lined with exercises that had to be kept up and practiced daily and hourly.”5 Although Foucault did not refer explicitly to Loyola’s Exercises, it is clear that the change he identified was the one that had been initiated with Ignatius’s reconfiguration of the tradition of spiritual exercises, a tradition and transition that will be analyzed below. Rahner’s existentialist and ecumenical positions regarding the Spiritual Exercises were not shared by all Jesuit theologians of the second half of the twentieth century, and many of them have been flatly rejected.6 For its part, Foucault’s claim that a pivotal move toward modernity took place in the systematization of spiritual exercises in the period does not withstand careful scrutiny either. Both luminaries, however, correctly saw in Loyola’s Exercises an important transitional moment in the history of Christian spirituality,

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of practices of the self, and of modernity. Spiritual exercises enhanced belief, created new selves, and enabled pious believers to make sense of their lives. It is by means of the practice of spiritual exercises, Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises in particular, that a new configuration of the relations between subjecthood, subjection, and subjectivation came into being in early modern Catholicism. I have chosen Loyola’s Exercises to exemplify a practice of belief whose history, like the histories of all but one of the other practices discussed in this book, pre-dates late medieval and early modern Catholicism. Other compilations might have yielded a similar history of spiritual exercises. For example, both Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi (The Imitation of Christ; ca. 1420) and Girolamo Savonarola’s Triumphus Crucis de fideli veritate (1497) were important collections of spiritual exercises and best sellers of spiritual meditation. Savonarola, in fact, maintained that ceremonies and rites were never sufficient for salvation, and that spiritual exercises were the sole means of transforming one’s life and overcoming sin. For him, spiritual purification required meditating on the nativity, life, and Crucifi xion of Christ. Yet it was Loyola’s work that became, in the early modern period, the premier collection of spiritual exercises, and it has remained so. The Exercises had an enormous impact on the Catholic tradition of meditations, and in bowdlerized versions they also reached Protestant and Anglican audiences. The Spiritual Exercises were controversial precisely because of the concerns considered in this book, among them issues of individual agency in belief versus obedience to advisors and to tradition; the role of spiritual practices and their social availability; and the desires and dangers inherent in self-formation and new subjectivation. Last but not least, the Exercises present not only a new beginning, as Rahner and Foucault have argued, but also an important bridge connecting premodern to modern Catholic notions of selfhood and interiority. But the adjustments they underwent in the early modern period warn against a reading of a linear transition from early modern innovations to modern appropriations. The Exercises thus enable us to analyze what, precisely, was modern about early modern practices of subject formation, as well as to challenge a teleological model of historical change. As noted in the introduction, I make use of a somewhat naive (yet common) defi nition of modernity, sidestepping the postmodernist debate about whether or not we have ever been modern and the postcolonial moral and political challenge to the Eurocentric dimensions of this notion of modernity. Thus, I defi ne modernity as the shift to an anthropocentric worldview (anthropologische Wende, as it is known in twentieth-century theol-

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ogy), an accelerated drive to control and transform the natural world, the growing separation of realms (political from religious, private from public), and a widening space for individual decision-making by human subjects. While each aspect of this defi nition might be justifiably contested, I follow closely Rahner’s and other theologians’ engagement with modernity, as well as that of sociologists, historians, and Foucault himself. Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, as Rahner and Foucault pointed out, were indeed a means to enhance individual self-knowledge and decision-making under God. To the degree that the modern age is characterized by a “turn to the subject” and respect for an autonomous (alleged) freedom, liberated from constraints of the church and of communal forms of identity formation, they offer the Christian believer a technique, a template of choices, and a degree of self-trust uncommon in religious traditions. In Rahner’s words, “The central fact is that it is the individual subject itself which applies, even when this person freely and deliberately accepts and absorbs the traditional realities handed on by a philosophia perennis and by the Christian faith; i.e. when this subject belongs and remains a member of the Church, and regards himself to be not only a member of the profane world, but as a person directed by God.”7 While Foucault argued that the process of subjectivation was always accompanied by an internalized subjugation to a new configuration of truth-telling, Rahner suggests that in Catholic modernity this subjugation is voluntary.8 In the tension-ridden relations between religious belief and practices on the one hand and freedom and that which marks modernity on the other, there is no escaping this individual self-formation as an agentic subject (even when subjected to a truth regime), as adherence to the church is now itself a matter of free choice.9 This perception of the dialectic complexities of free will, subjugation to authority, and subjectivation is itself modern. Traditional Catholicism in general, and post-Tridentine Catholicism in particular, had no space for individual free will or for a self-formation outside the church, as the fight against Alumbradismo showed so well. To reiterate: Rahner’s interpretation is an utterly modern reading of early modern Jesuit theology. What further complicates the relations between modernity, subectivation, and subjugation is Foucault’s important insight that this process of subectivation involved the interiorization of religious notions of wrongdoing, guilt, shame, and inherent truth. Philip Endean aptly summarized this process as one in which “the church became merely the context within which the individual religious drama was played out.”10 “Thinking with the church” means, for Loyola and for modernity both, fi rst thinking, and only then using this individual agency of thinking to decide to follow church teach-

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ing. The ecclesiastical church is important only insofar as the individual’s immediate experience of God leads the believer to embrace it. This understanding, highlighting as it does the modern potentialities and dangers embodied in all practices of subjectivation, including and perhaps especially the practice of spiritual exercises, is the core of my argument in this chapter. In the following pages I move from spiritual direction, which was the temporal and spatial setting of acquiring practices of introspection and self-formation, to the actual functioning of Christian psychagogy. I proposed in the previous chapter that spiritual direction created a long-term and ongoing dialogical setting in which a director and an advisee collaborated in an effort to enhance the latter’s ability to decipher God’s actions within the self, to obtain self-attunedness, and to overcome pitfalls that were embedded in the spiritual route. In this and the following chapters we shall look closely at the content of what was transmitted from advisor to trainee during these interlocutory sessions. Spiritual exercises, as we shall see, were the foundations of other, more spiritually advanced practices, but they were also regarded, by all advocates of the cultivation of the self, as the sine qua non for spiritual conversion, of becoming a new self.

LOYOLA’S EXERCISES Spiritual exercises were collections of visualizations, prayers, and meditations aimed at producing a permanent psychic and mental effect—to form rather than to inform. Older than the church itself, the tradition of spiritual exercises, of taking care of one’s self (cura sui ipsius) by means of either intellectual or spiritual self-improvement, was constitutive of the education and self-formation of Greek and Roman elites.11 As noted, the Spiritual Exercises (compiled in the 1520s and 1530s; fi rst printed edition 1548) offered precious little originality. The work owed a major debt to Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi (written before 1378; many printed editions from 1474 on), which promoted the notion that activation of the imagination by means of meditative prayer intensifies the affective life of the soul and enhances self-examination, as well as Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi and other writings by followers of the Devotio Moderna. Loyola was also influenced by the abbot of Montserrat García Jiménez de Cisneros’s (1455–1510) Ejercitatorio de la vida espiritual (ca. 1500), or, more likely, an abbreviated version of this collection, the Compendio breve de ejercicios espirituales (1520; surviving only in its 1555 edition). Cisneros’s exercises were themselves informed by Devotio Moderna exercises and by

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Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis Christiani.12 Both the language and the order of Loyola’s Exercises closely follow Cisneros’s texts, while Loyola himself credited the Imitation of Christ with igniting his own conversion.13 He even assigned the Imitation of Christ as mandatory reading for Jesuit novices, who were to carry the text with them at all times. For Loyola, then, the monastic/spiritual and apostolic/ministerial missions of the Jesuits were compatible rather than incongruous. This point will be relevant in later developments to which I shall return. Thus, the Spiritual Exercises could be considered nothing but a compilation of existing meditations for self-cultivation and self-formation as a devout Christian, or, to use Ignatius’s own words, “to overcome oneself” [21] and “fi nd . . . more completely what one desires” [73].14 As such, they could be read as one element in a much wider attempt, carried out in early modern Europe by state and church together, to impose new norms of selfcontrol and self-discipline, a process proposed and analyzed by, among others, Foucault, Norbert Elias, Wolfgang Reinhard, and Adriano Prosperi. This view is accurate in the sense that Loyola’s goal was, indeed, to train believers to discover God within them and to heighten commitment to the church. Yet this ignores three pivotal refi nements Loyola made to the ancient and late medieval practices of spiritual exercises. These changes, which had far-reaching psychological, psychagogical, spiritual, and sociocultural implications, were: (1) shifting from reading spiritual exercises alone to listening to them as they are read aloud; (2) foregrounding the role of the spiritual director as mediator between text and practitioner; and (3) making available to all believers, irrespective of social status, spiritual exercises of introspection and spiritual growth. These elements serve to justify the close attention both Rahner and Foucault paid to the tradition that Spiritual Exercises widened. They also account for the choice of Ignatius’s Exercises as the topic of this chapter. Each of these three changes was stamped by paradox and tension. In fact, while the fi rst two changes— the systemization of the practice of the Exercises and the modification of the role of the spiritual director—were aimed at increasing church control and ensuring orthodoxy (thus overcoming the dangers of the expansion in the late Middle Ages of new forms of lay spirituality), the third Ignatian innovation—the wider diffusion of the Exercises—moved in precisely the opposite direction, toward the abandonment of traditional controls and normative boundaries (education, class, gender, clerical status, etc.) and created a space for unmediated, individual subjectivation. Loyola’s own text, like some early Jesuit commentaries, is understandably reticent on these matters. At stake were issues of burning impor-

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tance, fi rst and foremost the orthodoxy of Loyola’s collection of meditations, as well as of the religious order he established. Thus we have intense debates on the Exercises within the Society of Jesus. Some of these concerned apparently trivial aspects of the work: how to practice the Exercises, the manner in which they should be assigned, and the form in which they ought to be made available to different groups. As it turned out, these practical points were of crucial importance for both the diffusion of and opposition to the Exercises and will be addressed in the later part of this chapter. At issue were major matters of the young order itself. How was it to combine its mission to sanctify the world with its members’ personal goal of sanctifying themselves? What precisely should be the vocation of the Society of Jesus? Equally important were the most profound concerns of early modern Catholicism. Who has or ought to have access to divine illumination? What is the role of the human will in spiritual experiences? Should laypersons interact with the divine without priestly mediation? And how does practice enhance belief? These concerns took on new urgency in the fi rst half of the sixteenth century, a period that started with the Alumbradismo affair in Castile and ended with the Peace of Augsburg and the recognition by the Catholic Church that proponents of the “priesthood of all believers” were not going to disappear. Loyola’s idea to transform spiritual exercises from individual readings and visualizations to a director-supervised activity may well have been motivated by his own relations with the Alumbrados and his brush with the Spanish Inquisition. The Exercises were geared not only for people in monastic orders (or believers who, like followers of the Devotio Moderna, lived in semireligious communities), but also for those in the outside world, including women. In the view of contemporary theologians and clerics, these individuals needed more supervision. In the Spanish context especially, the spiritual pursuits of laypersons were regarded in the early sixteenth century with immense suspicion. Loyola was deeply familiar with the early sixteenth-century Spanish movement of Alumbradismo and its emphasis on illuminative individuality through independent spiritual exercise, and he himself was suspected of the heresy and of being a crypto-Jew. He served time in prison in Alcalá in 1526 before being exonerated, only to be questioned and arrested again the following year in Salamanca— and again acquitted.15 Yet Loyola’s vindication and the approval the Exercises received from Pope Paul III in 1548 did nothing to dispel the opposition of conservative theologians, especially Dominicans, to the universal availability of a set of spiritual exercises written in the vernacular.16

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Ignatius was a lay mystic. The years 1522–23 in Manresa saw him experiencing visions, suffering from temptations, and even contemplating suicide. From the chaos of his own struggles Loyola acquired a discernment of spirits. The restrained and organized author of Spiritual Exercises reveals himself in his Autobiography and in the short fragments from his Diary to be emotional, even tempestuous. Perhaps drawing from his own experience, it seems that Loyola designed the Exercises to control the psychological extremes of consolation and desolation and to channel private mystical experiences into the safety of supervised external control. As I showed in chapter 2, the second half of the sixteenth century saw a systematic attack on forms of self-constitution as a religious subject within Catholicism, forms that had been gaining popularity for the previous three hundred years but were deemed now to be dangerous. Ignatius’s balancing maneuver of preserving lay mysticism by placing it under clerical supervision was to continue in a series of intense debates within the Jesuit order concerning some allegedly technical aspects of the Exercises. Technical though these points may have been, they reflect a major reconfiguration of Catholicism after the Council of Trent. They also demonstrate the impossibility of separating technique from content (or practice from belief) in spiritual exercises, meditations, and other practices.17 Loyola’s Exercises, formed in turbulent times, were further modified to conform to changing notions of orthodoxy. Their technical nature aside, the changes discussed below promoted the Exercises during a time when other collections of spiritual exercises and meditations were banned. The direct result was the Exercises’ preeminent status, not to mention their power to reconfigure early modern Catholic spirituality and sensibilities. The Exercises contributed to an unprecedented diffusion of introspective techniques among lay believers (even when their access to the spiritual exercises was severely restricted) and even, through translations into vernacular languages and edited renditions, to Protestant and especially Puritan spiritual exercises.18 The Spiritual Exercises would have gone much further in this kind of formation of modern subjectivities and selves had it not been for the resistance they aroused and the late sixteenth-century imposition of modifications in their form. The following pages discuss both the technical novelties of the Spiritual Exercises and their historical context, tracing both the fruit and the failure of their radical potential. Let us now pause to trace the history of spiritual exercises in their Christian configuration. A late medieval practice of envisioning and verbalizing to oneself imaginary representations as means of deepening belief found its origins in an Aristotelian-Augustinian anthropological-cognitive

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theory. This theory posits that three different spirits (or instincts) are active within the human soul: the divine, the natural, and the angelic. The last is further divided between activities that are urged by fallen angels (evil spirits) and those that are inspired by good angels [32].19 These many spirits move within the soul and activate it continuously in different intensities, thus creating a large variety of effects. These in turn bombard the three faculties of the self: intellect, memory, and will (affections). It is through divine grace, intellectual cognition, and methodical exercises of the imagination that one learns to differentiate among these spirits and discern their impacts, thus enabling the imposition of order on their chaos. Imagination, in this late medieval and early modern understanding, is an active power, not a passive capacity; it produces, rather than opposes, intellectual reasoning.20 As Loyola put it, the Exercises’ goal is “to overcome oneself and to order one’s life in such a way that no decision is made under the influence of any ill-ordered attachment” [21]. This is a fi rst stage toward controlling these spirits, fortifying the intellect against trivial disruptions, turning the soul toward God’s own work within it, and enabling the soul to pursue its goal, which is recognition of, and unity with, divine love. During the Middle Ages reading, copying manuscripts, and meditating became major tools for ordering these internal movements. Proponents of spiritual exercises held that the soul could be shaped by reading, memorizing, and visualizing a series of meditations on the history of humankind and Christian salvation (from Creation to heaven and hell and from Christ’s Nativity to his Crucifi xion and Resurrection), and on one’s sins. These practices kindle and sustain the will for the self to be re-formed by a set of both mental and physical exercises, such as penance, obedience, and discipline, and by the activation of the intellectual soul by the emotional and nonintellectual passions and inner movements that result from the intensity of visual meditation and the sense of sinfulness.21 All of these mental and intellectual activities together participate in a constant internal battle in which prayers and acts of penance are leveraged against disorderly dispositions. The fi nal product of this spiritual training, the person who is liberated from the clutches of chaotic forces and desires, is the homo internus (to borrow Thomas à Kempis’s term). This figure is also a homo pacificus, one who overcomes the state of alienation caused by the passions and thus lives in quietude. Liberty stamps this interiorized peace. In this anthropological-psychological frame, since the Fall we have lacked sovereignty over ourselves and are thus unable to recognize God’s plan for us. But once we acquire the ability to place the self beyond the

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domination of disorderly emotions and desires, we are liberated to fi netune our own actions to recognize both the purity of our own hearts and God’s love for us.22 The late medieval meaning of spiritual exercise, then, was an expansive one. It encompassed mental processes and practices such as prayer, meditation, the application of the senses, the examination of conscience, the combating of temptations and tribulations, and the discernment of internal spirits, as well as physical activities such as penitential fasting and self-mortification. It also included mundane activities such as the copying of texts and modes of comportment. By the early sixteenth century the term “spiritual exercises” was also used to describe printed or hand-copied collections of prayers, proverbs, and devotional sayings that were read and consulted by the practitioner to maintain and fortify spiritual commitment and to direct his or her faculties.23 Often such exercises were individual compilations: people wrote down ideas and short prayers for their own spiritual growth and development and sometimes even invented their own exercises. The practitioners of such exercises were penitents, who had already committed themselves to a life of devotion. Spiritual exercises, as John Van Engen has pointed out, could be understood as a monastic rule for the layperson.24 Ignatius of Loyola had absorbed this enormous body of introspective practices and the meaning attached to them when he sat down, in the mid-1520s, to commit his own spiritual experiences to paper and to elaborate his own method of instructing others in spiritual exercises. Yet we now know that Loyola also introduced changes which were directly related to the promotion and popularity of techniques of selfformation and introspection in early modern Catholicism.

FROM READING TO LISTENING Until the followers of the Devotio Moderna movement, Savonarola, and Cisneros wrote their compilations, medieval collections of spiritual exercises were in the main written in Latin, and their audience was presumed to be “learned” (litteratus)—literate not only in the vernacular, but also in the language of the Vulgate Bible and the liturgy.25 These learned people were usually members of the regular clergy and lived their lives according to a monastic schedule. Exercises were to be carried out during free time between liturgical and manual occupations, and the setting of fi xed times for the pursuit of this solitary practice was encouraged. A case in point is the collection of spiritual exercises compiled by the Cistercian mystic Gertrude of Helfta (1256–1302). Gertrude’s exercises closely follow the lit-

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urgy and were meant to be read aloud by the practitioner. As such, it is difficult to differentiate them from noncanonical prayers.26 The exercises, which were probably intended for the instruction of her fellow sisters, follow the Christian monastic life from baptism and initiation, through clothing with the habit, consecration, and profession. These exercises lead to the fi fth and sixth exercises, which describe the union of the practitioner with Christ. The fi nal one prepares the exercitant for death and the fi nal and full meeting with God. What Gertrude offers, then, is a set of paraliturgical prayers, divided into seven sequential units. Even the spiritual exercises of the lay followers of the Devotio Moderna movement in the fi fteenth century were organized according to canonical hours,27 as were Cisneros’s Ejercitatorio de la vida espiritual and Compendio breve de ejercicios espirituales. In religious communities, meditating and reading had always been an important means of spiritual growth. Often collections of recommended visualizations and other spiritual exercises were read alone, and their benefits resulted from the unmediated interaction between the written texts and the meditating practitioner. “Be always either reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating,” advised Thomas à Kempis. Involvement of a spiritual counselor is highly recommended, but not mandatory. The written text itself is the practitioner’s spiritual director.28 Cisneros privileged reading, specifying that one ought to practice the exercises by reading them to oneself repeatedly.29 Spiritual exercises were practiced throughout the lifetime of the penitent, who often led a life of seclusion from the world. They were also practiced in accordance with the canonical hours, an external way of organizing time, thus further emphasizing their resemblance to monastic life. As was the case with Gertrude’s Exercises, they served, in fact, as a personal book of hours or a catechism, a text intended to intensify the practitioner’s steadfastness. They could also serve individuals or religious communities to gain divine advice. Thus, when Sister María de San José (1656–1719) and her mother superior were sent to establish a new Augustinian convent in the Mexican city of Oaxaca in 1695, María made a retreat for spiritual exercises for the sole aim of praying to His Majesty for the success of the foundation. . . . Then one day while I was on my retreat, without knowing how or in what way, I was enraptured and I found myself in something like a room. And it seemed to me it was very well decorated. I also saw something like a table in this room and on it material for writing. Some people were speaking, and they seemed to me to have authority.

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I knew only, and it was given to me to understand, that one of these people was His Holiness the Pope. He was giving in writing the permission or brief for this foundation. 30

It was imagining and visualizing, then, rather than learning and reading that constituted the core of spiritual exercises. These were texts that prompted a practice, a singular type of text, whose intention was to produce fi rst ephemeral images and then a permanent psychic and mental effect: to form selves and enhance belief. Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises diverged from other similar texts in a number of respects. First, they were not governed by canonical times, following instead an internal clock: “if at any point I fi nd what I am seeking, there I will repose without any anxiety about going further until I am fully satisfied” [76]. Secondly, they were meant to be practiced in a retreat, defi ned as a monthlong period of time that was set aside specifically for this purpose, with or without permanent withdrawal from the world.31 Thirdly, in a major break from tradition, Loyola’s Exercises were addressed to a director rather than to the practitioner and were to be practiced according to a given sequence. The medieval practitioner chose what to read and what to meditate on or contemplate. There was no obligatory order to the exercises, although they very often followed Christ’s triumph from birth to Resurrection: “the person who gives to another the method and procedure for meditating or contemplating should provide a faithful account of the history contained in the contemplation or meditation” [2].32 This new arrangement had both pedagogical and psychological implications. First, a new triangular relation of text-master-exercitant replaced two alternative sets of binary relations that had in the past characterized spiritual exercises. In the early church tradition and its pre- Christian precedents, as Pierre Hadot has shown, spiritual exercises were oral rather than textual. The philosophical dialogue was a conversation rather than a text, and its goal was self-transformation through self-discipline and constant introspection.33 In early monastic communities, self-improvement was also gained through observing and imitating the master. While these ancient traditions stressed the master-student relation and the late medieval practice, as we have seen, centered on the unmediated interaction between text and practitioner, Loyola posited that neither of these pairs was sufficient unto itself. Only an interactional web of text, master/reader, and practitioner/listener will yield the true benefits of spiritual exercises. Such an entwinement also ensures orthodoxy. Not for Loyola the rap-

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turous ecstatic activities of late medieval visionaries or the late medieval goal of self-annihilation in God by means of extreme mortification. He offers a strictly regimented and ordered set of imaginations, always gauged by an experienced mediator. In an age of print culture, increased literacy, and the growing availability of written texts, Loyola’s practitioner accessed the exercises through the ancient mode of audition. To use twentyfi rst-century language, Loyola distrusted self-help manuals and promoted psychodynamic interactions instead. This, as I have already noted, was not an invention ex nihilo. Loyola, probably unknowingly, revived the ancient configuration of spiritual exercises as a type of exchange that forms and transforms and that can only take place within a dialogue. The spiritual director listens, assigns exercises, and gauges the impact of previously assigned exercises on the practitioner’s soul. He dispenses these exercises one by one in accordance with the practitioner’s progress, state of being, position in life, and success or failure of previous exercises (note here again the rejection of canonical hours as well as of ecstatic spirituality). “When the one giving the Exercises becomes aware that the exercitant is not experiencing any spiritual motions in his or her soul, . . . the director should question the retreatant much about the Exercises,” he explained [6]. Undertaking spiritual exercises— almost always an individual practice of self-cultivation in the later Middle Ages—is being reshaped now as relations of dependence upon human authority [11]. Loyola, in fact, denies the practitioner unmediated access to the text (or to the divine). Practitioners are not expected either to experience an infused spontaneous rapture or to pursue their own set of mystical prayers and contemplations. Instead, they are escorted step by step along a welltrodden road. Practitioners leave the assignment of exercises, as well as their spiritual progress, in the hands of the director. Unlike their medieval predecessors, they may not pick and choose from among the different exercises in their own collection, to page forward or backward. Their spiritual self development is mediated through another, who controls their ascent toward a spiritual destiny. This relation of obedience, guidance, and subjugation is indispensable for the practitioner’s comprehension and discernment of the presence of the divine within the self and for one’s ability to re-form oneself. Arguably, the spiritual or even mystical experience is devoid of meaning until its discernment by the collaborative effort of the practitioner and the director and their joint recognition, once they identify the feeling of consolation, that the spiritual experiences of the former are orthodox and originate in God.

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THE DIRECTOR’S OBEDIENCE The exercitant, then, is dependent upon the provider of the exercises, and access to the exercises is mediated through the latter’s experience and authority. But the director himself is bound to a predetermined set of exercises. He is no longer the omniscient philosopher, a dispenser of truth, like the ancient sage, but merely a dispenser of exercises, a reader who himself follows a prescriptive text. Loyola’s techniques diminished the sense of awe that the ancient student felt toward his master and that was, to some degree, the foundation of the relationship. Unlike the ancient teacher, Loyola’s director is himself nothing but a mediator who “releases” exercises composed by another. Paradoxically, at the same time that Loyola restricted the exercitant’s access to the exercises, he also restricts the freedom of the director, who is himself (and it was mostly he) bound by Loyola’s instructions (anotaciones), which regulate even the most minuscule aspects of the enterprise. Time and again Loyola instructed directors to give the Exercises exactly the way he himself had fi rst practiced them [6]. Mimetic behavior and comprehension is in fact a core of the Exercises, and, equally important, their long-term benefit: “while one is eating, it is good to imagine Christ our Lord eating in company with his apostles, and observe how he eats, how he drinks, how he looks about, and how he converses, and then try to imitate him” [214]. A move toward more systematic spiritual exercises can already be discerned in the writings of some late medieval mystics such as Bonaventure (1221–1274), Pseudo-Bonaventure (the author of the Meditationes vitae Christi), Ludolph (ca. 1295–1378), and Henry Suso (1295–1366).34 Cisneros, Savonarola, Bartolini, and followers of the Devotio Moderna movement also advanced an ordered approach to spiritual exercises. Ignatius, however, took this notion a step further, mandating the meticulous observance of a codified set of exercises to be followed diligently by all who give and undertake the exercises. Collections of prayers and meditations in books of hours, for example, are outside of time and often order and can be practiced as the reader wishes. The Exercises are precisely punctuated, and spiritual growth hinges on their sequential performance. Loyola undoubtedly was influenced here by the Modes Parisienesis, the didactic method developed in the Low Countries and at the University of Paris in the fi fteenth century, which called for systematically drilling students in a topic until they master it before moving on to a new and more complex topic. 35 This reconfiguration of spiritual exercises was of signal importance. The Spiritual Exercises were meant neither to maintain a life of self-

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reflection nor to help the practitioner reach an ecstatic mystical union with God and be annihilated into the divine. Transformation of the self was the aim, but the transformation was to be rigorously controlled. This transformation, this new self, was the self that was unified with God by means of Election— of choosing and comprehending, by pursuing the Exercises, the life trajectory God had already assigned the practitioner. Although the spiritual director holds the key to the exercitant’s attainment of self-control and consequently of self-knowledge, he is to refrain from imposing his own will on the exercitant. For example, he should explain briefly the content of a specific historical event from the life of Christ and the procedure of the meditative exercise on this event. He then lets the practitioner meditate on it, “for in this way the person who is contemplating, by taking this history as the authentic foundation, and by reflecting on it and reasoning about it for oneself, can thus discover something that will bring better understanding or a more personalized concept of the history either through one’s own reasoning or insofar as the understanding is enlightened by God’s grace” [2]. The process of achieving selfrealization by means of introspection and subjectivation is a personal one, and once the director assigns an exercise, he listens more than he talks: “during these Spiritual Exercises when a person is seeking God’s will, it is more appropriate and far better that the Creator and Lord himself should communicate himself to the devout soul . . . accordingly, the one giving the exercises ought not to lean or incline in either direction” [15]. Luís Gonçalves da Câmara (1519–1575), to whom Loyola, between 1553 and 1555, related the story of his life, wrote that Ignatius had told him explicitly that “no greater error was possible in spiritual matters than to seek to direct others according to one’s own way.”36 The Italian Jesuit Achille Gagliardi (1537–1607), in the fi rst printed commentary on the Spiritual Exercises (1590), concurred. Directors commit a major mistake when they try to direct the exercitant toward goals that they (the directors) have set: “It ruins all of this,” because it tries to force God to act within one’s soul in the same manner in which it acted within the director’s soul. 37 The director’s detachment (indiferencia) is especially important at two crucial transitional times, namely the moment of choosing a vocation in life (end of the Second Week) and the last two Weeks of the Exercises. As Gagliardi explained, the more the practitioner’s soul advances toward the Third and Fourth Weeks of the Exercises, the Weeks that lead to abnegation and the creation of space for God to act within the soul, the more the director ought to increase his detachment. He should have only one goal: “to help the soul that has put itself in his hands to enter an interior disposition

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that will prepare it to be illuminated and directed by God according to his own good pleasure.”38 A delicate balance is being sketched here between the religious occurrence itself, experienced sine medio, and its comprehension, which can only be achieved with the help of the director. Thus, multiple tensions are built into Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. The practitioner is to behave both autonomously and obediently, while the director is expected to be both directive and detached. The tensions, then, revolve around the axis of involvement and distancing. The director assigns an exercise, ignites a desire, and leaves the practitioner alone to practice and experience it. The exercitant then chooses what regimen to follow during the exercise and which body comportment best serves his or her spiritual well-being. Collaboration resumes once the exercise is over, when together the practitioner and director analyze its impact. Finally, the practitioner is to follow the instruction of the director concerning when to move on in the exercise sequence. The director, for his part, also follows a set script, namely, the exercise sequence set out by Loyola. We see, then, that in the Exercises Loyola most defi nitely does not advocate a unidirectional subjugation to authority, as some commentators, most famous among them Michel Foucault, have argued.39 It is true that it is only through collaboration with a director that the practitioner discovers his or her vocation (Election) and individuality. Yet the practitioner assumes a highly active role in the process of bringing about his or her divine illumination, while the director does not direct so much as guide the discernment of the spiritual activities within the soul. Both indispensable and detached, the director is, to use Loyola’s own image, like the pointer of a scale in equilibrium [15]. In fact, it is collaboration, not subjugation, that characterizes the director-advisee relationship. This collaboration is what enables the advisee to acquire the ability to discern internal spirits and develop spiritually, all the while safeguarding the orthodoxy of the experience. Most important, the Spiritual Exercises aims to cultivate a mechanism of permanent cognitive scrutiny [333], what Loyola calls the discernment of spirits [313–36].40 This activity of introspection operates during each exercise and entails checking each step and internal movement within the soul, each affect and sense. Only by comprehending these divine activities and movements within our affective consciousness and then analyzing them with the director can the practitioner advance spiritually. Traditionally, the discernment of spirits had been understood as a divine grace. In other words, it was considered a kind of divine infusion. Here, however, the discernment of spirits, while still a divine grace, is also a practice, a

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joint struggle of the director and the exercitant to determine the origins of “motions” and “movements.” The ability to discern spirits is gained following a general confession by the end of the First Week of the Exercises, that is to say, when the exercitant has regained God’s grace. Once the practitioner masters the tools of introspection and becomes aware of the divine presence, and once one’s vocation has been illuminated by grace, the practitioner becomes his or her own seismograph.41 The discernment of spirits interiorized, the technique of introspection now activates itself within the soul independently of the Exercises. Hence, introspection is an interiorization of subjugation to divine authority as mediated through the clergy. Yet it is just as much a mechanism of liberation from subjection to the authority of postlapsarian inclinations and desires. Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises has been unpacked to reveal a paradoxical configuration of relations between freedom and obedience, subjectivation and subjection. It is a brilliant solution to two contradictory concerns of its creator, namely how to preserve and promote lay, interiorized, and individual devotion and at the same time ensure its orthodoxy and church control over the content of these private experiences. In Loyola’s Exercises, freedom is achieved through obedience to a director who assigns a predetermined set of meditations. The divine will that acts within the individual soul manifests itself in signs whose initial decipherment can be achieved only with the help of a director. But this prescribed set of exercises, assigned by a mediator, has the potential to lead to an individualized authentication of the self, to a recognition of “who-am-I-ness.” What starts as obedience to the spiritual director’s assignments and develops into a dialogue between director and practitioner matures into a continuous dialogue of the self with itself. Obedience to the director leads to obedience to the church, which, in turn, leads to obedience to the divine will. But all of these obediences terminate in personal self-control and self-realization, which is maturity. Obedience in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises leads to freedom: subjugation leads to subjecthood.

THE DISSEMINATION OF THE SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES “The Spiritual Exercises should be adapted to the capabilities of the persons who desire to perform them, that is, to their age, education, and intelligence” [18]. They nevertheless follow the precise order set forth by Loyola. The Exercises are divided into four stages, called “Weeks,” and are meant to be practiced during a retreat from the material world and its concerns. Each exercise opens with a narrative assignment by the director

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about what to visualize. Thus, the fi rst exercises of the Second Week [102] invite the retreatant to “survey the history of the matter I am to contemplate. Here it is how the three Divine Persons gazed on the whole surface or circuit of the world, full of people, and how, seeing that they were all going down to hell, they decide in their eternity that the Second Person should become a human being in order to save the human race.” This is followed by “imagining the place” [103] of the event, “to see in particular the house and rooms of Our Lady in the town of Nazareth in the province of Galilee.” Seeing the Virgin in her room and contemplating the mercy that this visual encounter recalls, the exercitant is to activate a desire, “to ask for an interior knowledge of Our Lord, who became human for me, that I may love him more intensely and follow him more closely” [104]. The intense recognition of love leads to further introspection and visualization. The practitioner parcels the exercises into smaller and smaller segments. He or she can concentrate on the Three Persons as they gaze at the world, then follow them in visualizing the diversity of humankind, “some white and others black, some in peace and others at war” [106]. Or the practitioners can see the Virgin encountering the angel Gabriel [106] and listen to their conversation [107]. These intense meditations and visualizations lead to further reflections and to a “profit” [107–8]. The profit, in turn, leads to a colloquy. It is not clear whether this is an internal conversation or a dialogue with the director. What is evident is that the colloquy is an opportunity to further introspect one’s heart “and to beg favors according to what I perceive in my heart, that I may better follow and imitate Our Lord, who in this way has recently become a human being” [109]. The exercises of the First Week enhance the practitioners’ awareness of themselves as sinners and lead toward a general confession and a rebirth (see chapter 4). The following Weeks offer a set of meditations on the life of Christ, from Conception to Resurrection. While for some the goal of the Exercises is discovering their vocation in a religious order, referred to as Election, the Exercises also instruct the practitioner in how to maintain a spiritual life while pursuing his or her life in the world, “in order to reach perfection in whatever state or way of life God our Lord may grant us to elect” [135]. Above all they are meant to teach the practitioner to “note and dwell reflectively on the principle places where he or she has experienced greater interior motions and spiritual relish” [227]. This is Loyola’s third important contribution to the redesign of spiritual exercises and to the dissemination of introspective practices. The Exercises are neither a guide to visions or to a conversion on the way to Damascus, nor a collection of edifying sayings. Rather, they are instructions for a modular and gradual

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process of transforming one’s life. The collection recognizes and legitimizes the unique quality of spiritual growth while affirming that sanctification through divine love and methodical spiritual work is no longer beyond the reach of laypersons, nor is it restricted to mystics. Everyone can learn a few basic practices toward the goal of comprehending desires and directing them toward specific aims; everyone can acquire a technique to control internal spirits and use it to enhance his or her recognition of God’s love, love which is knowledge (“amor ipse notitia est,” in the words of St. Gregory). This new configuration of the meaning of spiritual experiences and of the route to achieving them normalized and significantly expanded people’s access to spiritual experiences. What in the past had been understood to be an extraordinary (in the literal sense) experience is claimed now to be ordinary. As noted, Loyola strongly recommended that the full set of Spiritual Exercises be performed during a retreat that lasts four “Weeks” [20], and the Exercises are designed accordingly. However, Loyola himself promoted a different manner of administering the Exercises. Not all practitioners were capable of taking time off for a retreat, nor did they all possess the mental and affective capacities to grow to full spiritual maturity. For them Loyola suggested, and his followers delivered, just the First Week of the Exercises, leading to a general confession. A concise version of the Exercises could also be given during a set of meetings that lasted only a few hours or even an hour per day: “a person who is involved in public affairs or pressing occupations but [is] educated or intelligent,” for example, “may set aside an hour and a half each day to perform the Exercises” [19]. Paradoxically, even the pseudo-monastic (month- or weeklong) setting sanctifies life in the world, as it indicates that one can live a monastic life for a brief time while remaining of the world the rest of the time. Setting aside specific time to undertake exercises while continuing with one’s mundane activities further blurred the boundaries. Spiritual direction itself moved here from monasteries and self-selected religious communities to the wider population. This, too, had its origins in the Devotio Moderna movement and the English and Italian spirituality of the fi fteenth century,42 with their diffusion of vernacular exercises. But here as well Loyola expanded the potential audience to be much wider than that which his predecessors had envisioned. He himself, while still a layperson, fi rst experienced giving the Exercises to laypersons in Barcelona and Alcalá. And indeed, the Society of Jesus instituted the practice of Spiritual Exercises in the Marian lay congregations it established throughout Europe.43 The Spiritual Exercises was to be given to people of all sorts of what Loyola

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calls “estates” (estados), that is, social positions and degrees of religious vocation and education. The official Constitution of the Society of Jesus (1558) and the Official Directory to the Spiritual Exercises (1599) both specified that the Spiritual Exercises “of the fi rst week can be made available to large numbers; and some examinations of conscience and methods of prayer . . . can also be given far more widely, for anyone who has good will seems to be capable of these exercises.”44 They were following Loyola’s own instruction that “exercises should be given, each one, as much as they are willing to dispose themselves to receive, for the greater help and progress” [18]. In making the Exercises available to those of all estates, Loyola transformed the relationship between literacy and spiritual development. Because the practitioner received the Exercises one at a time from a director, the practitioner no longer had to be literate in order to pursue spiritual growth, introspection, and self-actualization. This wider dissemination is reflected in Loyola’s view of the usefulness of his Exercises for women and for married people. Married property owners, for example, “ought to consider and work out in detail . . . how large a house and how many persons in it one ought to maintain, how one ought to direct and govern its members, and how to teach them by word and example. So too persons such as these should examine their resources, how much they ought to allocate for the house and household” [189].45 In his letters Loyola also elaborated on the benefits married people can gain from experiencing the First Week of the Exercises.46 Figuring out whether women should have access to the Exercises became a major issue for the young Society. During his fi rst spiritual experiences and fi rst experimentation with his Exercises, Ignatius was in Manresa (1522–23), and during this time he encountered only one spiritual person, a woman. I will not go into the complicated history of shifting attitudes of the Society of Jesus toward women. However, Loyola’s early encounter might have led to his acceptance of women’s spiritual capacities. Women, too, he therefore ruled, should be given the Exercises. But Loyola also warned against spiritual intimacy between Jesuits and women, and forbade the foundation of a society of female Jesuits. When he stated that women, too, should benefit from the Spiritual Exercises, he restricted their access according to their estate; here, however, “estate” is determined not only by one’s social status and educational degree, but also by one’s gender.47 Except for a very few women of noble extraction, women are weak in judgment, intelligence, and spiritual potential [325]: “Exercises of the fi rst week can be extended to large numbers of persons, including women and

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married ladies. But once they have made their general confession and have been left a memorandum and instruction on how to pray and examine their conscience, one should proceed no farther.”48 The Official Directory of 1599 agreed. While most women should be given only the earlier Exercises, “there may be the case of women who possess such good judgment and capacity for spiritual things, and sufficient leisure at home, that they can perform all or most of the Exercises in full form. There is nothing to prevent this.”49 This being said, it is important to point out that while the Exercises would ideally be provided in individual meetings with a spiritual guide, if the director is hard-pressed, he could employ a different technique for nuns or children. In such cases, Loyola recommended giving them to a carefully selected nun, who would then give it to others. Alternatively, he offered the possibility of giving the Exercises to groups of women (and, in rare cases, to groups of men), “even if this is not the best manner.”50 Thus, the dissemination of the Exercises, while far-reaching and even unprecedented, did not eliminate traditional gendered norms.

THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES AND THE POST-TRIDENTINE CHURCH In his sanctification of lay life and his instructing laypersons how to pursue spiritual goals while remaining in the world, how to interrogate their interiority, and how to train their souls, Loyola was typical of his century. He was a follower of late medieval Franciscan and Dominican spirituality and of the Devotio Moderna, a contemporary of Erasmus, and a predecessor of François de Sales. Like them, he argued that the divine will acts within each individual, and that each individual has a vocation which he or she ought to discern. But Loyola was also an immediate successor of Savonarola and a contemporary of the Castilian Alumbrados and of the belief in the potential priesthood of all believers, à la Luther and Calvin, as even Karl Rahner recognized. In this sense, then, the Spanish Dominican Melchor Cano (1509–1560), one of the fiercest enemies of the early Jesuits, was not wrong when he objected to the Exercises. They offered “everybody” (todos) spirituality that ought to be restricted to the learned elite. They implied that spiritual exercises and personal experiences assured personal salvation and thus undermined respect for reason, learning, and authority. Such easy access to spiritual exercises endangered clerical supervision, risked heterodoxy, and was more likely than not to lead believers to self- delusion, vainglory, and demonic deceit.51

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Cano, notwithstanding his personal animosity toward the early Jesuits, was right. There was indeed a risk involved in this wider accessibility of spiritual exercises. While the Exercises dictated a method, systematized a practice, and set a general purpose of a spiritualization of daily life, it left it to the practitioner to adjust the Exercises to his or her circumstances and goals. The Exercises also assumed the ability of each person to comprehend his or her own Election. Individuals were now granted the ability to pursue their own subjectivation. Let us recall that the spiritual director is explicitly forbidden to instruct the practitioner in the crucial decisions of the latter’s life, the assumption being that the practitioner will fi nd his or her way. For Loyola, in fact, there was something quasi-mystical in this process of Election, because practitioners are illuminated by God to discern it themselves. Of course, this divine illumination could only be reached by the scrupulous practice of sometimes pedestrian, even banal meditations and contemplations, assigned by an experienced director. Juxtaposed here is a whole range of tensions: divine infusion and illumination on the one hand and penitential hard labor on the other, ordinary means and the attainment of extraordinary goals, subjugation to clerical guidance and subjectivation, and liberating as well as constraining the imagination. These tensions, combined with the wide dissemination of spiritual experiences, led in the second half of the sixteenth century to a series of debates within the Society of Jesus concerning the manner of giving and undertaking the Exercises, the intent of their author, and the degree to which different individuals should be allowed to advance in their training in the Exercises. These debates reflected a wider debate within Catholicism concerning mysticism, mental prayers, and the laity’s access to devotional literature in the vernacular. They also coincided with a systematic post-Tridentine campaign to restrict and prohibit access to major spiritual and devotional late medieval texts.52 Loyola’s laconic comments in the text itself, and the existence of slightly different traditions and interpretations that survived among these followers who received the Exercises directly from him, only added to the confusion. Commentaries on the Spiritual Exercises proliferated, with different people teaching slightly different ways of practicing them. This proliferation of variations, and, more important, growing attacks on the Exercises’ orthodoxy, led to the development of an authorized manner of giving and receiving the Exercises. As mentioned earlier, anxiety regarding spiritual experiences that encourage self-formation through divine infusion had probably shaped Loyola’s own vocation and haunted many religious individuals and reli-

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gious orders in this period of Catholic refashioning. The ferocious attacks on the orthodoxy of the Society of Jesus by the Inquisition and by some Dominican friars, as well as confl icts between different wings of the Jesuit order itself, led to repeated investigations of the Society in the 1560s and ’70s.53 Among other issues, it was precisely the “technical” introspective aspects of the Exercises, addressed above, that were at the center of the fi restorm. How free should the practitioner be to pursue his or her imagination? Should laypersons, especially women, be allowed to experience all four Weeks of the Exercises? Can one enhance the divine infusion within one’s self? And what is the right balance between personal spiritual growth and apostolic ministry? Once he took office, Superior General Francisco Borja (Borgia; 1565–1572), who prior to his appointment had been forced to flee Spain while pursued by the Inquisition and whose works had been placed on the Index, encouraged time for mental prayer and meditations.54 But in 1575 (and in accordance with decisions of the Council of Trent and the Index), his successor, Everard Mercurian (1573– 1580), forbade Jesuits from reading without written prior authorization some of the very same fourteenth- and fi fteenth-century Rheno-Flemish mystics (Tauler, Suso, Ruusbroec, and Henri de Herp) who had indirectly influenced Loyola’s spirituality and Exercises.55 Two leading Jesuits, Mercurian and the then provincial of Toledo, Antonio Cordeses (1518–1601), confronted each other during these years concerning the right balance between mystical and ascetic readings of the Exercises and the degree of freedom that should be granted the exercitant. While serving as rector of the Jesuit College at Coimbra, Cordeses had promoted a more personalized and promystical approach, treating the Exercises as a means to enhance the practitioner’s ability to contemplate God’s love and to attune oneself to his desire. During Mercurian’s generalship and that of Acquaviva, mental prayer, ecstasies, prophesies, and other “excessive” manifestations of mystical experiences were all downplayed, and a daily hour of vocal prayer and teaching was introduced.56 General Mercurian stressed the Society’s apostolic mission over its spiritual one. The cultivation of personal introspection and contemplation rather than social engagement was perceived by him as a deviation from the Jesuits’ vocation and as a danger to the survival of the Society, which he perceived— correctly—to be under attack. Private and mental meditations according to the Exercises, when practiced alone or excessively, Mercurian feared, could discourage people from thinking and acting in accordance with societal needs and the Society’s requirements and as such do not follow Ignatius’s original intentions in the Exercises. The

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discernment of internal movement and the training of the soul to discern the divine presence within itself were understood by him as a mechanism of internalizing obedience and patience.57 In 1599 Acquaviva circulated a letter instructing that private prayers under no circumstances reduce the practitioner’s primary obligation to apostolic work, and his Official Directory of 1599 (parts of it drafted by Mercurian or at his request) institutionalized the correct—but also new—manner in which to give and undertake the Exercises. The letter was intended to resolve the tension between the mystical (and therefore more individualistic) and the apostolic (and therefore societal) wings of the order and did so by recalibrating the balance between the individual liberty of the practitioner to meditate and the need to ensure the conformity of the meditation to doctrine, as well as the balance between prayer and ministry. Acquaviva set a limit on the number of hours the practitioner might devote to prayer and insisted on the crucial importance of moderation in meditation.58 Printed images and emblems, as well as detailed verbal descriptions of recommended visual meditations, circulated in large numbers and editions as prescribed pictorial aids to the imagination. Rather than a method of self-transformation and introspection, Jesuits were encouraged to practice the Exercises as a collection of prayers. This, lest we forget, did not contradict Loyola’s own teaching. He himself recommended that some people take only the First Week of the Exercises and praised the benefits of this shortened undertaking. But this obviously limited the transforming potential of the practice. In addition, Jesuit novices were no longer allowed to own copies of the entire four Weeks of the Exercises, and the circulation of the Exercises in the vernacular was restricted to clerics. Last but not least, the retreat, that monthlong individual and intimate interaction between director and exercitant, became a rarity for non-Jesuits. Group retreats, originally intended for children and women, became the new norm for all laypersons. This reduced significantly the potential of using the retreat to discern the divine plan for the individual retreatant.59 Concomitantly, it decreased the potential of Ignatian Spiritual Exercises to enable individuals to form individual selves. This process paralleled similar developments in other religious orders and conformed to Tridentine decisions restricting the circulation of devotional literature in the vernacular. In accordance with this general Catholic trend, the Exercises’ original mimetic and affective intensities, so typical of late medieval spirituality, were now tempered with a safer, more cautious and cognitive reading of the collection as a compilation of beneficial prayers. The Spiritual Exercises remained a guide for steadfastness

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and resolution to practice virtues and good works in accordance with one’s calling. Its value as a technique for acquiring awareness of the activities of the spirits within the soul and hence a means for self-transformation and self-actualization became secondary. The direct experience of ecstatic spiritual joy (“consolation”) was viewed more often now as an extraordinary grace that one should not expect to experience. This was true even for Jesuit novices and members of religious orders. Mercurian’s instructions and directives, as Philip Endean points out, glossed the Exercises as a means of achieving an ordered life rather than of “exploring inarticulate levels of the self.”60 Self-control and ministry restricted and restrained affective mysticism, and even those practitioners who reached unitive contemplation were to be instructed to return to the earlier ways, meaning moderation and “practices of virtue.” For the laity the change was more dramatic. The complete Exercises should only be given to “a select few,” while others should be given the meditations of the First Week and a few additional exercises “if this seems good.”61 For most laypersons, then, the compilation became a self-help manual, a mere collection of devotional practices for moral training. In the process it lost many of the radical changes that Loyola, shaped by fi fteenth-century spirituality, had fi rst introduced. While the exact nature of the controversy is still debated,62 by the early seventeenth century the Exercises were used fi rst and foremost as a series of edifying exercises, hardly different from similar collections of spiritual exercises that had been in circulation throughout the later Middle Ages or from books of hours. Abbreviations and renditions of the Exercises for both clerics and laypersons of different estates and professions were compiled in the last years of the sixteenth century and during the fi rst half of the seventeenth, to be read alone at home by the practitioner. These were the compilations that Foucault argued had “carpeted and lined” each day, week, month, and year of every early modern Catholic. And although this, as we have seen, was not the case, and although Foucault exaggerates both the diffusion and the autocratic imposition of spiritual practices of belief, these compilations did indeed contribute to reshaping the Jesuit comprehension of Loyola’s original Exercises, turning them into traditional prayers and devotional meditations. In a way, this move was a return to the late medieval Cistercian and Franciscan traditions we encountered at the beginning of this chapter. What had been the fallback for Loyola now became the standard way of giving and taking the Exercises. The best example for this new style of Jesuit exercises was probably Alfonso Rodríguez’s Ejercicio

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de perfección y virtudes Cristianas of 1609— a collection of meditations, prayers, medieval exempla, and very traditional religious reflections. Within twenty years the book had been published in seven Spanish editions and translated into all the major European languages.63 It seems, then, that the Spiritual Exercises’ potential to cultivate new individualist and “modernist” selves had already been curtailed by the last years of the sixteenth century and the fi rst decade of the seventeenth. But with so many other late medieval vernacular spiritual and devotional books being banned and put on the Index, the “safe”—that is to say, moralistic, methodic, and edifying—Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises filled a void. More often than not they were put to a new use quite different from what their author had had in mind when he composed them fi fty years earlier. More important, the “more mystical” and more personalized approach to practicing the Exercises was marginalized. However, it was far from dead. In 1615 Luis de la Puente (1554–1624), a prolific Jesuit author of the period, composed a hagiographic life of his teacher, Balthasar Álvarez (1533–1580), the spiritual director of Teresa of Ávila and one of the more mystical interpreters of the Exercises. Álvarez argued that there was no incompatibility between life devoted to contemplation and apostolic ministry. In fact, he insisted, to interrupt a person who is in a state of grace and in deep “prayer of silence” (later to be called “infused contemplation”) and recall him or her to an active obligation is both dangerous to the practitioner and a violation of the divine will. Álvarez’s method of prayer was deemed “strange” (peregrin manera de oración) and was banned by Mercurian, and Álvarez himself was silenced. Nevertheless, de la Puente’s life of his teacher, which included a detailed explanation of Álvarez’s method of prayer, circulated in many editions, as did De la Puente’s own mystically inclined spiritual guides and compilations.64 Throughout the early modern period, attempts by Jesuits to maintain the more individualistic manner of undertaking the Exercises were met with accusations of “new spirituality” and Alumbradismo. From Balthasar Álvarez and Antonio Cordeses in Spain, through Gagliardi in Italy, to Louis Lallement, Surin, and Jean Labadie (1610–1674) in France, the specter of Alumbradismo continued to haunt the Society of Jesus.65 Jesuits who deviated from the apostolic rendition of the Exercises were accused of practicing “strange devotions,” “peculiar inventions,” and “dangerous” and “contagious” illusions. And in fact, had Loyola not already warned that “those who abandoned themselves with excess to retreats and long contemplations are exposed to demonic illusions”?66 Mapping the precise

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chronologies and internal developments of the conflicts between the two wings of the Society over the issue of spirituality would warrant a book of its own. What can be noted here is the persistence and the longevity of the introspective infusionist interpretation of the Exercises. While the possibility of achieving self-actualization by means of introspection and of cultivating one’s unique spiritual geography was restricted, the struggles within the Society of Jesus itself document that remnants of the more individualistic, dialogic tradition persevered, albeit in a much diluted form.

SPIRITUAL EXERCISES OF SUBJECTIVATION We see that Loyola’s psychagogy in the Spiritual Exercises both reconfigured the traditional practice of spiritual exercises and had a revolutionary potential to diffuse introspective techniques among the wider population. To be sure, an earlier tradition of introspection had already been promoted by the Franciscans, by the followers of Devotio Moderna and of late medieval English spirituality, and even by some Dominicans (such as Savonarola). Loyola’s main contribution was to make available in the vernacular spiritual exercises for the use of people who were not committed to the religious life. They too could now obtain interiorization, absorb and practice it, and enjoy systematic progress toward self-knowledge. They too could set themselves life goals, making themselves into subjects. By following a regulated set of exercises, practitioners were saved from the joint pitfalls of interior desolation and exterior inquisitions. Just like learning how to drive a vehicle (and the comparison is not as far-fetched as it may seem, because in both cases we are talking about a route to be pursued in order to achieve a goal), being guided through the Exercises was an apprenticeship that had the potential to lead the student toward independence. It supplied the practitioner—be it a member of a religious order or a lay individual, male or female, learned or illiterate—with a toolkit for investigating interiority and enhancing self-knowledge by means of introspection and self-formation, instruments that could be used in the future for mastery over the self. Of course, the inner self, for Loyola and his followers, was not uncharted territory: for them, what was to be discovered had in fact already been known in advance, namely divine love. And for them self-fulfi llment meant submission to the divine will rather than the pursuit of independence and individuality, concepts which are often related to modern notions of subjectivity. Arguably, then, there is nothing in the Exercises

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that resembles the modern understanding of the uniqueness of each individual self and the modern notions of self-formation and subjectivation. Undeniably, the cultivation of introspection, self-command of passions and desires, and a submission to a divine plan for the individual all set the Spiritual Exercises within a traditional Christian worldview. It was also not markedly different from numerous other mechanisms of selfcontrol in medieval and early modern Europe, among them the promotion and cultivation of virtues of trustworthiness, maturity, moderation, self-policing, and, above all, obedience. In this respect, Foucault and other critics are right to point out the similarity between the Jesuit method of self-examination and self-formation as a carrier of internal truth and other mechanisms of early modern interiorized self-control. Moreover, there is no denying that the Ignatian self was not only a traditional self; it was also a modern self inasmuch as it internalized its own scrutinizing mechanism, and in subscribing to the notion that there is an inner truth that is the core of the individual’s subjecthood. But the Spiritual Exercises in its more spiritual avatar contributed just as much to the birth of modern individualized and differentiated subjectivities. Even if the ultimate goal of the Exercises was for one to live one’s life in accordance with a preordained plan, the Ignatian route to this goal supplied the practitioner with a set of tools for comprehending his or her own life, for acquiring and cultivating infi nite notions of singularity and subjectivity, and for learning to introspect one’s interiority in order to discover, using an acquired technical know-how, the essence of their existence. The continuing popularity of de la Puenta, Lallement, and Surin demonstrates the desire among Jesuits and their followers to maintain the radical potential of the Spiritual Exercises. Rahner, this contemporary of Foucault who could not have been more different from the French philosopher, put it well when noting that in the Exercises the actual subjectivity of the subject becomes the theme of the subject’s focus, instead of being merely the mode through which the subject realizes itself. This is something typical of the [early modern period]. The Christian recognizes that what he is actually doing . . . falls essentially short of what he is actually capable of in terms of the fullness of Christian existence. Thus, he always orients his individual decision toward the boundless range of other Christian possibilities, and so learns to regard himself as the subject, not only of what actually is, but also of what might still be possible beyond that.67

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In fact, we have seen that the Spiritual Exercises was considered dangerous enough that it warranted censorship, modification, or both. The wide diffusion of a vernacular guide to the spiritual life (even when mediated through a spiritual director) was not viewed positively by some early modern readers. Unmediated access to the Exercises, it was feared, might lead some individuals to escape clerical control; to gain too much selfconfidence in their own spiritual capabilities and in their mastery over their interior movements. This led to repeated attempts to restrict access to the Exercises and to moderate the text’s individualistic (“mystical”) potential. Foucault, then, was right when he argued that Loyola’s Exercises are typical of modern internalized mechanisms of self-control and self-censorship, and that they merged subjugation and subjectivation in a new way. Yet the struggle against these “strange manners of prayer” lasted throughout the seventeenth century, erupting at different places at different times and demonstrating that the radical potential of the Exercises to enhance individual self-cultivation and liberty through introspection survived more conservative interpretations of Ignatian spirituality.

Ch a pter Four

General Confession

I

n the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, the set of statutes and regulations detailing the rules of the new Society, Ignatius of Loyola specified that a candidate for the Society should “do spiritual exercises for one month or a little more or less; that is to say, examine his conscience, turn over his whole past life and make a general confession, meditating upon his sins, and contemplating the steps and mysteries of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ our Lord.”1 For Loyola, then, the examination of conscience, the practice known as general confession, and the performance of the spiritual exercises were of a piece. In fact, the First Week of the Exercises terminates with a general confession, and both general confession and the entire set of spiritual exercises lead, as we shall see in the next chapter, to the implementation of an internalized mechanism of permanent and incessant self-examination. Thus Loyola fused these three distinct techniques of self-formation— examination of conscience, confession, and spiritual exercises—into a single three-step process. In doing so, he both foregrounded their commonality and clarified the degree to which medieval Christianity treated them as three distinct practices. In fact, there was nothing inevitable about Loyola’s integration of the three practices into one coherent method of self-formation and introspection. Both before and after the Ignatian amalgamation, minor yet significant tensions among these three practices of subjectivation intrigued theologians and spiritual directors. We have already seen (and will return to) the confusion concerning whether or not the same person ought to serve as both spiritual director and confessor to a practitioner. The practice of general confession itself raised theological concerns, fi rst and foremost among them the sacramental nature of the activity. In the same vein, the precise nature of the relations between 96

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spiritual exercises, whose goal, as we have seen, was recognition of God’s actions within the self, and general confession, which aimed at the recognition of agentive sinfulness, was far from clear. As mnemonic and discursive practices, confession and general confession were characterized by verbalization and truth-telling. Confession was done verbally, while general confession usually involved writing. Although spiritual exercises and the examination of conscience could take place entirely within the soul, confession and general confession were always embodied practices. Or were they? General confession, in fact, challenged even this self-evident assumption. In fact, it was never clear precisely how the examination of conscience figures within the setting of the sacrament of penance and whether general confession requires a confessor. Certainly some relation among these spiritual practices is intuitively obvious. Yet treating them singly enables us not only to reconstruct their particular histories but also to historicize their integration into a unified mechanism of subjectivation within the setting of the Franciscan and Jesuit pastoral and missionary enterprise of saving souls and making Christian selves. In this chapter and the next, then, I shall look at the ways in which general confession and the examination of conscience were transformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These changes, I argue, created a nexus and a trajectory that combined preexisting devotional practices into a new and coherent system of psychagogy, of training souls to introspect and re-form themselves, thus making themselves into subjects. The term “general confession” pre-dated the early modern period, and when Loyola used it he clearly had in mind a specific practice of enhancing belief. Unlike spiritual direction and spiritual exercises, however, general confession was a Christian invention that had no pre- Christian origins. It was directly related to medieval Christian notions of sin and penance and (in ways that will be explored below) to auricular confession, and was a fundamental element in a new configuration of truth as the core of one’s personhood, a topic to which I shall return shortly. And just as it is useful to disentangle the history of general confession from the histories of spiritual exercises and the examination of conscience, it is helpful to trace its history independent of the history of sacramental confession. It is certainly true that in practice these two spiritual techniques often overlapped, and general confession often (but not always) preceded sacramental confession. Yet theologically and morphologically these two forms of confession strove toward different goals, and they employed different psychological and psychagogical mechanisms to realize them. The practice of general confession, as we shall see, was especially

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popular in late medieval and early modern Europe. Probably developed by the Franciscans, it was adopted, adapted, and popularized by the Jesuits. General confession (in the specific form that concerns me in this book, namely a constructed written narrative of the confessant’s entire life) fell out of favor by the second half of the seventeenth century, when it was overshadowed by the practice of the general examination of conscience; in fact, the former was collapsed into the latter. In what follows, I fi rst defi ne general confession, discussing how it differed from penitential traditions and from sacramental confession and why it has been difficult to trace its history. Next I document the diffusion and decline of general confession. In the fi nal section of the chapter I show how a consideration of general confession alters our current narrative of the concept of sin and the practice of confession, as well as the complex ways the two contributed to new notions of interiority, guilt, truth, and power in the modern age. Jean Delumeau and Michel Foucault take pride of place among scholars who have mined the history of confession to articulate theories of the transition to modernity and to modern subjecthoods, subjections, and subjectivations. The body of Delumeau’s work offers a detailed history of confession and the sense of sin from the early Middle Ages until the modern age. For Foucault, as has been noted, confession is an exceptionally dramatic example of the nexus of power and knowledge:2 “everyone in Christianity had to explore who he is, what is happening within himself, the faults he might have committed or may commit, the temptations to which he is exposed. Moreover, everyone is obliged to tell these things to other people, and hence bear witness against himself.”3 Foucault’s sophisticated genealogies of the power of confession to elicit new notions of knowledge and thence new forms of discipline and self-discipline, as well as the relations of power to subject formation, truth-telling, and historical change, mutated and developed over the course of his career. His construal of these relationships will be addressed in due course. Foucault’s shifting theories notwithstanding, by placing confession at the center of a discussion of modern forms of internalized subjugation (what later in his career he called “governmentality”), the French philosopher created a new paradigm that found its echoes in more detailed historical analyses by prominent historians, among them Thomas Tentler, John Bossy, Adriano Prosperi, and their many disciples.4 A different school of historians investigated not the practice of confession itself but what they called “confessionalization,” a process that was a main characteristic of the transition to modernity in early modern Europe. What scholars of this school mean by “confessionalization” is the collab-

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orative endeavor of state and church in both Catholic and Protestant countries to create new submissive subjects. In the process, religious changes, moral reforms, state formation, and various civilizing processes coalesced and together participated in a wide-ranging and all-encompassing enterprise of social control and in a major re-formation and manufacturing of modern obedient selves.5 While for these scholars the process was mostly political, judicial, and sociological, it is important to remember that for Foucault confession was much more than merely the production of apparati of information gathering and a means for examining, analyzing, and controlling subjects by the imposition of these external bodies of control. Instead, the French philosopher zeroes in on the implementation of these control mechanisms within the self, the process by which the self comes to recognize himself or herself as the holder of a self-incriminating and self-shaming truth. Foucault (in his later writings from the late 1970s on), just like the sociologist Norbert Elias fi fty years before him, was more interested in how selves shape themselves by absorbing new concepts than in how external mechanisms of brute force enforce new configurations of selves.6 Of course, similarities abound between exterior and interior mechanisms of control on the one hand and discipline and self-discipline on the other. Some of these were explicit, such as, for example, the collaboration of church and state in the prosecution of heretics or in the institutionalization of schools, where obedience to God and king was promoted and inculcated. Others were morphological or structural, such as, for example, the redesign of traditional church mechanisms of coercion and punishment by new state authorities, a move that turned docile believers into obedient subjects.7 We will return to Foucault’s shifting articulations of the relations among truth-telling, self-formation, and subjection in the closing section of this chapter. Suffice it to say at this point that his works, as well as those of the confessionalization school, led Tentler, Delumeau, and the Italian historians of confession to a new understanding of confession in late medieval and early modern Catholicism. However, this chapter, by way of contrast, sets itself a much more focused goal. I aim not to discuss the practices of penance and confession in general, but the little-known minor practice of general confession, a late medieval and early modern tradition about which none of the scholars mentioned above had much to say. General confession, I will argue, both supports and challenges the disciplinary paradigm and its connections to modernity and to modern subjecthoods and subjugation. As this chapter will show, it was indeed a form of self-formation and subjectivation, and for many people general con-

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fession was also a mechanism for a systematic interiorization of a sense of wrongdoing, accompanied by guilt and, no less important, recognition of an inner truth that constitutes the self. As such, general confession may exemplify, perhaps even better than the more widely known practice of sacramental confession, the disciplinary and governmental processes that lie at the heart of Foucault’s inquiry. At the same time, and equally important, general confession was a practice that helped its practitioner to acquire the realization of his or her self as a unified self, a self that enjoys both spatial and chronological continuity, as well as a life trajectory. It supplied its practitioners with the techniques to cultivate and realize themselves as subjects who own agency, who could gain control over their lives, shape and reshape them, and, above all else, recognize the divine love toward them and found within them. Moreover, just as general confession submitted practitioners to a self-imposed regime of guilt, shame, and fear, it also liberated them from illusions, temptations, and seductions, not to mention the scrupulous thoughts and anxieties they produced.

MANY GENERAL CONFESSIONS Before addressing the practice of general confession that was promoted by Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and that was, I believe, constitutive of a new subjectivity, several linguistic clarifications are in order. In 1554 the Fourteenth Session of the Council of Trent ruled that absolution would be provided to sinners only upon their offering an itemized list of their sins. General confession was considered to undermine the very purpose of the sacrament of penance, “for it is evident that priests could not have exercised this judgment . . . had the faithful declared their sins in general only and not specifically and one by one.”8 In the very same year, a method of prayer Teresa of Ávila had developed on the basis of her own spiritual experiences fell under suspicion. A Dominican confessor advised Teresa to consult a Jesuit father. To this father the founder of the Discalced Carmelites “gave a perfectly clear description of [her] whole life and spiritual state in the form of a general confession.” Teresa wrote down “all my good and bad points and prepare[d] the clearest account of my life that I possibly could, leaving nothing unsaid.” This was a transformative experience for her, one that “seemed to make [her] quite a different person.”9 The priest who heard Teresa’s general confession approved the divine source of her experiences and her method of prayer. The Avilan founder herself, as is well-known, was canonized in 1622, shortly after her death, and in 1970 was made a doctor of the church. Recalling the decree of the Council

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and the testimony of Teresa of Ávila, then, we see that general confession must have meant different things to different people. While the Council insisted on a verbal itemization of disconnected sinful acts, Teresa described an autobiographically oriented written account of her life and spiritual states of being. These two conceptualizations differed temporally as well: for the fathers in Trent confession was a brief activity, whereas Teresa experienced a longer process of composing her life as a work in progress. The former form of general confession was distinctly fragmented, even piecemeal in tone, while in the latter a new self was birthed through a process of recollection, giving account, and describing. It is very likely that in denouncing the confession of “sins in general,” the bishops and theologians of the Council of Trent had in mind the Protestant practice of making, at the beginning of Mass, a general declaration of confession of being a sinner in an ontological sense. But even within early modern Catholicism itself, as both John O’Malley and Adriano Prosperi have already observed, the term “general confession” was both confused and confusing.10 Therefore, before explicating the different meanings of the term, I shall offer several examples of the precise practice of general confession that interests me here. Following Teresa, Carmelites made general confession part and parcel of their spiritual regimen. Teresa’s Autobiography and Way of Perfection appeared in French translations in 1601, and shortly afterward the Spanish reformer herself appeared in a series of apparitions to Madame Barbe Acarie (1566–1618). Since the late 1590s Acarie, a pious Parisian laywoman, had turned her house into a gathering place for a group of devout laypersons and clerics. Following her visionary encounters with the Spanish holy woman, Acarie initiated the invitation of the Discalced Carmelites to France. And like her spiritual guide, she adopted the practice of general confession. After undertaking a general confession, she recommended the practice to her own spiritual sons and daughters.11 General confession, she explained, serves to validate incomplete previous confessions. More important, she went on to explain, only general confession leads to and fortifies a genuine conversion.12 Indeed, upon making a general confession, the seventeenth-century Provençal mystic Jeanne Perraud (1631–1676) “felt as if she had peeled off the old skin that had covered her until then.” Similarly, the demoniac-turned-mystic Jeanne des Anges (1602–1665) underwent a general confession that ignited in her what she later described as a “desire to conduct myself from now on in a different manner, and step by step I started to acquire such an inclination for prayer that I no longer lost any time avoiding it.”13 Vincent de Paul, the seventeenth-century French

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missionary (1581–1660), drew attention to another benefit of general confession: it “puts people in such good state that demons cannot abuse them.”14 Recommended by leading authorities of the Catholic Church, the practice was thus a means of attaining a whole set of spiritual goals from confession of sins and prayer to conversion and protection against demons. Confusingly, however, general confession was the homonymous term used for a number of penitential practices. First and foremost among these was the common practice of listing all possible sins during “generic” (“complete”) auricular sacramental confession, an act meant to stimulate awareness of sins and help the penitent recall as many sins as possible.15 As José Calveras has shown for Spain, Roberto Rusconi and Miriam Turrini for Italy, and Pierre Michaud-Quantin, Peter Biller, and Bert Roest for other parts of Catholic Europe, this form of general confession gained popularity from the second half of the fi fteenth century on. It follows the medieval scholastic tradition of focusing on “who, what, where, by whom, how often, why, in what manner, when” (quis, quid, ubi, per quos, quotiens, cur, quomodo, quando) a person committed a sin. Guides for confessors and/or for penitents, many of them with the term “general confession” in the title, enumerated different sins classified according to different taxonomies: the seven deadly sins; sins that violate the Ten Commandments; sins against the seven senses of the body; the twelve articles of faith; the seven virtues; and so on. During the late Middle Ages, the practice of general confession by means of enumerating and indexing sins was recommended repeatedly by authors of catechisms and confessionals. Four-to-sixteen-page booklets, many of them compiled by Franciscans and most of them in the vernacular, were published, especially during Lent, to prepare the laity for the annual auricular confession. Olivier Maillard’s La confession generale is a good example of this tradition. Maillard (ca. 1430–1502) was an Observant Franciscan preacher who wrote two manuals for confessors and devout lay penitents: La confession generale (n.p., n.d.; eight editions were published before 1527); and La confession de Frère Oliuier Maillard (Paris, 1481; with seven additional editions before 1529). Maillard’s Confession generale itemized in succession the sins against the five senses, the seven deadly sins, the works of mercy, the sacraments, the Ten Commandments, the twelve articles of faith, the seven virtues, and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. General confession in this case seems to imply a confession that is both generic and as complete as possible.16 Another practice that went by the name “general confession” was the nonsacramental, liturgical-communal public confession (Confiteor), re-

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cited in the vernacular at the beginning of the Mass for collective absolution (and which absolves minor sins only).17 A third practice known by the same name was a concise deathbed confession. One “should review his life as a whole in order to make a general confession—this is something that any man of honor should do before he dies,” wrote François de Sales in a letter to Jeanne de Chantal on October 14, 1604. General confession in articulo mortis is associated fi rst and foremost with the name of the French saint Vincent de Paul. There are three crucial theological concerns during penance, he explained: the competence of the confessor, the completeness of previous confessions, and the degree of sincerity and contrition that accompanied them. And since no one can ever be sure of all three, general confession, “in which one confesses all their previous sins, whether they had already been confessed or not,” is strongly recommended for all Christians approaching death.18 In southern France, the Low Countries, and Germany the term “general confession” was also used to denote an annual public confession of the entire community during Lent, on either Holy Thursday or Good Friday.19 This form of general confession was thought to effectively induce sorrow and repentance but was not considered a substitute for a complete auricular private confession and therefore could not lead to priestly absolution. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the use of the term “general confession” widened further to include the generic or concise confessions that missionaries conducted in the European countryside. Missionary orders— Jesuits, Lazarists, and Capuchins—made general confessions of this type the dramatic climax of their preaching expeditions. By the 1540s the Jesuit Silvestro Landini, a missionary to northern Tuscany and Corsica, had adapted Ignatius of Loyola’s meditations for the First and Second Weeks of the Spiritual Exercises into a series of sermons that instructed his listeners in how to examine their conscience by meditating on sin, punishment, the Last Judgment, and paradise. The communal examination of conscience then led listeners to penance and “interior conversion,” which terminated in a series of public mass general confessions.20 In 1616–17 Vincent de Paul and Jesuits from Amiens conducted a similar mission among the peasants of the parishes of Folleville in Picardy, leading people to penance. They then devoted two entire months to hearing thousands of individual general confessions.21 In 1632 the Jesuit Jean-François Régis (1597– 1640), a missionary to Calvinist-infested Vivarais (Ardèche, Rhône), south of Lyon, conducted thousands of general confessions in three days, following three days of preaching penance around the clock. These confessions, while individual, could not but be perfunctory.22 They were adaptations to

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new circumstances of the late medieval general confession during Mass, Lent, and Holy Week and a practical solution, as David Myers points out, to a pressing need to confess and absolve hundreds or thousands of people at once.23 Last but not least, general confession referred to the recounting of one’s entire life to a priest in a setting of private examination of conscience with the aim of spiritual peace. And it is to the history and significance of this form of general confession that I shall now turn.

GENERAL CONFESSION TRANSFORMED At issue is nothing less than “a reform of the interior man.” As Jeanne des Anges informs us, general confession is a transformative event that takes place in the present and reshapes both the past and the future. Confession is often considered a practice that absolves the penitent of sinful acts in the past. Human nature after the Fall being what it is, however, the cleansed self is likely to become resoiled. Hence the requirement of the Fourth Lateran Church Council of 1215 that all Christians attend confession on a yearly basis and confess the new sins they committed since their last confession.24 General confession in the sense that interests me here, however, not only absolves previous sins but also puts into action a mechanism that enables both a spiritual awakening in the present and the potential for continuous self-improvement in the future. This aspect of general confession was promoted especially by the Jesuits, who made conversion and re-formation of the self a pillar of their order. Thus, for example, for Ignatius of Loyola’s disciple Pierre Favre (1506–1546), the greatest benefit of general confession lies in the future: general confession, “more than anything else” (!), is a foundation for a new life.25 For Jérôme Nadal (1507–1580), who entered the Society of Jesus in 1545, general confession “puts in a new soul,” while for the prolific Jesuit author Gaspar de Loarte (1498–1578), who joined the Jesuits in 1552, general confession is a way “to beginne a new booke” of one’s life.26 The Directory to the Spiritual Exercises of the Society of Jesus of 1599, clarifying the official Jesuit position, explains that general confession is “a considerable help for [the] reformation [of the soul]. . . . Experience shows that this has been very profitable for many men and has aided them toward self-knowledge and amendment.” While amendment points backward, the benefits of self-knowledge and what the Directory calls the “inauguration of a new life” lie in the future.27 The Jesuit Constitution agrees. General confession, it advises, should be prescribed for Jesuit students every six months “because of its many benefits.”28

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As with all the spiritual practices and beliefs discussed in this book, the benefits of general confession became clear only through experience. When directed by an experienced confessor or a competent spiritual director, it led the confessant/penitent/advisee to acquire a deeper awareness of the sense of sin in general and of his or her own sinfulness and corrupt nature in particular. Looking into the abyss, acquiring the knowledge of oneself as a sinner, and consequently gaining a new and stronger awareness of God’s mercy, general confession was a transformative experience that generated a new and reformed self. It opened the gates to a new life, and it was in this sense that general confession was understood by its practitioners and promoters as a conversion. Importantly, general confession was equally a reshaping of one’s past: recollecting sinful acts was never merely a passive process and always involved inventing, forgetting, and cohering experiences into stories. This was true, of course, even for the traditional processes of listing and indexing distinct sins in auricular confession. Yet it was true to a much greater extent in the type of general confession I discuss here, where it was an ex post facto creation of both a memory and a narrative of a life as a coherent continuity. Despite the fact that such confession was ideologically theorized as a process of discovering a preexisting coherent interior subjectivity, in reality it was an invention of this very subjectivity. General confession was the joint effort of penitent and confessor to recognize (actually, to invent) patterns of sinful behavior and to contextualize sins not only within the concrete physical and chronological settings in which they had taken place, but also— and, I would argue, fi rst and foremost—within the cognitive, moral, and psychological present. At the same time, it offered the penitent a trajectory for the future, a future that he or she could shape. General confession was the process of making sense of one’s entire life—past, present, and future. This, I presume, was what Michel Foucault had in mind when around 1981 he coined the term “subjectivation.” Precisely how the practice of general confession came to be configured as a mechanism of conversion and subject formation is far from clear. As the recent history of sacramental confession has documented convincingly, a slow but steady process of interiorization of penance had been taking place from the thirteenth century on. In scholastic pastoral theology, the role of the penitential obligation (satisfactio) decreased, while contrition (contritio in corde) and repentance became the more significant aspects of the sacrament. Interestingly, this interiorization of the sense of sin went hand in hand with an exteriorization of guilt: the confessant was to repent internally, to confess verbally to a confessor, and to manifest

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sincere contrition, but then also to perform visual acts of satisfaction.29 We have already seen the growing importance of the spiritual director in monastic communities and even some lay circles, and the process by which the responsibilities of the confessor and the director gradually overlapped. Thus, for example, Jean Gerson (1363–1429), a theologian and the rector of the University of Paris, who never set out spiritual direction as an independent type of spiritual guidance, said (echoing the fourth-century Gregory of Nyssa) that “the art of arts is the direction of souls.” For him, it was obvious that direction occurred during hearing confessions. Gerson went on to discuss the enumeration of sins, especially of the sexual kind, and when he did mention “general confession,” he referred to the late medieval practice of listing separate sins. Nevertheless, Gerson’s consideration of confession makes clear that sacrament confession included not only listening and questioning, but also advising and correcting. I have little doubt that these activities included the cultivation of the penitent’s awareness of his or her identity as a sinner. 30 For Gerson, confession both transforms the past and shapes the future. Contrition called for a personal admission of guilt. The Dominican philosopher Cardinal Thomas Cajetan (1469–1534) referred to this stage as the actus veritatis, the avowal or prerequisite that makes penance possible. Cajetan here captures well the new emphasis on recognition of oneself as a sinner, regardless of one’s actions in the world. 31 However, while by the late fi fteenth century the internalization of sin and the sense of guilt were encouraged by confessors and promoted among penitents, printed late medieval guides for general confession still demanded the enumeration and indexing of sins, and they still made use of a typology that classed sin by severity. Sins, then, were still treated as distinct events rather than as manifestations of a core identity. This dissuaded the penitent from experiencing, uniting, and verbalizing his or her past as a life in sin and his or her future as a permanent effort to overcome sin. In other words, whereas the general confession that interests us involved coming into being as a (sinful) subject, and while the pastoral theology of confession in the late Middle Ages had already introduced overcoming sinful inclinations as a condition for conversion and for becoming a new person, traditional auricular confession as it was actually practiced encouraged the fragmentation of one’s life into disparate (sinful) acts. Metaphorically, the relation of confession to general confession might be likened to that between a curriculum vitae and a psychodynamically oriented autobiography. In 1522 Loyola penned a general confession in the Catalan Benedictine monastery of Montserrat. The confession, which covered his entire life,

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took three days to write down. Unfortunately, the details of this text have not come down to us, but it is probable that in it Loyola did not make a simple list of specific sins.32 Rather, those three days were likely to have involved meditating on sins, comprehending them, and experiencing contrition. A short, anonymous manual of spiritual exercises from early sixteenth-century Montserrat discusses purging the heart by means of a general confession as a fi rst step toward conversion but does not specify what this general confession entails. 33 Be that as it may, Ignatius’s personal experience laid the foundation for the prominent place of general confession in his Spiritual Exercises, and for the history of the practice in the Society of Jesus. Loyola recommended a general confession at the end of the First Week of the Exercises, a Week dedicated to penitential meditations whose goal was the purging of sin from the exercitant’s soul. The Exercises of this First Week instruct the confessant to recall the earliest sins in history, namely the sins of the fallen angels and of Adam and Eve [50–51]. By so doing the penitent becomes aware of the inherent connection between his or her personal sins and sinfulness as a concept that has characterized fallen humanity and is incarnated in the penitent. This meditation, then, locates the sin within the cosmic drama of the Fall, penance, and redemption. The confessant then moves from the general to the concrete as he or she recalls his or her own sins in the context of the time, place, and circumstances in which they were committed [25]. This, remember, had been the late medieval tradition across types of confession. However, here the process of recollection is concurrently a process of acquiring a growing sense of humility; the point is to look upon oneself “as a sore and abscess from which have issued such great sins and evils and great infection” [58]. Conducting a general confession at this time, Loyola went on to explain, is beneficial for three reasons. First, it follows “the greater sorrow experienced at present for all the sins and evil deeds of one’s entire life” that the confessant has just recalled; secondly, during this Week “one reaches a deeper interior understanding of the reality and malice of one’s sins than when one is not so concentrated on matter of the interior life. In this way, by coming to know and grieve for the sins more deeply during this time, one will profit and merit more than was the case on earlier occasions.” And fi nally, the deeper apprehensions of one’s past leads to a better disposition to receive the Holy Sacrament, as well as to “preserve the increase of grace” [44].34 There is nothing new in either the mnemonic devices themselves or in their alleged direct influence on awareness of selfdebasement and contrition. The novelty here lies in Loyola’s methodical

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exposition of the stages of the recognition of personal sinfulness. This includes thinking about and visualizing the entire cosmic history of sin, starting with the sins of the fallen angels, moving to the sins of Adam and Eve, and then to those of “anyone who had gone to hell” before the penitent even starts to recall his or her own sins [50–57]. Pondering each sin, the confessant is also to reflect how he or she offended God [60] and use each of the senses to experience the torments of hell [65–70]. The confessant was also expected to recognize and repent of the soul’s consent to the sin. But the First Week of Loyola’s Excercises did more than that. Gil Gonzáles Dávila (1532–1596), the Jesuit provincial of Castile in the second half of the sixteenth century, explained that general confession is an itemizing as well as a remembering of “the crimes and evil deeds of [one’s] previous life.” This benefit of the practice was already clear to the late medieval Franciscans. But, Dávila added, it also leads to a deep comprehension of one’s entire life as a work in progress. 35 By the time the general confession takes place, namely the end of the First Week of the Exercises, as we have seen (in chapter 3), the practitioner has already acquired recognition of his or her life as a life of sin and has also already made up his or her mind to convert and begin life anew. The confessant has already visited hell and invoked the Virgin and Christ, and his or her contrition has led to acquiring “an interior knowledge” of the self [63]. While neither preparation for confession nor the recollection of the Fall was an Ignatian innovation, the First Week of the Exercises that preceded the general confession transformed the tone of penance. It no longer involved an annual appearance for a short auricular confession on the eve of Easter or during Lent, nor was it centered on the enumeration of sinful acts or thoughts. Instead, an entire Week was dedicated to calling to mind and perceiving patterns for an entire life’s worth of sin. The First Week of the Spiritual Exercises retained the traditional mnemonic techniques of recalling the capital sins, the Ten Commandments, and sins of the senses. It shared the presumption that these enumerating mechanisms of itemizing all possible sins and interrogating the confessant as to whether he or she had committed them arouse the penitent to an awareness of sin. In Loyola’s hands, however, these traditional techniques were put to new use. The penitent was expected to participate in a collaborative project with the spiritual director in which not only specific sins but also the psychological, emotive, and cognitive contexts in which they had occurred were summoned to memory. 36 Moreover, the confessant was to internalize the immediate connection between his or her sins and the worst punishments that had befallen both humans and angels.

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In the Jesuit general confession, sin was not an act or an event of wrongdoing or experiencing evil thoughts, but a recognition of one’s essential lack of control over one’s desires and acts, of one’s evil inclinations (malicias).37 Although it was private (in the sense of making the confessant come to terms with his or her uniqueness as a sinner and penitent), it was also a visualization of the commonality of all humanity, of the human condition after the Fall. The Jesuit general confession was a process of creating a coherent narrative of individual subjectivation and of theological and anthropological universal truths. Sin, to invoke Søren Kierkegaard, was understood no longer as merely an act but as the very essence of our shared humanness; sin is what we are. 38 As such, general confession ideally succeeded where regular Easter sacramental confession had failed, namely, in overcoming the all-too-human inclination toward recidivism. Last but not least, as the Italian Jesuit theologian Paolo Segneri put it in returning to the overworked image of the confessor as a physician and confession as healing, general confession not only heals the past but helps the penitent to persevere in the future. 39 Its impact was nothing less than conversion, a total severing of the penitent from his or her previous life.

THE SACRAMENTALITY OF GENERAL CONFESSION I have established that general confession was transformational. But was this type of general confession sacramental in nature? Much evidence points to the idea that it was. Sacramental confession was clearly the goal of the First Week of the Exercises, and the Second Directory of the Society even advised that the confessor ought to be someone other than the spiritual director.40 Often, of course, it wound up being one and the same person. Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647–1690), the seventeenth-century Visitandine nun and a leading promoter of the cult of the Sacred Heart, described thus her own general confession: “My Divine Master permitted that a Franciscan Father should come to our house, and remain for the night that we might have an opportunity of making our general confessions. I had written mine about a fortnight before, for although I was in the habit of making a general confession whenever I had an opportunity, it seems to me that I could never do so often enough on account of my great sins.”41 Her general confession was undoubtedly a sacramental confession that entailed a two-week hiatus between recalling sins and sinfulness and experiencing contrition and the absolution, and the same Franciscan father conducted both the preparations and the confession. General confession could therefore be conceived as a sacramental confession that

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featured a temporal gap between the different parts of the sacrament. In the fi rst, preparatory part, the penitent-confessant absorbed and comprehended the meaning of his or her sins within a context or a life trajectory. This process was then followed by a sacramental absolution by the same spiritual healer who prepared the confessant for the general confession or by another priest. In other words, general confession might be described as an extreme version of sacramental confession, one in which telling the truth of the self to oneself is distinct from, and to some extent outweighs, speaking this truth to a confessor. Unlike sacramental auricular confession, however, general confession was never a mandatory practice, and “a person who confesses annually is not obliged to make a general confession” [44]. It did not even need a cleric. The Devotio Moderna had already introduced a parallel tradition of “nonsacramental confession” that remitted sins, enriched a person’s spirituality, and enhanced contrition. Such confession did not even require the presence of a priest; one could confess to a fellow layperson, even to a woman (!), who, in turn, helped the confessant to discern virtues and vices.42 Furthermore, the practice of confession to a peer was not condemned during the period (and, in fact, not even by the Council of Trent).43 Loyola himself, as we remember, guided people in his own compilation of spiritual exercises prior to becoming a priest, and this guidance, we may presume, included hearing a general confession. To some degree, then, the practice of general confession offered a recognition of sinfulness that could be operated by the self on itself. Thus, by incorporating this tradition into the Spiritual Exercises, Loyola actually clericalized a lay practice. The general confession was to be articulated now verbally to a priest (or to the spiritual director). From being a freestanding practice of penance it was integrated into a new mode of self-formation. Perhaps this was another instance of Ignatius’s preserving suspected spiritual practices of belief through their clericalization. The official Jesuit Directory of 1599 further distinguished between auricular confession and general confession. Only after a practitionerpenitent fi nished a set of exercises and meditations, conducted under the supervision of a spiritual director, and gained “deep interior knowledge of his sins and genuine contrition  .  .  . should [he] be advised to prepare himself for a general confession.” General confession demanded special preparations because experience has “shown that persons often approach confession without sufficient examination, or without due sorrow, and with little or no purpose of amendment.”44 The seeds of an amended future, then, were as crucial to general introspective confession as was the

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admission of sins past. Once again, we are witnessing not an early modern departure from but a reframing of the traditional auricular confession. Here again we encounter the ambiguity concerning the sacramentality of general confession. This ambiguity was of immense importance, because it could circumvent accusations of heterodoxy. If general confession were a sacrament, its practice, which included confessing all sins committed in the confessant’s life, perforce would have included sins that had already been confessed to another confessor. This was an “erroneous and bad doctrine,” which put in doubt the validity of all confessions. If, on the other hand, general confession as not a sacrament but a voluntary devotional practice, it did not call into question the validity of previous sacramental confessions and absolutions, nor did it challenge the authority of parish priests or their monopoly over the transfer of grace from God to humankind.45 Interestingly, general confession in this context and in its Jesuit avatar was “Jansenistic.” I use the term to connote a sense of informed contrition, of a deep recognition of one’s sinfulness as the only appropriate form of confession. As is well-known, Trent accepted attrition, a weaker form of sorrow for sin, as sufficient for absolution. General confession demanded intense preparation of the heart and the soul and created a delay between contrition and sacramental absolution. This Jansenistic facet of the Jesuit practice of general confession should not, in fact, come as a surprise. Carlo Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan (1564–84), who, as we remember, encouraged and enforced new, rigorous forms of penitential practices in his huge archbishopric and revolutionized the practice of confession, was very close to the Jesuits and incorporated general confession into his rules for penance. He in turn shaped the theology and practice of penance in Italy and France in the seventeenth century, and both Jesuits and Jansenists relied on Borromeo’s Avvertenze . . . ai confessori (Instructions for Confessors) of 1574 to substantiate their claims.46 Prior to the bitter fights of the later years of the seventeenth century, no one doubted the rigorous nature of Jesuit penitent practices. Sacramental confession and general confession diverged as well with regard to the matter of writing. Loyola and Margaret Mary Alacoque, as we have already seen, wrote down their general confession, and many spiritual directors counseled their advisees to prepare for general confession by committing to paper one’s entire life story. In her “Advice to Sisters Who Serve as Spiritual Directors,” Madame de Chantal elaborated on the matter. It is always better for confessants to say whatever comes to their mind, but this is not the case with preparations for general confession. In this case, literate novices should be encouraged to write down their

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confession. Interestingly, however, the director should be prevented from reading it: “one should make a distinction between confession, in which the young women should be left in complete liberty, and the compilation of a report of conscience.”47 Chantal’s advice showcases the self-formative aspect of general confession. She is proposing a singular ego document, a confession of the self to itself. There is no sacramental confession without verbalization, without telling the truth about the self to an Other. But the most fundamental feature of general confession here is truth-telling to oneself. To be valid, sacramental confession had to be articulated vocally.48 As such, one could argue that general confession in its early modern sense was an aide-mémoire more than a confession. “Introspective” individualized general confession had the unique quality of enabling practitioners to overcome scrupulous thoughts.49 Ignatius suffered from them and devoted a special section of the Spiritual Exercises to scruples [345–51]. Following his general confession in Montserrat, his scrupulosity increased. His confessor ordered him never to confess his past sins again, but Loyola’s apprehensions continued unabated until he learned to discern the dialectical powers of consolation and desolation within himself. The ability to decipher these interior movements, affections, and inspirations was for Ignatius a liberating experience. The whole purpose of the Spiritual Exercises was “to conquer oneself, and to order one’s life in such a way that no decision is made under the influence of any ill-ordered attachment” [21]. There are three types of thoughts, he went on to elaborate: individual thoughts “come solely from my own free will and choice; the other two come from without, the one from the good spirit and the other from the evil one” [32]. Doing the Exercises and making a general confession liberates the penitent from the control of external spirits and enables both the advisee and the director to recognize his or her interior vocation [73]. Once Loyola had acquired self-knowledge and overcome his scrupulous anxieties, he comprehended that he need not ever again confess his past sins. Loyola also attained another insight: confession works best when it is accompanied by a methodical training in the discernment of spirits.50 Years later, in 1551, when asked by the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Brandão whether a penitent should itemize sins during confession (as the Council of Trent was to rule), or whether a general and brief confession was satisfactory, Loyola used this insight to distinguish between two types of confessants. Those who tend to fall into mortal sins should confess in detail. For them he also recommended the traditional method of listing and indexing sins against the Ten Commandments, the seven deadly sins, and

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so on ([18]; see also “Three Ways of Prayer” [238–48]). However, those who are “drawn to doubts and difficulties, seeing sin where there is no sin,” would do better to confess a general confession. Loyola also stated that “a close scrutiny of fi ne points is not as helpful toward sorrow as is getting an overall view of one’s serious sins.”51 Recalling the Jesuit-Jansenist debates, we might suggest that laxism, just like rigorism, characterizes the practice. General confession, according to Igantius, liberates. It puts penitents in a state of quietude and peace, enabling them to embark on a new life of spiritual growth. Once liberated from the clutches of their evil passions, inclinations, and “motions” and purified by the methodical practice of telling their internal truth to themselves and then to their director of conscience, they could act as self-possessing subjects.

GENERAL CONFESSION AND THE LAITY General confession thus became a relatively protracted process of recalling/inventing, writing, and at times recounting one’s life as an autobiography of sinfulness. It also gave birth to an individualized program for reform. Loyola’s true innovation might well have been the merging of the sacrament of confession and the process of spiritual direction into a spiritual undertaking that lasted several days or weeks, was performed under supervision and with instruction, and centered on the solitary work of the practitioner within his or her own interiority. Who ought to reap the benefits of this type of introspective and selfforming general confession? Auricular sacramental confession had been mandated for all Christians since the thirteenth century. The practices, which together with general confession contributed to the early modern re-formation of Catholic subjecthood and subjectivation, namely the examination of conscience, the compilation of meditations and visualizations, and the undergoing of spiritual direction, had been practiced only in monastic communities since the desert fathers but started to spread among male and female mystics and a few devout individuals in the late Middle Ages. The Spiritual Exercises were written for novices of the Society of Jesus, but Loyola himself, as we have already seen, started instructing laypersons even while composing the fi rst version of the Exercises and writing down his own general confession. His secretary, Juan Alfonso de Polanco (1516–1576), wrote on Loyola’s behalf that laypersons, including young women and married ladies, should have access to the First Week of the Exercises and to general confession.52 Gaspar de Loarte concurred, and his Exercitio della vita spiritual of 1557, the earliest Jesuit book on

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the spiritual life, recommended general confession for all believers, including those who were illiterate, who should seek someone to read such guides to them. He also encouraged reading “some briefe & learned confessionary” as a preparatory stage for a general confession. Following Ignatius’s original intent and these early instructions, general confession also became a prerequisite for membership in Jesuit lay confraternities (sodalities) and Marian congregations (including, for example, the fallen women of the Casa Santa Marta in Rome). The practice was popularized and recommended for all devout Catholics who wanted to advance in their spiritual life.53 Jesuit missions, as we have seen, encouraged penitents to participate in “generic” and public general confessions. But for some the mission became an opportunity for a more thorough conversion as well. During a mission conducted by the French Jesuit Pierre Coton (1564–1626) in Aix-en-Provence in 1601, “members of all social groups and all occupations showed up, jostling each other to determine who would be the fi rst to reach the confessors and the altar. And the more eminent among them even asked this man of God to confess a general confession of their entire past life, wishing to start a new [life] under his direction and his spiritual patronage.”54 Coton’s mission, then, combined both types of general confession: he offered concise confessions to the masses and introspective, transformative general confessions to spiritual or social elites. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, in fact, the practice of general introspective confession, which in the past had been restricted to monastic and devout circles, was recommended for the masses. It was practiced by large segments of the urban devout population, as well as, possibly, by nonurban elites. The dispersion of the practice in hybrid forms also reached the New World, as has been documented by Michelle Molina.55 General confession was promoted not only by the Society of Jesus, but also by several prominent early modern theologians. The Spanish Dominican preacher Luis de Granada (1504–1588) explained in his immensely popular Guía de pecadores (Sinners’ Guide) of 1556 that general confession is much more than a confession of sins. It is a devotional practice, a remembrance of sinfulness in general rather than in its particular incarnations, and a method of maintaining tranquility and a state of “quiet within the soul.”56 Granada’s best-selling book included an example of a short general confession of one’s entire life, as well as numerous spiritual exercises which he recommended to penitent readers of his guide. Carlo Borromeo, for his part, had made a general confession with the Jesuits, and while archbishop of Milan he incorporated many of Loyola’s insights into

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his Avvertenze . . . ai confessori. For him, as for Ignatius, general confession was meant to lead to conversion and amending one’s life.57 The third promoter of general confession, and the one whose version of it was to mold Jesuit spirituality itself, was the Savoyard saint François de Sales. We have already encountered him and his highly successful Introduction to the Devout Life of 1608 (augmented in 1609), which was addressed directly to an ideal devout lay female reader, Philothea.58 According to de Sales, the fi rst step toward God is “purification of the soul” by way of confession. But confession is not a simple undertaking. One ought to fi rst seek the best confessor available, then read penitential guides. Next, the penitent should recall “point by point in what way you have done wrong from the time you reached the use of reason until the present hour.” This recollection of sins is best carried out in writing, but de Sales, like Ignatius before him, does not make that a requirement. Each reader, he instructed again and again, should adapt the guide for her own needs and station in life, which in some cases took illiteracy into account.59 In order to facilitate the recollection of sins, de Sales offered a series of meditations on the creation of the world and of humanity, divine graces, sins, death, judgment, hell, and paradise [Book 1:9–18]. These meditations, too, followed very closely the First Week of Loyola’s Exercises. Having completed the meditations, the penitent was ready to “go on bravely and in the spirit of humility to make a general confession” [1:19]. “Note carefully, Philothea,” de Sales cautions, “that I speak of a general confession covering your whole life. I readily grant that this is not always absolutely necessary, but I consider it exceedingly useful in this opening period and therefore I earnestly advise it.” General confession is recommended because regular sacramental confessions are often incomplete, as penitents at times forget specific sins or are too ashamed to confess them. Furthermore, most confessions, regrettably, fail to bring about a conversion of the heart, in which case confessants all too soon resume their customary life of sin. A general confession, on the other hand, “summons us to know ourselves, arouses wholesome sorrow for our past life, makes us marvel at the mercy of God . . . [and] provides our spiritual director with an opportunity to advise us more properly.” It is a “complete conversion by undertaking a devout life” [1:6] and terminates with the practitioner’s consecrating him- or herself to God [1:20]. For de Sales, then, as for Loyola, general confession was a re-formation, a conversion.60 It is both a sacrament and a devotional practice, and even more than regular confession, it pointed both backward and forward. Like

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all sacramental confessions, it included the itemizing of past sins and terminated with an absolution. Yet more than a standard confession, it was also a new beginning. Ideally, according to both Loyola and de Sales, the process of conversion thus begun was to be continued through periodic examinations of conscience and frequent additional confessions, the goal of which was to further advance subjectivation and self-formation as a Christian. However, the Jesuit general confession and its Salesian avatar differed in a significant way. The preparatory stages of the latter did not necessitate a dialog with a director. While de Sales promoted spiritual direction and personally directed many devotees, among them many women, his ideal Philothea could practice on her own and prepare for her general confession by reading manuals and following de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life. She was encouraged, even ordered, to consult regularly with spiritual directors and to confess to confessors. But self-interrogation, the recollection of sins, and the framing of these recollections into a coherent autobiography of one’s life as a sinner could, according to the future Savoyard saint, take place prior to the encounter with these learned figures. Arguably, both Luis de Granada and François de Sales continued Loyola’s own effort to further “democratize” the access of penitents to spiritual exercises and meditations and to lead devout lay Christians not only toward the absolution of sins but also toward subjectivation, examination of conscience, and conversion. And even more than Loyola himself (perhaps because his own orthodoxy was never doubted and he did not have to distance himself from suspected Illuminist tendencies), de Sales created more possibilities for self-psychagogy, for cultivating independent introspective comprehension. Interestingly, most French and many non-French Jesuits of the seventeenth century chose François de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life over Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises as their model for conducting general confessions and spiritual retreats for the laity.61

BETWEEN LOYOLA AND FOUCAULT Confession was central to Michel Foucault’s entire intellectual trajectory, from the early writings on the abnormal and the manufacturing of abnormality in the mid-1970s, through the interest in sexuality in the later ’70s, to his last works on self-formation in the early church. Other scholars have already pointed out the degree to which his “entire discussion of the concept of confession lacks sufficient theoretical weight from which to establish any coherent position.” This was no secret: Foucault himself admitted as much.62 Yet there is much value to his theorizations, both in

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terms of their actual content and in light of the fact that his assumptions, whether historically and theologically sound or far-fetched, have come to dominate all discussions of confession in Catholic Western culture and in Western modernity. In this section I discuss to what degree Foucault’s lifelong engagement with the topic of confession helps us understand the practice of general confession, and in what ways the discussion of general confession in which we have been engaged in this chapter sheds new light on Foucault’s theorization. For Foucault, confession was fi rst and foremost a cognitive and psychological “ritual of discourse where the subject who speaks corresponds with the subject of the statement.” The confessing person acquires during confession the modern notion of selfhood as a quest for and belief in a preexisting internal truth. So confessing is a mode of self-formation as a subject, a subject who has an essence, an internal truth that defi nes it. The dynamics of confession, however, are also always dialogic: one confesses to another person or entity. As such, the production of truth about one’s self, which is also the production of the self, is also the production of the subject as subjugated to the authority of the listener. Confession produces not only subjects but also subjugation to authority and to the government of the self by itself. This political-pastoral amalgamation of powers and truth mechanisms has characterized modern Christian culture especially since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when police and government (both in the wider, early modern French sense of the terms) became the general order of European powers. In modernity, confession to a priest, and later on to a police officer, a physician, or a psychoanalyst, have all become disciplinary mechanisms that produce a new form of subjecthood, a personal and political order in which one no longer merely submits to authority but becomes “the authority who requires the confession.”63 The manufacturing of a truth about the self is surely the main goal and process of confessional practices in general and of general confession in particular. Foucault was right to insist on the centrality, in Western thought, of the Augustinian dictum that “by making truth inside oneself one could get access to the light” (qui facit veritatem venit ad lucem).64 However, I wish to signal a slight yet important difference between the Augustinian process of making truth inside oneself and the Foucauldian characterization of this process as one by which a person discovers (actually manufactures) an allegedly already-existing inner and “truthful” truth. In fact, one could argue that the process of undertaking a general confession resembled the process that takes place during exorcism of demonic spirits. In casting out demons, a self that lacks autonomy, owing

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to its possession by the Master of Lies, is slowly released from captivity. Satan is unveiled as the liar that he is and is expelled slowly and methodically, thus creating a liberated space within the self to be (re)fi lled by a new possessing agency, namely God. Similarly, general confession is not only a process of telling a truth about oneself to oneself and by so doing discovering/inventing the self as a truth teller and a subject. It is also the process of telling the truth about one’s previous possession by an external entity that prevented the self from actualizing its potential, from coming into being its own agency. The confessant in general confession is not only formed as a subject who is also subjected to. In addition, the penitent is being liberated, with the help of the confessor or the spiritual director, from one subjugation (to Satan) in order to pursue a new, better domination, that of God. There is a crucial difference between these two forms of subjugation: one is overpowering the confessing subject against its will, while the other is being invited to take control over the redeemed captive. “I have a very strong Christian, Catholic background, and I am not ashamed of it,” Foucault declared in a roundtable discussion in 1983. And in a conversation a few years earlier, when provoked by a young hitchhiker who argued that what is left of the church today is nothing but simulacrum and that there are “not many people left who take an interest in all that,” Foucault laughed and agreed: “there is only me left.”65 It is therefore surprising to fi nd Foucault tackling the hierarchical relations between confessant and confessor to the complete exclusion of any traditional Catholic conceptualization of this dynamic. The collaboration of the confessant with the confessor or the spiritual director in general confession indeed evoked guilt and shame in the confessant (and often in the confessor as well) while establishing a degree of authority of the confessor over the penitent. However, pastoral power, for Foucault a major, if not cardinal, characteristic of the Christianization of society and of the notions of governmentality, was far from total.66 The dyadic relation between the confessant and God that lay at the core of Christian ontology and practices of confession and general confession made this so. This was the light at the end of the tunnel; this was the goal that was worth striving toward and that justified in the eyes of believers the effort, the shame and guilt, and the submission to clerical authority. This light, what Augustine called the “truth that dwells in the inward man” (in interior homine habitat veritas), however, was not the practitioner’s true inner self but the re-meeting of the self with the image of God within.67 I suggest that this oversight, this marginalization of God from the confessional and pastoral exchange, led Foucault to a one-dimensional reading of the interlocutory

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scene and of the complex dynamics of confession. This was as true for the early modern period as it had been in the transition from the classical to the early Christian world. One need not be a devout Catholic to subscribe to this reading of the practice. By reassigning confession, and especially general confession, to their theological and salvific contexts, new interpretative possibilities emerge. General confession was indeed, as Foucault has convincingly theorized, a process of self-formation by means of introspection, narration, and verbalization, and subjugation to authority (both external and internal) was an integral part of it. But at its theological core, general confession entailed not only disciplinary submission but also liberation. The hermeneutics of the self were a restructuring of one’s subjectivity by substituting one form of control for another. Foucault taught us that there is no human setting immune to power. General confession, too, was surely not a release from power relations into a realm of (imaginary and nonexistent) freedom. But within the Christian ontotheology whence it sprang, shifting from being subjected to Satan to being subjugated to God was conceptualized as liberation. In one of the few surviving fragments from the never-published fourth volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault in fact recognized this point and connected confession to another human being to the possibility of maintaining one’s relations with the divine: “One has to rid oneself of the power of the Other, the Enemy, who hides behind seeming likenesses of oneself, and eternal warfare has to be waged against this Other, which one cannot win without the help of the Almighty, who is mightier than he. Confession to others, submission to their advice and permanent obedience to one’s superiors are essential in this battle.”68 General confession was always a voluntary practice of attaining attunement. More than a mechanism of disciplining the soul, it was a technique of charting, conquering, and purifying it. The practice of belief demanded that the confessant recognize inclinations and desires, cohere them into a narrative of a life lived in sin, and acquire a sense of sinfulness as his or her core essence. This mental practice worked because of the penitent’s belief in the Christian story of redemption through Christ’s sacrifice and love. In other words, buy-in to the belief system was a precondition for contrition and penance. Between 1550 and 1650, as we have seen in this chapter, this technique of introspective general confession exploded in popularity: it was advocated and practiced by members of all religious orders throughout Catholic Europe and the sphere of Catholic global expansion.69 This development paralleled a decline in the number of guides for confession that went under the name “general confession” but

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that consisted of an exhaustive list of sins for the confessant to gauge in severity prior to being assigned penance.70 Yet just as this form of general confession as subjectivation was gaining adherents, it was also starting to fall out of favor. The decline was a dialectical cause of its success, as was practitioners’ search for ever more enhanced practices of self-formation. It is to one such practice, the continuous examination of conscience, that we now turn.

Chapter Five

Examination of Conscience

W

e have seen the difficulty of distinguishing the practice of a systematic examination of conscience from the sacrament of confession on the one hand, and from general confession on the other, as well as that of differentiating all of these practices from spiritual exercises. These difficulties derive directly from the imbricated nature of these traditions. A genuine confession includes contrition, and contrition necessitates selfinvestigation, which is nothing less than an examination of one’s conscience. Similarly, spiritual exercises train the practitioner to identify with Christ’s sacrifice and death on behalf of a sinning humanity, thus again emphasizing the immanence of sin and sinfulness in the composition of the human person. Nonetheless, just as general confession was both like and unlike auricular sacramental confession— and the differences between the two should not be overlooked—the examination of conscience was both like and unlike contrition. A closer look at this practice of self-investigation reveals additional dimensions of early modern Catholic reconfigurations of interiority and techniques of introspection and selfformation. In this chapter I shall document the rise of the examination of conscience to its prominent position among spiritual practices in early modern Catholicism. Like spiritual direction and spiritual exercises, this practice has a long history. By the seventeenth century, as we shall see, it overshadowed general confession, and its alleged benefits were often contrasted with the (implicit) shortcomings of the latter. Thus, as entwined as these two practices were, it is worth considering each singly.

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THE LATE ANTIQUE AND MEDIEVAL GENEALOGY OF EXAMINATION OF CONSCIENCE Like spiritual exercises and the direction of souls, the examination of conscience was a penitential and self-formation practice whose origins lay in the early days of the church. Indeed, like other early Christian spiritual exercises and introspective methods, the examination of conscience was a Christian avatar of a pre-Christian (mostly Stoic) tradition. For Greek and Roman philosophers, self-examination entailed a systematic interrogation of one’s actions and the degree to which these conformed to the laws of nature and reason, as well as to one’s own goals. A practitioner was to regularly examine his code of conduct and moral obligations, in order to maintain their harmony with universal laws and with goals set by the practitioner for himself (and it was always a male). By scrutinizing his actions, the practitioner of the pre-Christian examination of self was freed from the tyranny of irrational actions and from desires that contradicted his commitment to his own articulations of his desires. The pre- Christian examination of conscience was, we might say, a dialogue of the self with itself about the conformity of its actions to its goals.1 In its Christian version, the mode of conduct to which one conformed shifted from rational and natural inclinations and a commitment to the self itself to a set of self-imposed obligations to the teachings and the truth of Christianity as they were embodied in one’s psychological inner self. Liberty from irrationality and from disparities between desire and action was replaced by obedience to the church and to one’s core truth. This subjection to authority came with a reward: salvation. The Christian practitioner was expected to examine thoughts and inclinations as much as actions and to calibrate his conduct not only to his intentions and articulations of desires but also to the tenets of Christianity. This was a radically new mechanism of self-scrutiny, one that was to reshape the very fundaments of the Christian configuration of the examination of conscience. The dialogue of the self with itself was replaced in early Christian communities by a dialogue of the self with a prescribed body of expectations and norms. Loyalty was no longer to one’s presumed essence and to the will to conduct oneself in accordance with one’s own code, but rather to a divinely ordained order. Obedience replaced freedom. Personal truth had become an incarnation of the Truth, a Truth to which one voluntarily submitted.2 The precise characteristics of the pre- Christian examination of self and the degree to which the above very brief summary of Foucault’s de-

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piction of the transition from the classical world to early Christianity interest me less than pointing out that practices of self-examination were around long before the incorporation of this technique of self-interrogation into early Christian belief and practice system. Like the ongoing debates concerning the exact forms of Greek and Roman practices of the care of the self, we are far from certain as to the precise form of early Christian self-examination. We do know, however, that Paul commanded the faithful to perform it prior to taking Communion (I Corinthians 11:28–31). It was later practiced as an individual devotional and penitential practice among the spiritual elites of the ancient Christian world, but we know nothing about its diffusion beyond early monastic communities. Some fathers of the church, among them Ambrose, Basil, Cassian, Augustine, and John Chrysostom, examined themselves nightly. Athanasius tells us that as early as the late third century St. Anthony recommended that his followers record in writing the spiritual progress that resulted from their nightly examination and meditations. 3 “In the morning we must take account of our expenses, then in the evening, after our meal, when we have gone to bed and no one troubles us and disquiets us, we must ask ourselves to account for our conduct to ourselves,” wrote John Chrysostom in the fourth century.4 Thus actions and thoughts were rehearsed each evening no longer in order to enhance self-mastery and aesthetic conduct as a person whose deeds and words corresponded to the tradition of the philosophical school one adhered to, but to ensure that such thoughts and actions corresponded to God’s desire.5 This tradition was likely kept alive in monastic communities during the early Middle Ages, but the evidence is very fragmentary. It is significant, however, that neither the church fathers nor medieval theologians and founders of religious orders systematized the examination of conscience, which is probably an indication of the intensely personal and fluid nature of the practice. What we do know is that in the twelfth century an examination of conscience was practiced among the Victorines and the Cistercians as a form of penitential prayer or meditation and had probably been practiced similarly even earlier.6 The examination of conscience was practiced in some monastic communities in the later Middle Ages in two settings. One of these was as a preparatory part of the sacrament of penance. A diligent examination of conscience, the argument went, increased contrition, ensuring that the confessant recalled all of his or her sins.7 This form of examination was, of course, very similar to the practice of general confession. But the examination of conscience was also a devotional technique of self-analysis, to be practiced daily or even continuously, an interiorized mechanism of

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self-scrutiny safeguarding against temptations. The practitioner was to question himself or herself on a constant basis and acquire the ability to discern the inclinations and faults within his soul. This ceaseless examination of conscience had an additional and even more worthy goal: it enabled the practitioner to recognize the truth about him- or herself. “We seek for truth in ourselves, in our neighbors, and in its essential nature,” explained Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), and “we fi nd it fi rst in ourselves by severe self-scrutiny.” The benefits of this practice are immense and are available for everyone, he went on to say. Even the pope should examine himself as to his moral conduct, his temperament, and the way he fulfi lls his duties.8 His inner truth should correspond to the Christian truth, his duties to his duties as a Christian pastor. Novices came in for special attention. According to Bernard, they should learn how to examine themselves and how to acquire discretion, “the mother of all virtues.” By so doing they will overcome “irregularities” within their selves. “Examine your life daily with great care; take careful notice of your progress and failures . . . discipline your heart, rule your actions, correct your failures,” he exhorted them.9 The best means to achieve this recognition of the truth of one’s self, for the pope as much as for more humble believers, is by observing carefully the Decalogue and by being severely critical of one’s own conduct while showing generosity and mercy toward others’ shortcomings. Such self-examination is also a buffer against gossipy curiosity, which leads to petty admonitions of others, and against vainglory, which often distracts from telling the truth about oneself to oneself. As such, examination of conscience is a practice of humility. Franciscan manuals from the late Middle Ages in both Latin and the vernacular catered to an increasing number of priests and friars who were involved in pastoral care as well as to a growing population of lay penitents. Like Bernard in the twelfth century, mendicant orders also paid special attention to the training of novices. They were expected to practice daily examination as a prerequisite for their daily confession, and Bonaventure (1221–1274) even recommended seven examinations a day “for a complete introspection of self.” Similarly, Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) suggested that his listeners retire daily to some small space and examine themselves. By the mid-fi fteenth century Franciscan and Dominican spiritual directors had compiled a series of daily examinations in the vernacular for nuns and devout lay believers of all social classes.10 A daily examination was similarly common among the followers of the Devotio Moderna in the Low Countries. Thomas à Kempis invited his followers to “always make diligent search, both within and without, to leave nothing

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inordinate unreformed in us. And if you cannot do it continually . . . do it once in a day, evening or morning. In the morning, you should make a good purpose for the day, and at night you should examine diligently how you have behaved yourself in word, in deed, and in thought.”11 In houses of the Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life, an evening examination was the rule, with members meditating or writing down their daily faults. The Jesuit missionary to Germany Peter Canisius (1521–1597) recalled that his spiritual advisor, Nicolas van Esch (Eschius; 1507–1578), a priest and spiritual director in Cologne, who was close to but not affiliated with the Carthusians in the city, had asked him each night to tell him “everything, all the errors I had committed during the day.12 Toward the end of the fi fteenth century and in the fi rst half of the sixteenth century, then, a daily examination of conscience was already a devotional practice that was unconnected to the sacrament of confession. It was also recommended for the laity not only by the mostly lay devotees of the Devotio Moderna, but also by the Dominican Savonarola, in his Regola del ben vivere of 1498, and the Benedictine Garcia de Cisneros (1455–1510), the abbot of Montserrat in Catalonia, among many others.13 From the thirteenth century on, with the growing emphasis on introspective contrition during confession (contritio in corde), the examination of conscience was also promoted as a means to increase the confessant’s ability to internalize his or her sinfulness and to regret it profoundly. The examination of conscience was integrated at that time both into the confession itself and into the pastoral literature, not to mention public sermons that encouraged confession and penance.14 Thus two parallel processes can be discerned in this period: the examination of conscience is integrated into confession, and it is promoted as a devotional practice to be pursued privately outside the context of confession but as part of the daily routine of every devout person. What, precisely, was a practitioner to examine, and how was he or she expected to do so? As noted earlier, any attempt to systematize the practice is conspicuously absent from the late medieval guides. It remained, at least according to the available sources, a personalized meditative enterprise, centering on self-reflection, sins, and evil inclinations. From the little we do know, practitioners employed common penitential mnemonic techniques. One was to teach them to reflect on the Ten Commandments, the seven deadly sins, or the commandments of the church. The penitent was to recall his or her routine behaviors and to examine whether he or she sinned in heart or body while performing any of them. Another method encouraged the monk, nun, novice, or layperson to reflect on the

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day’s events: what, when, and where he or she could have transgressed against this or that teaching of the church. Whether it was practiced daily or as a preparatory stage for annual or monthly confession, the examination was organized mnemonically, with each section of the examination corresponding to a sin or a virtue that had been preselected by the penitent, often at the recommendation of a spiritual director, a confessor, or the compiler of the written guide. Printed booklets increased accessibility to the practice, and examinations of conscience were also included in either textual or pictorial form in books of hours.15 This late medieval examination of conscience was marked by a tension between the cultivation of contrition by individualized meditative prayers on the one hand, and the practice of systematic enumeration of sins, sites, and settings according to a preordered mnemonic framework on the other. While the meditation called for a personalized experience, the mechanical recollection pulled away from it. Yet, the lack of structure had its own benefits. It meant that the examination of conscience could be pursued at different times and in different settings: in the solitude of the monastic cell or at the kitchen table; at night before going to sleep or in interrupted fragments during the day’s busyness; it could be practiced by religious people as well as by the laity; and it could be reported to a listening director, confessor, or friend, or simply imprinted in the practitioner’s own memory. The examination of conscience was the individual practice of belief par excellence; it was a voluntary reaffirmation of the practitioner’s commitment to the tenets of Christianity and of his or her trust that there was no salvation outside the church. At the same time, it was a manifestation of the individual’s cognitive and affective capabilities to discover her innermost truth, avow it to herself, and thus grow spiritually into subjecthood.

JESUIT RECONFIGURATIONS When Ignatius of Loyola redesigned the examination of conscience, he was driven by a desire to channel and restrict the fluidity that had characterized the practice in the later Middle Ages. Here again, as was the case with spiritual exercises and general confession, Loyola was not trying to reinvent the wheel. His goal was to preserve and further promote late medieval spiritual and devotional practices that he himself had benefited from while avoiding the dangers that derive from lack of clarity and authority and from overexcitation of the senses. His own experience with the practice of examination of conscience led him to modify it in ways

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that facilitated its systematization among members of religious orders. The Jesuit version of general confession, as we remember, was advanced and diffused intensively among both clerics and spiritually inclined laypersons in Marian congregations and during missions and retreats. The examination of conscience in its Jesuit version, on the other hand, called for the demarcation of times and places to practice it. This reconfiguration limited its accessibility by most segments of the laity, who could not afford fi xed times for meditation and self-reflection. Ignatius examined his conscience while at Montserrat.16 Following the late medieval tradition, he distinguished in his Spiritual Exercises between two types of daily examinations: the one particular and the other general. The ultimate goal of the general daily examination is “to make a better confession” [32]. In accordance with the late medieval Observant tradition, this was understood as a preparatory stage toward sacramental confession, but according to Loyola it could also be used as a means of daily self-purification. This daily general examination was supplemented by a daily particular examination of conscience. This practice sets itself a more specific goal, such as the correction of a specific inclination. Loyola’s daily particular examination is divided into three different time units. Upon rising in the morning, the practitioner resolves to avoid a certain fault during the day or to perform a particular virtue [24]. By noon the practitioner makes an “exacting account [cuenta] of self” with regard to this designated fault of the day, marking in a notebook how many times he or she fell into this sin, and then renewing the resolution for the rest of the day [25]. This examination was to be repeated at night, when the exercitant was encouraged to recall and record failures since the midday investigation [26]. A notebook of detailed records of such daily failures enabled the practitioner to examine his or her process of improvement over time and led toward riddance of the particular fault under examination [27–31]. Loyola also suggested that the practitioner impose physical penance for each one of the faults committed each day [27]. What we see here, then, is a more precise ordering of the late medieval encouragement of both lay and religious to keep track, preferably in writing, of their faults, meditate on their causes, and strive to overcome them. Most important, the Ignatian method integrated self-examination of conscience into the daily routine and fragmented the practice into short segments. Introspecting actions and thoughts and combating sinfulness were incorporated now into a well-ordered schedule that did not demand more than a few minutes of self-reflection. Like his renditions of general confession and spiritual exercises, Igna-

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tius’s examination of conscience was propagated by the Jesuits as early as the second half of the sixteenth century. Thus, Francis Xavier wrote from Goa in April 1549 to Gaspar Berze, the commander of a Jesuit mission to occupy Ormuz: “Twice a day, or at least once, make your particular examens. Be careful never to omit them.”17 The Official Directory of the Society of Jesus, published in 1599 by order of Acquaviva, detailed how to teach and conduct this examination. The director fi rst explains to the trainee that each individual has some faults or sins to which he or she is more inclined than to others. One of these should become the focus of the particular examination until it is overcome. This will lead to “purity of soul” and a reordering of one’s entire life. Concurrently with this anthropological and theological explanation of the prevalence of sinfulness, the director should also introduce the exercitant to both general examination and daily examination.18 The latter should include not only actual sins of behavior but all “states and faults of the soul, the passions, inclinations, temptations,” as well as all that is needed for a better recognition of one’s self. A daily examination was recommended for novices and devout laypersons. But religious virtuosi were taught to strive for much more. Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1527–1611), Loyola’s fi rst biographer, tells us that Ignatius himself “always kept this habit of examining his conscience every hour, and of asking himself with careful attention how he had passed the hour. If at the end of it he happened upon some more important matter, or a talk which prevented this pious practice, he postponed the examen, but at the fi rst free moment, or the following hour, he made up for this delay.” And in another anecdote we are told that, upon meeting another Jesuit, Loyola asked this brother how often had had already examined his conscience that day. When the brother answered, “seven times,” Loyola responded: “So few?” even though the day had just started.19 Following Ignatius’s example, Pierre Cotton and Surin, two of the more prominent French mystic Jesuits of the seventeenth century, did not stop at two or three examinations each day. They too used the examination of conscience and recommended it as a mechanism that maintains the practitioner in a state of being ever attuned to occurrences within the soul.20 This format of constant examinations, with its rigid and methodical division of the examination of one’s conscience into clearly defi ned and steadily performed investigations of particular sins, inclinations, and tendencies, was immediately adopted and further adapted by non-Jesuits who had themselves been advised by members of the order or were close to the young Society of Jesus. Carlo Borromeo instituted a mandatory examina-

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tion of conscience of fi fteen minutes every evening among seminarians and priests in his diocese. Teresa of Ávila similarly commanded examinations twice day, as well as a brief examination before each prayer during the day. Let Matins be said after nine o’clock, and not before, but not so long after as not to leave a quarter of an hour after they are over for a selfexamination on the use [to be] made of the day. A bell shall be rung when the examination is to begin and a nun appointed by the mother prioress shall read in Spanish something about the mystery which is to be the subject of meditation on the following day. . . . Shortly before dinner the bell shall be rung for the sisters [to start a] self- examination on what they have done down to that time; let them resolve to correct the most serious fault that they fi nd in themselves and to that end say a Paternoster for obtaining God’s grace. Let each nun, wherever she may be at the time, kneel down and make her brief examination.21

Thanks to the influence and spiritual guidance of François de Sales, the Visitandines also practiced three examinations a day. Madame de Chantal, the cofounder of the order, also recommended the daily examination to the laity. In a letter to her (biological) daughter, Countess Françoise de Toulonjon, she encouraged her to start each day by turning her thoughts to God’s presence in everything and making a resolution as to “what good you will accomplish that day and what evil you will avoid, especially by resisting your predominant fault.” During the day she should fi nd time to withdraw often to a quiet and private space and pray for a quarter of an hour, terminating this short prayer with a renewed resolution. Before going to bed she should, again “examine [her] conscience kneeling in front of God.” In a letter of spiritual advice to Noël Brulart, Commandeur de Sillery (1577–1640), a French aristocrat who underwent a conversion and became a benefactor of her young order (and later also took religious vows), she promoted the same technique. He should start each day by making a resolution to follow God’s will throughout the day, and then, “during the activities of the day, spiritual as well as temporal, as often as you can, my dear Lord, unite your will to God’s by confi rming your morning resolution. Do this either by a simple, loving glance at God, or by a few words spoken quietly and cast into his heart.”22 In the seventeenth century, daily examination of conscience—to be precise, a culture of numerous short examinations each day—became common practice in religious communities. Mother Superior Marguerite

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de Veni d’Arbouze (Mère Marguerite de Saint- Gertrude, 1580–1626) of the Benedictine convent of Val-de-Grace in Paris ordered that when the nun wakes up in the morning, she should get on her knees before the crucifi x in her room, confess her sins, and ask forgiveness. Note that it is very likely that the nun, who had just woken up, had probably not yet had time to sin this morning, but the lack of knowledge of sin does not mean that she, in fact, had not already sinned. In the evening she should again examine her soul and recall all her faults during the day, especially acts or feelings of self-love, infidelities, or other malicious inclinations. This examination should be carried out with humility rather than scrupulous exaggerations (themselves possible signs of vainglory) before images of the Virgin Mary and the Crown of Thorns.23 What does the practitioner discern during this examination? According to Pierre Favre, one of Loyola’s original disciples, once a man examines himself as to his interior feelings, he will soon come to see that the eyes of his soul are offended by the ugliness of his impurity and bodily defi lements, of his lewdness and gluttony. If he considers his evil reputation, he will come to perceive his own foul odor so that he will smell rank even to himself. If he goes on then to contemplate his fits of rage, his bad temper, his envy, and his pride, he will suddenly fi nd that he has become bitter to himself: I mean he will become aware of his bitter and nauseating state—nauseating because of his pride, bitter because of his moods of anger and envy. . . . He will also recognize these other two qualities of his sense of touch: an excessive indolence which keeps him in a state of idleness and an excessive degree of obduracy which makes him impervious to divine realities.24

Interestingly, the examination, which is of course purely mental, has an immediate physical impact on each and every one of the senses. Like most practices of belief, even this highly interiorized technique encompassed an embodied aspect. The examination of conscience in its early modern Ignatian avatar, then, was a devotional practice that was divorced from its original source as a preparatory stage of confession. Its ultimate goal was the acquisition by the practitioners of a comprehension of one’s soul as an endless source of temptations and faults, while also recognizing the practitioner’s own capacity (with divine grace, of course) to discern and overcome these evil inclinations. Once internalized, the examination of conscience works

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nonstop. The awakening of the sense of penance and the awareness of one’s sinfulness were to expand now from Lent and other (rare) occasions of sacramental confession across one’s entire life. The goal, then, was to integrate the examination of conscience into the routine operation of the soul. Self-improvement by means of self-examination was to become continuous and natural, absorbed to such a degree that it would become a never-ending mechanism of introspection. As such, the examination of conscience was a panopticon in the Foucauldian sense of the term: an inspecting device that places the penitent under constant surveillance. Significantly, in the examination of conscience the practitioner submitted his or her life to his or her own self-scrutinizing gaze, a gaze that by its very essence always found the practitioners falling short of both personal and institutional expectations. But subjection to this observatory mechanism was a means to reach subjectivation, to gain control over one’s life. Thus, the practice combined the psychological experiences of desiring to overcome a temptation with the cognitive work of using mnemonic techniques to recall sins, movements, and inclinations. Recognizing these as constituting one’s core identity and as mechanisms that operate on a constant basis within the soul opened the door to self-transformation. These psychological and mental dimensions of the practice were often enhanced by the embodiment of sorrow through physical acts of penance and selfinfl icted pain. Loyola recommended, as previously mentioned, that one “touch one’s hand to one’s breast in sorrow [doliendose]” [27] for each sin. Penance was to be felt mentally and physically and recorded both in a (real or virtual) notebook and on the body itself [43]. George A. Aschenbrenner, a leading theologian of the renewal movement that has reshaped Ignatian spirituality in the second half of the twentieth century, noted that Loyola’s main contribution may have been turning the examination of conscience into an examination of consciousness. By ever so slightly shifting the focus of the practice from past sins to attuning to oneself, and by learning to discern and then control thoughts and inclinations in the present, Loyola offered the devout practitioner a new mechanism of self-scrutiny and subjectivation.25 While the examination as a penitential practice was oriented toward the past, requiring that the practitioner evaluate his or her actions and thoughts after the fact, the constant examination of conscience sets future goals: in the morning, the practitioner wished to reach midday without sin, then in midday to complete a sinless day. Hence, the Ignatian daily examination was a self-imposed regimen of permanent introspection and self-correction, one minuscule step at a time.

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It was also, as Loyola himself pointed out, a form of contemplative prayer. The examination opened with an individually chosen desire, a desire to resist a particular sin. But for Loyola, human desire could not be activated without grace. Therefore, upon setting a goal for the day, the practitioner immediately requested God to grant the grace to achieve what he or she desired, namely the power of recollection [25, 43]. This, of course, was a typical Ignatian avoidance of Pelagianism. Try as they might to act on their own, practitioners cannot even activate their self-scrutinizing mechanism by themselves. Only divine grace enables them to focus on a desire and achieve their search for their inner self by discerning the movements within their selves.26 Daily examination was thus an absorbed introspective mechanism which performs two things: fi rst, it familiarized the self with God’s actions within the self and God’s design for the practitioner; and secondly, it taught the practitioner to live a life of constant self-surveillance and self-purification. The sum total of the daily examinations of conscience was a personal and continuous attunedness to one’s relations with God and to one’s ever improving self.

REACHING OUT TO THE LAITY In the second half of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth, both the daily or particular examination of conscience (outside of the context of confession) and frequent confession were intensely promoted by Jesuit confraternities, Marian congregations, and sodalities, along with printed guides for confessants.27 We will deal later in this chapter with the relations between these two practices of belief. Here I wish to home in on the complexities of the propagation of the examination of conscience to larger segments of the laity. Loyola, we recall, recommended the examination of conscience to novices, Jesuits, and the few lay individuals who could manage it in terms of time. Loyola’s own suspicion of unsupervised individual lay spirituality and his brushes with the Inquisition explain his hesitancy regarding mass diffusion of the practice. He willed these doubts to the Society. The practice of examination of the self by itself, addressed to the same self, was dangerous. Vainglory and self-reliance ever lurked, as did claims of a divinely infused guarantee of orthodoxy and a revival of Alumbradismo. Ignatius’s students, however, had fewer scruples. In his set of rules for the Jesuit sodality of Parma, the indefatigable Jesuit missionary Pierre Favre explained how lay members of the group were to maintain the benefits of the Spiritual Exercises and the retreat they had made under his supervision.

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By means of these exercises you have obtained some knowledge of yourselves and [a recognition of] abnegation, and a degree of love of God and neighbor. It will be necessary in the future as well to continue steadily in these excellent practices with greater fervor of spirit. Your method and order for doing this daily should be as follows. First, every evening, before going to sleep, kneel down and recall to your minds the four last things: death, judgment, hell, and paradise. Dwell on these for the space of three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. Immediately thereafter, make an examination of your conscience, thinking fi rst of the benefits received from the Lord God, and thanking him; and recognizing, on the other hand, the sins you have committed that day, with sorrow and a fi rm resolution to confess them to your confessor at the regular time. This is called spiritual confession, in which the person, acknowledging his sins in detail, accuses himself, in the sight of God, and with contrition and the resolution to confess his sins orally at the proper time— a time which I want you to have in your thoughts and desires.28

Favre here connects the examination of conscience with two modes of confession. It goes without saying that the sins the penitent discovers daily within his soul (and he addressed his instructions only to men) should be “at the regular time,” at some point in the future, be divulged to a confessor during sacramental confession. But no less important is the “spiritual confession,” the confession of the practitioner to himself. The gap between the present contrition and resolution to confess and the future confession creates a state of suspension. In this time period and state of being the confessant is already past contrition and has already confessed, if only to himself. His confession is not, alas, sacramental and lacks the fi nal stage of absolution. The penitent is thus suspended in Days of Awe, in repentance as a contemporary state of being, since the judgment has not been sealed yet. This time period is special, and rather than dreading it or experiencing anxiety over it, it should be cherished in “thoughts and desires.” Here we encounter, within Jesuit pastoral theology, rigorism— a type of early modern Catholicism often associated with the Jansenists (as opposed to the Jesuits’ alleged laxism). The laity, according to Favre, is capable of achieving this state of virtuosity, of rigor and doubt. But it is patently incapable of benefiting from self-reliance, and it should remember at all times that only a sacramental confession terminates the process of examination of conscience.

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Alonso Rodriguez (1526–1616), a master of novices in Cordova, composed an extraordinarily popular guide for spiritual guidance, the Ejercicio de perfección y virtutes cristianas (1609). The work is still read and used today. John O’Malley has attributed the enduring interest in the book to its simplicity: it flattened Jesuit and early modern spirituality and glossed over controversial matters.29 In this respect the Ejercicio de perfección, more than more sophisticated guides, served to train generations of young Jesuits in how to pursue spiritual lives and how to instruct others in spiritual practices, including the examination of conscience. Citing and summarizing the church fathers and medieval theologians on the examination of conscience, Alonso recommended a nightly examination. In addition to strengthening the resolve not to repeat the sin the following day, the looming nightly examination increased self-awareness during the entire day and deterred one from falling into bad habits.30 Examination works by our own voluntary and premeditated decision to “excite” in our heart “deep sorrow and extreme regret for our faults and negligences” and through a commitment to correct them (372). Among Jesuits, however, the value of the examination extends beyond these benefits and is comparable to— and perhaps exceeds—that of prayer. We pray for expiation of sins, but it is only the examination of conscience that has the power to turn prayer into acts. In fact, Rodriguez tells us, “it is the most efficacious means for our advancement in perfection” (351). Following Ignatius, he differentiates between the particular examination of a single sin or inclination (357–72) and a general examination. It takes the same amount of effort to overcome one vice as to overcome all, Rodriguez admits, and overcoming one sin is as difficult as overcoming all (358). Yet the good fight should be fought. We are to pursue the challenge we set for ourselves until we master each temptation and “crown our efforts with success” (366– 67). This process could last a long time, even years. Sometimes even two examinations of conscience a day do not suffice to arouse the penitent’s contrition, and in such cases the practitioner ought to further increase his or her effort. While these battles are always conducted in private, with the examiner of conscience being both the object and the subject of the examination, conferring with a spiritual director is recommended. This is not because an external examiner is important for ecclesiastical or sacramental reasons, but merely because we tend to deceive ourselves and exaggerate our successes in overcoming sin (368). Once an examination of conscience leads to sincere contrition, it delivers us from future sin; its impact is not restricted to repentance for past transgressions. Rather, it functions as a “bulwark against what is to come” (373).

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Rodriguez goes on, summarizing the data to date. General examination has even wider theological and psychological implications, he posits. It is both a way of thanking God for benefits we have already received and of begging him to grant additional grace. As such, the examination is a prayer. It connects us to ourselves and enables us to “enter into ourselves” (357), into our thoughts, words, and actions (378). Importantly, it is also a self-investigation of the “roots” of sinfulness within ourselves (382). It is a means to prepare us for true repentance and confession, as well as a cure of our souls (380). Because of its immense benefits, Jesuit brothers (like Reformed Carmelites) are called by the tolling of a bell to perform their examination twice daily. They should stop their activities and spare fi fteen minutes to reviewing their activities in the previous few hours or the entire day. Bodily discipline “and . . . bodily mortification to increase the impact of the examination” are highly recommended (375–78). But how can fi fteen minutes (or even less) suffice for an examination of a sin (or a multiplicity of sins)? Following Loyola, Rodriguez advocates preparing ourselves throughout the day for these great moments. Loyola, he reminds his fellow Jesuits, tied a knot upon a string each time he sinned, thus creating a record and an awareness of his faults. It is possible to follow his example and turn one’s life into an unending experience of self-scrutiny. Rodriguez then widens his discussion to advise the laity and those who cannot often practice self-examination. To them he recommends that they at least examine themselves upon completing major actions (381). Like members of the Society of Jesus, laypersons too should practice both particular and general examinations of conscience (350). And “whoever takes care daily to make his examen of conscience well, may be assured that he carries with him a director,” this director obviously being none other than the penitent himself (383). This is a crucial, as yet implicit element of the examination of conscience. The examination is the culmination of a process of psychagogy and of acquiring attunedness to oneself. In this last stage of the self’s re-formation, the self interacts with itself, guided by itself. Once the practitioner of introspection and spiritual growth has acquired, by means of spiritual direction, the technique of incessant introspection and absorption, he or she no longer needs an external reviewer. But just like Loyola and Favre, Rodriguez was aware of the dangers (real and histrionic) that accompanied lay spirituality in general and lay unsupervised meditative and mystical experiences of the self in particular. He therefore reminds his readers that consulting with a director or a confessor is the best guarantee against self-congratulatory and vainglorious delusions.

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The practice of examination of conscience among the laity was not restricted to Jesuit missionaries and directors. We have already encountered Madame de Chantal recommending it. In one of the most popular late sixteenth-century books of spirituality, the Theatine Lorenzo Scupoli (1530–1610) argued that the quintessence of life is spiritual combat, and that this fight ought to be fought by means of self-analysis. An examination of conscience should include three elements, he explained: a careful examination of the faults of each day, their causes, and the energies and promptness that ought to be mobilized against them: “You have already seen, daughter, the way that one must wage combat in order to overcome [one]self and to adorn oneself with virtues.” By means of introspecting the self you discern “what thoughts and desires usually occupy your mind” and what “the dominant passion [is] which must be singled out as your greatest enemy.”31 This is a daily battle, which starts fi rst thing in the morning: “As soon as you have woken up, the fi rst thing that the eyes of your soul must observe is yourself inside an enclosure, locked in with this law: whoever fails to do battle there remains eternally dead.” It lasts throughout one’s lifetime. Following Ignatius, Scupoli recommends that the warrior choose one sin or inclination each day. It is crucial to select the right inclinations and temptations, those passions by which one is “possessed and governed.” Scupoli’s collection of spiritual advice was addressed to a nun whom at one point he nicknames “guerriera”— a female warrior (135). But it soon became the most popular guide of its kind for both clerics and the laity. Between the fi rst Italian edition of 1589 and 1610 it was published in sixty editions and translated into all the major European languages. 32 Among his greatest fans was François de Sales. In a letter to his teacher/student Madame Jeanne de Chantal, de Sales wrote that he carries Scupoli’s precious book in his pocket at all times and always benefits from rereading it. De Sales’s student Jean-Pierre Camus (1584–1652) affirmed that “the Spiritual Combat was his favorite book. He told me many times that he had carried this book in his pocket for more than eighteen years and had been reading a few chapters each day, often numerous times a day.”33 In 1609–19 de Sales incorporated the Jesuit model of examination and Scupoli’s advice to his warrior nun into his own guides for spiritual perfection, at the same time both modifying and further democratizing them. His discussion of the daily particular examination (the one targeting a specific fault or virtue) exemplifies his method. De Sales promoted introducing a “general preparation . . . an aid and assistant to great devotion” into the morning prayer: “Consider beforehand what occupations, duties, and occasions

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are likely this day to enable you to serve God; what temptations to offend Him, either by vanity, anger, etc, may arise; and make a fervent resolution to use all means of serving Him and confi rming your own piety. . . . Nor is it enough to make such a resolution; you must also prepare to carry it into effect.”34 Before the evening meal, prostrating him- or herself before God, the practitioner is to “renew the warmth of your morning’s meditation.” And before going to bed, a more thorough and systematic examination is in order: “Examine how you have conducted yourself throughout the day, in order to recall where and with whom you have been, and what you have done. If you have done anything good, offer thanks to God; if you have done amiss in thought, world, or deed, ask forgiveness of His Divine Majesty resolving to confess this fault when opportunity offers, and to be diligent in improving in the future.”35 Following Ignatius, the Ignatian tradition, and Scupoli (who was himself, as we remember, informed by Jesuit innovations), de Sales then recommended that his spiritual daughters not settle for three examinations a day but instead examine their progress “throughout the day”: “Be sure, my child, that while externally occupied with business and social duties, you frequently retire within the solitude of your own heart. That solitude need not be in any way hindered by the crowds which surround you— they surround your body, not your soul” (2:12). The examination of the soul is an ongoing process, he explained, and “there is no need to carry it out all at once.” It can be pursued while walking or lying in bed—“that is, if you can keep wide awake and free from drowsiness,” he added. One method of examination of conscience then, was to set aside a few days or times during consecutive days to examine faults and failures and make fresh resolutions. Another was to withdraw into an intimate space three times a day, as recommended by Loyola himself, among others. But this, it turns out, is the bare minimum; de Sales in fact encourages his followers to live in a permanent state of self-examination. One should examine one’s conscience whenever one can fi nd time to do so. In fact, one should live one’s entire life as a ceaseless regime of self-examination. Having placed oneself in the presence of God and invoked the Holy Spirit, and having resolved in advance to discern and accept that spiritual progress advances in very small steps, the practitioner is to “go on to examine quietly and patiently how you have conducted yourself towards God, your neighbor and yourself up to the present time.” This examination includes questioning the self as to past sins but also as to various degrees of enthusiasm: in making confession and performing other spiritual exercises, in loving God and Christ, and in practicing humility and lack of self-love.

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Most important, this examination targets the affects, and the practitioner is to train the passions, to avoid both excessive attachments and scrupulosity: “It is by testing the passions of the soul, one by one, that we ascertain our spiritual condition, just as one who plays the lute tries every string, touching those which are discordant, either raising or lowering them. Thus having tried our soul as to love, hate, desire, fear, hope, sadness and joy, if we fi nd our strings out of tune for the melody we wish to raise, which is God’s Glory, we must tune them afresh with the help of His Grace, and the counsel of our spiritual father” (Book 5:3– 6). What we see in de Sales, then, is a transition from an examination of conscience as a defi ned practice, an activity that calls for setting aside specific times and places for pursuing it, to a thorough examination as a routine and ceaseless preoccupation of the soul. What Loyola had practiced himself, but had been viewed by him as something reserved for the few, was turned by de Sales into a practice that was potentially attainable by all, clerics and laypersons, men and women. This democratization of the examination of conscience gained enormous popularity among the followers of the early modern French school of spirituality, including the Jesuits themselves. Here it is interesting to remind ourselves of the strong ties between the examination of conscience and general confession. For sixteenthcentury Jesuits, general confession was a devout introspective practice whose benefits were immense: it created a new self, it was a conversion. But as early as 1606 Pierre Coton, in a review of the state of the Society of Jesus, emphasized not general confession but the importance of perpetual self-scrutiny of interior spiritual motions and self-examination. 36 Similarly, Louis Lallemant, the most prominent Jesuit spiritual director of his generation, lamented that some Jesuits mistook their conversion following general confession for perfection itself. They wrongly believed that their success as missionaries, preachers, and father-confessors was proof of their merit. In fact, this attitude was nothing but vainglory and self-love. “An examination of conscience [that] is carried out only at certain times” is insufficient, he taught. A “review of past actions and of numerous actions together”— a reference to introspective general confession— also falls short of a true conversion. One ought instead to “cross the threshold” (franchir le pas), to renounce all inclinations, desires, and wills; and in order to be capable of doing so, one ought to gain control over the soul and unite it completely with God’s will. Rather than periodic introspection or general confession, one should maintain a purity of heart and engage in a perpetual discernment of interior spirits, along with incessant cultivation of a

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surveillance mechanism that questions actions at the very time that they are taking place and reviews all spiritual effects as they are occurring. 37 Only by constant vigilance and self-examination can we “gradually acquire a great knowledge of ourselves and attune ourselves to the direction of the Holy Spirit [within us],” he went on to explain, and only by incessant self-examination we can slowly come to perceive what is “of God and what is not.”38 Lallemant’s student Jean Rigoleuc (1595–1653), after recalling Loyola’s instruction for exercitants to conduct an examination of conscience three times a day and write down their shortcomings not only in preparation for a general confession but “numerous times during the day,” went on to recommend that they put their hearts under constant surveillance (garde du coeur) and monitor each of the heart’s “movements.”39

FREQUENT CONFESSION, INCESSANT EXAMINATION, AND THE DANGERS OF SELF-RELIANCE By the second half of the seventeenth century, then, the examination of conscience was recommended as a permanent activity of self-scrutiny and subjectivation, an act of confronting one’s innermost inclination and of the self’s battling against itself. What had started in early Christian monastic communities as a ritual of self-formation that was meant to separate the wheat from the chaff and create an elite corps of spiritual ascetics was now viewed as attainable by, and therefore recommended to, all believers. We have seen a similar process of diffusion of monastic practices in each of the previous chapters, and I have argued repeatedly that this democratization of practices of belief and self-formation was a critical transition in the processes of subjectivation and subject formation in early modern Catholicism. In no other religious practice was this change as apparent as in the popularization of the examination of conscience. Not only was it recommended now to all, but it was promoted now as an individualized and interiorized self-scrutinizing mechanism whose incessant work is what defi nes the Christian believer’s very subjecthood. Furthermore, the content of the examination was no longer restricted to sins, temptations, or evil inclinations. The early modern extension of the practice of introspection took into account all domains of life. More than ever one was what one discovered within one’s self, and more than ever one was to report to oneself or to another what one discovered within one’s self. Selfscrutiny as a mandatory preparatory stage to confession was augmented now with the demand to be under constant self-surveillance. While this popularization of the examination of conscience was pro-

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moted, the ancient anxieties of uncontrolled access by the laity to forms of spirituality that should be restricted to learned and well-trained clerics also increased. Post-Tridentine Catholicism vigorously opposed the priesthood of all believers, and although religious orders and some theologians advanced practices of belief that in the past had been the domain of monks alone, we should remember the fierce opposition to what other theologians viewed as a revival of the scandal of Beguine vainglory. The acquisition by lay individuals of a permanent mechanism of subjectivation could lead believers who escape institutional control into illusions and Illuminism. Nothing, in fact, prevents practitioners of introspective techniques from trusting the infusion of comprehension they had gained through their practice and dismissing clerical advice. This, in turn, could lead to forms of quietism, of diminishing the centrality of good works and even the sacraments, including the sacrament of penance. Much has been written on the curtailment of allegedly excessive spirituality in early modern Catholicism, so I shall address only two specific manifestations of these anxieties.40 The propagation of spiritual practices of belief by the Jesuits and other orders and theologians went hand in hand with the cultivation of frequent sacramental confession. Frequency was never defi ned, but devout believers were encouraged to confess and take Communion at least once a month. Here, too, early modern religious orders followed in the footsteps of late medieval preachers and theologians, among them Gerson, Thomas à Kempis, and Savonarola, whose influence on the Jesuits we have encountered in previous chapters. Late medieval Franciscans promoted all forms of confession, since this was the best method of dispensing grace, and the Jesuits followed suite, establishing missions in the countryside and sending confessors to schools, confraternities, hospitals, and prisons.41 Frequent confession, according to the Jesuit Jérôme Nadal, was a remedy of individual conscience and a reform of Christianity. In the same visit to Parma in 1540 in which he introduced the examination of conscience to the local population, Pierre Favre also introduced frequent confession. Local preachers attacked it “as a novelty of that time,” but they failed to diminish the enthusiasm of the local population and its immediate spiritual progress.42 During the second half of the sixteenth century and throughout the century that followed, frequent confession became a new norm among spiritual elites. The practice, I suggest, supplemented the examination of conscience and, intentionally or (more likely) unintentionally, prevented the examination of conscience from escaping clerical control. Even when the practitioner of the examination of conscience acquired the means to

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analyze him- or herself alone, attending frequent sacramental confession meant that their self-regulated progress was the object of surveillance. In his consideration of the examination of conscience, an inquiry that frames this chapter, Foucault asserted that the core of the practice was “the nearly infi nite task of telling—telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts.”43 In accord with the Italian Jesuit Paolo Segneri’s guide for penitents of 1669, Foucault argues that the transformation of every desire into a discursive utterance stood at the core of the early modern revolution in penitential practices and served as the essence of general examination.44 As we have seen, this is an accurate description of the transition at hand. Discerning and confessing desires, sins, and transgressions was a foundational element in a wider program of re-formation of the self that Segneri developed in his popular guide. This was equally true for many (or most) other popular guides for examination of conscience, including those of de Sales and Rodriguez. Without contesting the importance of verbalizing and vocalizing thoughts and desires to a confessor, I have argued in this chapter that the examination of conscience went beyond both the avowal and the enumeration of sins to another person, as well as beyond the obtaining of absolution. In its early modern version, this technique of belief trained practitioners to internalize the mechanism of truth-telling not merely about acts and desires, but also about selfhood, about one’s “who-am-I-ness.” It was a technique of self-discovery (or self-formation, subjectivation) as much as it was about telling the self. This individualistic and personalized aspect of the practice, I repeat, occasioned much anxiety about, and some opposition to, the diffusion of the examination of conscience. In fact, one can argue that while Foucault was right in arguing that by subjectivation the subject subjugated himself or herself to new notions of selfhood, it was also the case that this same early modern Catholic self was no longer understood to be only a postlapsarian sinner whose redemption hinged upon confession to another. Now this early modern Catholic self was understood to acquire, through practices of introspection and subjectivation, the capability of governing his or her humanity: of gaining subjecthood.

Epilogue

D

“

o not go outward; truth dwells in the inward man.”1 In this brief comment, Saint Augustine captured not only the essence of Christianity but also a constitutive element of Western culture before and after the Christian hegemony. From Athens and Jerusalem to psychoanalysis and New Age spirituality, introspection has for three millennia lain at the core of identity and self-formation in the West. Cognitive, intellectual, and mental practices of attunedness have been developed, promoted, and at times discarded as practitioners have struggled to fi nd their inner truth. This inner truth has been configured variously as a precondition for citizenship, morality, happiness, and salvation. The early modern practices of belief and subjectivation that I have considered in this book were an essential element of this long-term Western pursuit of self-improvement through introspection. And like all techniques of acquiring self-awareness, they evolved over time. As we have seen, all but one of them had appeared prior to the late Middle Ages; they were adapted and adopted, rather than invented, in early modernity. Yet between 1500 and 1650 techniques of self-formation and introspection underwent dramatic changes that were probably unparalleled since the third and fourth centuries. We might characterize the transformations in the configurations and usages of these practices of belief as a transition from being fi rst and foremost penitential practices to becoming ongoing meditative regimes of self-formation. Penitence, it is true, already assumed re-formation, and self-formation is impossible without penance. Yet the shift in emphasis led to significant changes in the ways penitence, selfhood, and personal change were understood. In the fi rst stage of this transformation, the old and dispersed techniques of self-improvement through acts of penance and reflection were brought together by the Devotio Moderna movement, 142

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Savonarola, Ignatius, and others into a systematic method of becoming a new self. Concurrently, these techniques, which had been practiced sporadically and almost always in monastic communities and among small circles of devout laypersons, burst out of the convent’s walls and the borders of small communities of penitents and converts into society at large. More than ever before, novices, nuns, and laypersons pursued well-ordered techniques of self-interrogation and self-formation as Christian subjects. And more than ever before, members of religious orders put themselves at the service of these laypersons to escort them on their spiritual journey. Meditations not only on the tenets of Christianity, but on one’s own life, were promoted and diffused among believers whose thirst for such knowledge could not be quenched. Of course, those laypersons who performed practices of enhancing belief were spiritual elites—this was far from a mass phenomenon. And yet, in its scope, availability, and social diffusion, the spiritual awakening of early modern Catholicism was unique in character. This radical democratization and popularization of what could be called “the Catholic priesthood of all believers” was risky. Ecclesiastical authorities had long feared unsupervised and unmediated forms of devotion, especially lay Illuminist spirituality. The availability of techniques of self-formation by means of individual examination of one’s interiority among growing segments of the lay population had to raise concerns. Salvation was to be found solely within the church, and reliance on one’s own spiritual experiences and insights could challenge the hierarchical structures of Christianity— social, gendered, theological, and educational. At the same time, encouraging devout people to become better Christians was not only foundational to the raison d’être of the church, but a necessity at a time when rival Protestant claims to providing a pathway to salvation were being received with continually increasing warmth. Importantly, the training of spiritually minded individuals in practices of self-formation and introspection was taking place within a competitive society. Early modern Protestants, too, offered new forms of self-formation, penance, and conversion. Indeed, the Protestant version of the early modern re-formation of selves and subjecthood become the standard model of individual modernity and subjectivation. Challenging this stance, I have argued that an unbiased examination of Catholic spirituality of the period unveils the wealth and ingenuity of early modern Catholic practices of selfhood. This being said, if the fi rst half of the sixteenth century witnessed the burgeoning of new practices of introspection and self-formation, the last

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years of that century and all of the next were marked by attempts to restructure and restrict these innovations. General confession in its more individualistic form, the one that did not necessarily lead to sacramental confession but only served as a means to ponder one’s life and make sense of it, did not survive past the seventeenth century. By 1600 the practices described in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, which had offered the most profound potential for individual and personal self-formation, had been reshaped as pastoral and pedagogical ones, their psychagogical possibilities blunted. And by the second half of the seventeenth century spiritual direction was focused on preparation for the sacramental confession of sins, and often, especially if the practitioner was a woman, the freedom to choose one’s director was curtailed. The examination of conscience remained untouched, maintaining a tradition of subjectivation by means of internalized subjugation to the teachings of the church and above all to the fundamental notion that an internal truth about identity is found within the person and constitutes his or her true self. Crucially, the intense desire of late medieval and early modern believers to assume new selves and to reconnect with a God from whom they had been separated after the Fall owing to personal sinfulness arose from these individuals themselves. Clerics and lay spiritual directors may have encouraged the cultivation and diffusion of practices of introspection and self-formation, but this process did not include new norms and truth regimes imposed from above, nor did the process necessarily serve agendas of the church and state. Circles of lay individuals who sought self-examination and self-cultivation, and of spiritual pilgrims in search of their “inner self” and “interior person,” pre-dated the systematic development of guides for the instruction of the laity. In fact, the church was known to oppose such attempts, as was the case not only with the Alumbrados but also with the lay Dominican circles in the Italian peninsula and even with the young Ignatius of Loyola. Thus, while the process of becoming a new self was almost always negotiated by clerics (with Loyola a glowing exception), it was a process in which the initiator, namely the spiritual pilgrim or penitent, maintained a significant degree of agency. The subjecthood of the devout Christian, Foucault pointed out, came into being only through relations of truth-telling to another person who held the keys to discerning and self-discerning the self. Through this telling, however, the truth teller acquired a recognition of his or her singularity, of being a work in progress, and of his or her ability to map again and again a route toward self-formation. The more one advanced in this process

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of truth-telling and subjectivation, the more one acquired the capabilities that culminated, as we have seen in the examination of conscience, when the professional aid became secondary to the interiorized subjugation of the self to its own ceaselessly scrutinizing gaze. There is no self without the Other, as the French theologian Pierre Nicole stated in his De la connoissance de soi-même of 1671, a brilliant merging of the classical and Augustinian traditions of theories of selfhood and the culmination of early modern discussions of subjectivation.2 As such, there is no self-formation without power and power relations—that is, without politics. Becoming a new self and maturing into subjecthood meant being liberated from desires that are found within the self and pervert it. This process was possible only through submission to the church, because in Catholicism salvation and freedom were attainable within this body alone. However, coming into being as subjects in general, and coming into being as subjects to the church’s authority in particular, were delicate processes that played out not in the guides that provided the source material for this work, but in the intimacy of encounters between two individuals. The lived experiences of the individuals who were formed by exercises of spiritual subjectivation are difficult to reconstruct. Tellingly, it was mostly women who left us fi rsthand accounts of the impact of these practices of self-formation on the practitioner. Teresa of Ávila, Madame de Chantal, and Margaret Mary Alacoque are only some of the early modern women whose pursuit of self-knowledge and subjectivation was narrated not as a record of triumph but as a story of personal struggle. In their writings we glimpse not only the challenge of achieving spiritual maturity and liberating oneself from libidinal and other hazardous energies, but also the difficulty of fi nding someone capable of co-navigating the travails of subjectivation. Certainly, the unique inner selves that practitioners discovered were already known: they were enfolded into the grand narrative of humanity’s past and present damnation and its future salvation. Moreover, the truth of the “authentic” self that was to be unearthed and understood was the ontotheological truth of Christianity. Cognitive and emotive practices of belief functioned within a preexisting set of metaphysical assumptions. Belief preceded practice even if practice enhanced and reinforced belief. Thus the practices with which I have engaged here hardly recall the idealized, secular, and mostly male self-affirming and self-created modern individual, who claims to set his own goals and to operate within a sphere of total liberty. Yet, rather than placing into question the modernity of the

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practices of early modern subjectivation, this observation might lead us to rethink the self-congratulatory and doubtful portrayal of modern secular subjecthood. The process of becoming a new self was always mediated and controlled, the space and techniques of self-discovery forever restricted. And yet, by co-constructing a narrative of his or her life and mapping his or her interiority, the penitent acquired not only tools but also responsibility. The abiding notion that life was sinful because it was controlled by ignorance or the energies of temptation and desire found within the self thus lost much of its luster. Ascribing sin to demonic illusions, too, became a much more difficult task. Spiritual exercises of belief and subjectivation allowed the confessing and re-forming subject to acquire agency, as well as the notion that the self is the truth it tells itself (or an other) about itself. This truth-telling agency has been identified by Foucault and others with modern subjecthood. I submit that such agency may be considered an enduring contribution of Catholic practices of belief to modern notions of selfhood.

Notes

Ch apter 1 1. Jean Gerson, De mystica theologia, ed. André Combes (Lugano: Thesaurus Mundi, 1958), 15, quoted in Susan E. Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 213. 2. The French subjectivasion should be actually translated into English as “subjectivization” (as it was by Anthony Forster in his translation of “The Battle for Chastity,” in Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette [New York: Routledge, 1999], 196. But the English term subjectivation has come to dominate discussions of the topic in both translations of Foucault’s own works and works of his followers. 3. Charles Taylor, “The Concept of a Person,” in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 97; see also Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 4. Most troubling, I suppose, is my interchangeable use of the terms self and subject. Nonetheless, I am well aware of the fact that they have different histories and reflect different cultural and theoretical approaches to personhood. For a good overview of the literature, see Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997); and Jerrold E. Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 5. Steven Justice, “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?” Representations 103, no. 1 (2008): 1–29. 6. Or, as Foucault put it, we cannot extricate ourselves from our own “conditions of possibility of knowledge” in any given time and context. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982– 83 (New York: Picador, 2111), lecture of January 5, 1983, 20. 7. For a recent introduction, see Richard Biernacki, “Practice,” in Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology Online, ed. George Ritzer, http://www.sociologyencyclopedia .com/public/.

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notes to pages 6–8

8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 42; and Rodney Needham, Belief, Language, and Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), 108, 131. 10. William Robertson-Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (Edinburgh: Black, 1889); Edward B. Taylor, Primitive Culture ([1871]; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1920); E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956); and Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944). 11. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 22, 121; and Marcel Mauss, “Body Techniques,” in Sociology and Psychology: Essays (London: Routledge, 1979), 95–123. 12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), and Sens et non- sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948); and Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). See also Robert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 87–102. 13. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 68. 14. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87–125. 15. Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 41. See also in the same volume “Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual,” 83–124; “On Discipline and Humility in Medieval Christian Monasticism,” 125– 67; Asad, “What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?” and “Thinking about Agency and Pain,” in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 21– 66 and 67– 99; Malcolm Ruel, “Christians as Believers,” in Religious Organization and Religious Experience, ed. John David (London: Academic Press, 1982), 9–31; and Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 157; emphasis in original. Also relevant are Anne M. Gade, Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur’an in Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004); and the works of Thomas J. Csordas, esp. “The Somatic Modes of Attention,” Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 2 (1993): 135–56, and The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 16. Rebecca Lester, Jesus in Our Womb: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005). 17. Ernst Feil, Religio: Die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs von Früchristentum bis zur Reformation (Göttingen: Vandenboeck & Ruprecht, 1997); and Blaise Pascal, Pensées, no. 418. Abêtir means to act like an animal, to neutralize the human faculty of reason that obstructs faith. See also Asad, “Thinking about Agency and Pain,” 90. For a detailed exposition of current debates on the meaning of faith, see

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John Bishop, “Faith,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries.faith/. 18. Terence Penelhum, “The Analysis of Faith in St. Thomas Aquinas,” in Faith, ed. Terence Penelhum (London: Collier Macmillan, 1989), 113–33. 19. I have found Charles King, “The Organization of Roman Religious Beliefs,” Classical Anthropology 22, no. 2 (2003): 275–312, very useful. See also Paul Ricoeur, “Structure et herméneutique,” in Le confl it des interprétations: Essais d’herméneutique (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 31– 63; Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Tests and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 242–54; and Moshe Halbertal, David Kurzweil, and Abraham Sagi, eds., On Faith: Studies in the Concept of Faith and Its History in the Jewish Tradition, (Jerusalem: Keter, 2005) [in Hebrew]. 20. Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Believing: An Historical Perspective (Oxford: One World, 1998); and Michel de Certeau, “What We Do When We Believe,” in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 196. 21. Webb Keane, “The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion,” in “The Objects of Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to the Production of Knowledge,” supplement S1, special issue, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14(2008): S117. 22. Cf. Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 6; see also Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 23. [Everard Mercurian?], “Short Instruction on Giving the Exercises,” in Ignatius of Loyola, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599, ed. Martin E. Palmer (St. Louis, MO: IJS, 1996), 111. My reading of this document and of the balance between physical and spiritual dimension of the Catholic practices of self-cultivation is different from the one proposed in J. Michelle Molina, To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–1767 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), esp. 37–45. 24. Tanya M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Vintage, 2012); and Arnaud Halloy and Vlad Naumescu, eds., “Learning Spirit Possession,” special issue, Ethnos 77, no. 2 (2012), especially the introduction by Halloy and Naumescu, 155–76, and Naumescu, “Learning the ‘Science of Feelings’: Religious Training in Eastern Christian Monasticism,” 227–51. See also Naumescu, “The Case for Religious Transmission: Time and Transmission in the Anthropology of Christianity,” Religion and Society: Advances in Research 2 (2011): 54–71. 25. See, among many other works, Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and Nina P. Azari and Dieter Birnbacher, “The Role of Cognition and Feeling in Religious Experience,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 39, no. 4 (2004): 901–18. But see the critique in David

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Berliner and Ramon Sarró, “On Learning Religion,” in Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches, ed. David Berliner and Ramon Sarró (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 1–20. 26. See Carlo Severi, “Learning to Believe: A Preliminary Approach,” and Michael Lambek, “On Catching Up with Oneself: Learning to Know That One Means What One Does,” both in Berliner and Sarró, Learning Religion, 21–30 and 65– 81 respectively. 27. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Carruthers, “Mental Images, Memory, Storage, and Composition in the High Middle Ages,” Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung; Zeitschrift des Mediävistenverbandes 13, no. 1 (2008): 63–79; Carruthers, “Thinking in Images: the Spatial and Visual Requirements of Cognition and Recollection in Medieval Psychology,” in Signs and Symbols: Proceedings of the 2006 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. John Faulkner Cherry and Ann Payne (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2009): 1–17; Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 40–41; Tanya M. Luhrmann and Rachel Morgain, “Prayer as Inner Sense Cultivation: An Attentional Learning Theory of Spiritual Experience,” Ethos 40, no. 4 (2012): 359– 89; and Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building- Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 71. 28. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 29. Severi, “Learning to Believe”; Tanya M. Luhrmann, Howard Nusbaum, and Ronald Thisted, “The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity,” American Anthropologist 112, no. 1 (2010): 66–78; and Keane, “The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion.” 30. Lambek, “On Catching Up with Oneself,” 73, 79; cf. Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered, esp. 26–48. 31. Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984), ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 223–51; Asad, “Thinking about Agency and Pain,” 35; and Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001), 210. 32. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 182: “Être un sujet, c’est être un sujet” (being a subject means being subjected). Althusser was probably influenced by Georges Bataille, “La souveraineté” (1954), in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 8 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 283– 98. My discussion has been shaped by Étienne Balibar, “Subjection and Subjectivation,” in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994), 1–15; Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 12–17; and Mark G. E. Kelly, The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault (New York: Routledge, 2009), 78–108. 33. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 109–33; Judith Butler, Psychic Life of Power; Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subver-

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sion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999); Asad, “Thinking about Agency and Pain,” 69; and Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 34. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982 (New York: Picador, 2004), lecture of February 17, 1982, 255; and see lecture of March 3, 1982, esp. 362– 67. See also Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 35. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (London: Penguin, 1990– 92), vols. 2 and 3; “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Hermeneutics and Structuralism, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 208–26; The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984 (New York: Picador, 2012); and Du gouvernement des vivants: Cours au Collège de France, 1979–1980 (Paris: Gallimard & Seuil, 2012); quote from Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, lecture of March 3, 1982, 332. 36. Phyllis Mack, “Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency: Reflections on Eighteenth- Century Quakerism,” Signs 29, no. 1 (2003): 156. See also Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9; and Silvia Mostaccio, Early Modern Jesuits between Obedience and Conscience during the Generalate of Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1615) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 5–12. 37. Lester, Jesus in Our Womb; J. Michelle Molina, “Technologies of the Self: The Letters of Eighteenth- Century Mexican Jesuit Spiritual Daughters,” History of Religions 47, no. 4 (2008): 282–303; Molina, To Overcome Oneself; and see Amy Hollywood, “Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography,” Journal of Religion 84, no. 4 (2004): 514–28. 38. “Notre franc-arbitre n’est jamais si franc que quand il est esclave de la volonté de Dieu. Comme il n’est jamais si serf que quand il set notre proper volonté: jamais il n’a tant de vie que quand il meurt à soi-même et jamais il n’a tant de mort que quand il vit à soi.” François de Sales, Traité de l’amour de Dieu, 12:10. 39. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, 2:1, in The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, ed. and trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1946), 2:218. 40. Jean-Joseph Surin, Correspondance, ed. Michel de Certeau (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966), letter 407, 1212; and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, “Traité de la connoissance de Dieu et de soi-même,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gauthier Frères, 1828–31), 13:65. See also Mino Bergamo, L’anatomie de l’âme de François de Sales à Fénelon (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1994).Within the Christian tradition, the recognition of the connection between self-knowledge and the knowledge of God goes back at least to Clement of Alexandria (early third century) and Augustine. In The Instructor, Clement declares that “to know oneself is to know God” (Book 3:1), and Augustine starts his prayer in the opening chapter of Book 2 of his Soliloquies with the words “Nouerim me, nouerim te” (Let me know myself, let me know thee). Augustine, “Two Books of Soliloquies,” in Nicene and Post- Nicene Fathers, First Series, ed. Philip Schaff (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 7:2. 41. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject and Courage of Truth. “Self-in-

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formation” is Seigel’s apt term to describe the constant playoff of practices, embodiments, consciousness, and social interaction that shape and reshape identities. See Seigel, Idea of the Self, 31. 42. This is the topic of Mostaccio, Early Modern Jesuits between Obedience and Conscience. 43. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Penguin, 2002); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Briefe, vol. 4 (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1967), 187, quoted in Nicholas D. Paige, Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradictions of Modernity in Seventeenth- Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 239 n. 24; Georges Gusdorf, “De l’autobiographie initiatique à l’autobiographie genre littéraire,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 75, no. 6 (1975): 957– 94; and Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self- Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 44. Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 45. Jacob Vernet, Réflexions sur les moeurs, la religion et le culte (Geneva: Philibert et Chirol, 1769); Albert Réville, Prolégomène de l’histoire des religions (Paris: Fischbacher, 1881); and Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life. See also John Bossy, “Some Elementary Forms of Durkheim,” Past and Present 95 (1982): 3–18; Patrick Cabanel, “L’institutionnalisation des ‘sciences religieuses’ en France (1879–1908): Une entreprise protestante?” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français 140, no. 1 (1994): 33– 80; Peter Burke, “The Repudiation of Ritual in Early Modern Europe,” in The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 223–38; and R. Emmet McLaughlin, “Truth, Tradition and History: The Historiography of High/Late Medieval and Early Modern Penance,” in A New History of Penance, ed. Abigail Firey (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 19–71. On Vernet, see David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 69–111. 46. Even Keane falls into this trap in an otherwise extremely careful revisionist work: see Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounters (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 56–72. 47. The dismantling of this traditional dichotomy is at the very center of current work on ritual. See, among others, Asad, “Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual,” in Genealogies of Religion, 55–79; Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Susan C. Karrant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997); Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Christian Grosse, Les rituals de la Cène (Geneva: Droz, 2008); Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,” Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (2008): 497–528; and Matthew Engelke, “Material

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Religion,” in Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. Robert A. Orsi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 209. 48. Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1; Jean Delumeau, Le péché et la peur: La culpabilisation en Occident (XIIIe– XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Fayard, 1983); Delumeau, L’aveu et le pardon: Les difficultés de la confession, XIII– XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1990); Wolfgang Reinhard, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des Konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977): 226–52; Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment,” Catholic Historical Review 75 (1989): 383–404; Heinz Schilling, “Confessional Europe,” in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, ed. Thomas A. Brady Jr., Heiko A. Obermann, and James D. Tracy(Leiden: Brill, 1995), 2:641–75; Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe, 1550–1750 (London: Routledge, 1989); Paolo Prodi, ed., Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994); Paolo Prodi and Wolfgang Reinhard, eds., Il concilio di Trento e il moderno (Bologna: Mulino, 1996); and Thomas A. Brady Jr., “Confessionalization: The Career of a Concept,” in Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan, ed. John M. Headley, Hans J. Hillerbrand, and Anthony J. Papalas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 1–20. For a more nuanced view, see Asad, “Ritual and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual,” in Genealogies of Religion, 114–23. 49. Foucault, Du gouvernement des vivants, lectures of February 6 and 13, 1980, pp. 91–138. 50. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975 (New York: Picador, 2003), lecture of February 19, 1975, pp. 183– 84. 51. Michel Foucault, Wrong- Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice (Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 52. Bernard McGinn, “The Language of Inner Experience in Christian Mysticism,” in Spiritus 1, no. 1 (2001): 156–71. On interiority in the eleventh and twelfth centuries see Ineke van ’t Spijker, Fictions of the Inner Life: Religious Literature and Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004). On Eckhart, see Ben Morgan, On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); the author also emphasizes the role of Eckhart’s student Heinrich Seuse in developing Eckhart’s anthropology of the self. 53. Morgan, On Becoming God, 137–38. For a general history of the theology of personal experience in the period, see Hans Geybels, Cognitio Dei Experimentalis: A Theological Genealogy of Christian Religious Experience (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007). 54. My discussion is based on the masterful John van Engen, “Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life”: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). See also Robert J. Bast, ed., The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety: Essays by Berndt Hamm (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Penn-

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sylvania Press, 2008); and Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Ch apter 2 1. Ana de San Bartolomé, Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Darcy Donahue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 59, 61. 2. Surin, Correspondance, letter of November 7, 1634, to Achille d’Attichy, 235; and Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 206–40. The tradition of sacred ignorance was crucial, of course, for the social recognition of female mystics, among them Clare of Assisi and Angela de Foligno. For the early modern period, see Antoine Roullet, “Le savoir contemplatif: Les religieuses et les limites de la connaissance (Espagne, XVIe siècle),” Revue historique 665 (2013): 119–31. 3. François Vandenbroucke, Irénée Hausherr, Michel Olphe- Galliard, et al., “Direction spirituelle,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité: Ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, vol. 3, ed. Marcel Villar, Charles Baumgartner, and André Rayez (Paris: Beauchesne, 1957), cols. 1002–1129; Irénée Noye, “Note pour une histoire de la direction spirituelle,” La vie spirituelle 34, supplement (1955): 251–76; Michela Catto, Isabella Gagliardi, and Rosa Maria Parrinello, eds., Direzione spirituale tra ortodossia ed eresia: Dalle scuole fi losofiche antiche al Novecento (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2002); Michela Catto, ed., La direzione spirituale tra medioevo ed età moderna: Percorsi di ricerca e contesti specifici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004); Lawrence S. Cunningham, “Spiritual Direction as Christian Pedagogy,” in Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities, ed. John Van Engen (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 330–50; and Benito Goya, Luce e guida nel cammino: Manuale di direzione spirituale (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 2004). 4. Saint Benedict, Rule of St. Benedict, 2:12; cf. chapter 46:2 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981). 5. Marie de Beauvilliers, Conférences spirituelles d’une supérieure à ses religieuses (Paris, 1837), 12, 115. 6. Thomas Merton, Spiritual Direction and Meditation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1960), 16. 7. John of the Cross, “Flame of Living Love,” 3:46, in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1991), 691. 8. Mario Rosa, “Introduzione,” in “La ‘direzione spirituale’: Percorsi di ricerca e sondaggi; contesti storici tra età antica, medioevo ed età moderna,” special issue, Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico di Trento 24 (1998): 305–13; Giovanni Filoramo, “Introduzione,” in Storia della direzione spirituale, vol. 1, L’età antica, ed. Giovanni Filoramo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2006), 5– 6. 9. Foucault, Abnormal, lecture of February 19, 1975, 167– 99; and Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78 (New York: Picador, 2007). 10. Adriano Prosperi, “Dalle ‘divine madri’ ai ‘Padri spirituali,’” in Women and

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Men in Spiritual Culture, XIV– XVII Centuries: A Meeting of South and North, ed. Elisja Schulte van Kessel (The Hague: Netherlands Government Printing Office, 1986), 71– 90; Gabriella Zarri, “Disciplina regolare e pratica di coscienza: Le virtù e i comportamenti sociali in comunità femminili (secc. XVI–XVIII),” in Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. Paolo Prodi, Annali dell’Istituto storico italogermanico 40 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), 257–78; Zarri, ed., Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana dal XV al XVII secolo: Studi e testi a stampa (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 1996); Zarri, “Dal Consilium spirituale alla Discretio spirituum: Teoria e pratica della direzione spirituale tra i secoli XIII e XV,” in Consilium: Teorie e pratiche del consigliare nella cultural medievale, ed. Carla Casagrande, Chiara Crisciani, and Silvana Vecchio (Florence: Sismel, 2004), 93–107; and Adelisa Malena and Daniela Solfaroli Camillocci, “La direzione spirituale delle donne in età moderna: Percorsi della ricerca contemporanea,” Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 24 (1998): 439– 60. Daniela Solfaroli Camillocci, “La madre e il confessore: Il problema della direzione spirituae nel ‘Libro de la vita’ di Caterina da Genova,” Rivista di Storia e letteratura religiosa 38 (2001): 437–57, follows the interesting transition of the relationship between Catherine of Genoa and her confessor. While in the manuscript version of her Life she was directing him, by the time the Life was published in 1551, the confessor was portrayed as the director and the saint as the directee. 11. Jean-Pierre Schaller, “Direction spirituelle,” in Dictionnaire critique de théologie, ed. Jean-Yves Lacoste and Olivier Riaudel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 336–38. 12. Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza: Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin: Einaudi, 1996); Giovanni Romeo, Esorcisti, confessori e sessualità femminile nell’Italia della Controriforma (Florence: Le Lettere, 1998); Guido Mongini, “La direzione spirituale: Percorsi di ricerca e sondaggi-contesti storici tra età antica, medioevo ed età moderna,” Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 24 (1998): 315–21. 13. Alfonso Maria de Liguori, “Pratica del Confessore, Per ben exercitare il suo minister (1755),” in Theologia Moralis (Naples: Johannis de Simone, 1755), 2:747. For the argument as it is presented above, see Emilio Lage, “S. Alfonso e la direzione spirituale,” Spicilegium historicum Congregationis SSmi Redemptoris 48 (2000): 9–48; Patrizia Bertini Malgarini and Miriam Turrini, “Il confessore comme direttore d’anime in Alfonso Maria de Liguori,” in Catto, Direzione spirituale tra medioevo ed età moderna, 229– 87; and Emilio Lage, “S. Alfonso Maria de Liguori e la direzione spirituale,” in Zarri, Storia della direzione spirituale, vol. 3, L’età moderna, 527–41. In his Pratica, the Italian bishop did indeed advise confessors to instruct confessants in how to discern God’s presence within their souls and how to move from prayer and meditation to contemplation. The guide, however, deals with “assisting young confessors as they undertake the direction of devout souls” who are pursuing perfection and want to “grow in the love of God.” In other words, it was compiled to help confessors who are confronted with pressure from believers to help them grow spiritually, and as such is far from being an imposition of the sacramental authority of the confessors on the advisee. On Liguori, see also Frederick M. Jones, ed., Alphonsus de Liguori: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1999).

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14. Alison Weber, “Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform,” Sixteenth Century Journal 31, no. 1 (2000): 123–46; Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Barbara B. Diefendorf, “Barbe Acarie and her Spiritual Daughters: Women’s Spiritual Authority in Seventeenth- Century France,” in Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdisciplinary View, ed. Cordula Van Wyhe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 155–71. See also Patricia Ranft, A Woman’s Way: The Forgotten History of Women Spiritual Directors (New York: Palgrave, 2000). Ranft’s defi nition of spiritual direction is much broader than mine and includes prophecy and spiritual patronage. 15. See, for example, Adelisa Malena, L’eresia dei perfetti: Inquisizione romana ed esperienze mistiche nel Seicento italiano (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 2003), 113–17. 16. There is a huge and growing body of literature on women’s spiritual diaries in early modern Catholicism. See, among others, Jacques le Brun, “L’institution et le corps: Lieux de la mémoire d’après les biographies spirituelles féminines du XVIIe siècle,” Corps écrit 11 (1984): 111–231; le Brun, “À corps perdu: Les biographies spirituelles féminines du XVIIe siècle,” Temps de la réflexion 7 (1986): 389–408; Frank Bowman, “Le status littéraire de l’autobiogrpahie spirituelle,” in Le statut de la littérature: Mélanges offerts à Paul Bénichou, ed. Marc Fumaroli (Geneva: Droz, 1982), 313–34; Isabelle Poutrin, Le voile et la plume: Autobiographie et sainteté féminine dans l’Espagne moderne (Madrid: Casa de Velázques, 1995); Marilena Modica Vasta, “Misticismo femminile e trasgressione sessuale nelle eresie di fi ne Seicento: Il caso siciliano,” in Donne santé, santé donne: Esperienza religiosa e storia di genere (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1996), 211–34; Giovanni Pozzi, “Il ‘parere’ autobiografico di Veronica Giuliani,” Strumenti critici, n.s. 2 (1987): 161– 92; Giovanni Pozzi and Claudio Leonardi, eds., Scrittrici mistiche italiane (Genoa: Marietti, 1988), 21–42; Massimo Lollini, “Scrittura obbediente e mistica tridentina in Veronica Guiliani,” Annali d’italianistica 13 (1995): 351–70; Nicky Hallett, Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Elena Bottoni, Scrittura dell’anima: Esperienze religiose femminili nella Toscana des Settecento (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 2009); Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza, 431– 64; Prosperi, “Diari femminili e discernimento degli spiriti: Le mistiche della prima età moderna in Italia,” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 2 (1994): 77–103; Kathleen A. Myers and Amanda Powell, A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); and Adelisa Malena, “Ego-Documents or ‘Plural Compositions?’ Reflections on Women’s Obedient Scriptures in the Early Modern Catholic World,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 1, no. 1 (2012): 97–113, and the bibliography there. For a thorough discussion of a spiritual diary by a male, see Filippo Baldinucci, Diario spirituale, ed. Giuseppe Parigino (Florence: Le Lettere, 1995). 17. Paul Rabbow, Seelenführung: Methodik der Exerzitien in der Antike (Munich: Kösel, 1954); Garth Fowden, “Religious Communities,” in Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, ed. Glen W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, Oleg Grabar (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), 82–106; Irénée Hausherr, Spiritual Direction in the Early Christian East (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990); Michel Senellart, “La pratique de la direction de conscience,” in Foucault et la philosophie antique, ed. Frédéric Gros and

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Carlos Lévy (Paris: Kimé, 2003), 153–74; Guy G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 110–27; and Foucault, Du gouvernement des vivants, lecture of March 12, 1980, 231–46. 18. See Foucault’s detailed discussion of spiritual direction in early Christian monasteries in Du gouvernement des vivants, lectures of March 19 and 26, 1980, 247–313. 19. Quoted in Jean Leclercq, François Vandenbroucke, and Louis Bouyer, The Spirituality of the Middle Ages (Wellwood: Burns & Oates, 1968), 325. 20. Vandenbroucke, Hausherr, Olphe- Galliard, et al., “Direction spirituelle,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité: Ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, vol, “Direction spirituelle,” in Villar, Baumgartner, and Rayez, Dictionnaire de spiritualité, vol. 3, cols. 1082– 98. 21. Bernard of Clairvaux, “De diversis,” sermon 8:7, in Opera (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–77), 1:116; “In circumcisio Domini,” sermon 3:11, 4:290– 91; and Epistle 87:7, 7:228. 22. Bernard of Clairvaux, “In obitu domini Humberti,” 4, in Opera, 5:443–44. 23. Andrea Tilatti, “La direzione spirituale: Un percorso di ricerca attraverso il secolo XIII nell’ordine dei Predicatori,” in Dalla penitenza all’ascolto delle confessioni: Il ruolo dei frati mendicanti (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1996), 125–73. 24. Gabriella Zarri, Le sante vive (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990); Anna Benvenuti, “In castro poenitentiae”: Santità e società femminile nell’Italia medievale (Rome: Herder, 1990); Tilatti, “Direzione spirituale,” 128–31; and John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 25. Giovanni Dominici, Regola del governo di cura familiare, ed. Donato Salvi (Florence: Angiolo Garinei, 1860), 2–3; and Antonino de Firenze, Confessionale; “Curam illius habe”; Medicina dell’anima (Bologna, 1481). See also Seneca, “On Tranquility of Mind,” 1:2–3, in Moral Essays (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1928–35), 2:202–3. 26. Bartolomé de Medina, Breve instrucción de como se ha de administrar el sacramento de la penitencia (1579; Barcelona, 1604), fols. 44–47. Compare Lorenzo Davidico, Medicina dell’anima (Vercelli, 1568); Gaspare Loarte, Avisi di sacerdoti et confessori (Parma, 1584), 84– 88; Juan de Ávila, “Reglas muy provechosas para andar en el camino de Nuestro Señor,” in Obras del venerable maestro Juan de Ávila apóstol de la Andalucía (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1792–1806), 9:352; and Martino Fornari, Institutio confessariorum en continens (Rome, 1610), 98. By the seventeenth century, the comparison of the confessor to a physician of the soul is ubiquitous. See Bertini Malgarini and Turrini, “Il confessore comme direttore d’anima,” in Catto, Direzione spirituale tra medievo ed età moderna, 210–20; and Wietse de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul: Confessions, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter- Reformation Milan (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 53– 63. 27. Maria Pia Paoli, “Antonino da Firenze O.P. e la direzione dei laici,” in Zarri, Storia della direzione spirituale, vol. 3, L’età moderna, 85–130. 28. Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life, 282– 93. 29. Battista da Crema, Lo specchio interiore: Opera divina per la cui lettione ciascuno potrà facilmente ascendere al colmo della perfettione (Milan, 1540), 55v; see also

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da Crema, Via de aperta verità (Venice, 1525). The best current discussion of da Crema’s spirituality is Massimo Firpo, Nel labirinto del mondo: Lorenzo Davidico tra santi, eretici, inquisitori (Florence: Olschki, 1992), 16–41. See also Orazio Premoli, Storia dei Barnabiti nel Cinquecento (Rome: Desclée, 1913), 17–30; and Aldo Zagni, La contessa di Guastalla (Reggiolo: Corno d’Oro, 1987). Gaetano da Thiene himself was a prominent spiritual director of elite women. See Francesco Andreu, Lettere di San Gaetano Tiene (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1954). 30. On Negri, her role as spiritual mother, and her own trial, see Andrea Erba, “Il ‘caso’ di Paola Antonia Negri nel Cinquecento italiano,” in Schulte van Kessel, Women and Men in Spiritual Culture, 193–211; Massimo Firpo, “Paola Antonia Negri monaca angelica (1508–1555),” in Rinascimento al femminile, ed. Ottavia Niccolo (Bari: Laterze, 1991), 35– 82; and Rita Bacchiddu, “L’eredità spirituale di fra Battista da Crema: Paola Antonia Negri e Marco Antonio Pagani,” in Zarri, Storia della directione spirituale, vol. 3, L’età moderna, 221–37. 31. Gabriella Zarri, Il carteggio tra don Leone Bartolini e un gruppo di gentildonne bolognesi negli anni del concilio di Trento (1545–1563) (Rome, 1986) (= Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà 7 [1986]: 337–885; and Romana Guarnieri, “‘Nec domina nec ancilla, sed socia’: Tra casi di direzione spirituale tra Cinque e Seicento,” in Schulte van Kessel, Women and Men in Spiritual Culture, 111–32. 32. Zarri, Carteggio tra don Leone, 384– 86. 33. Most recently by Melquíades Andrés [Martín], Historia de la mística de la Edad de Oro en España y América (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1994); Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Stefania Pastore, Un’ eresia Spagnola: Spiritualità conversa, Alumbradismo e Inquisizione (1449–1559) (Florence: Olschki, 2004). See also bibliographies in these works. 34. Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, ed. George E. Ganss (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1992), [15]. The number in square brackets refers to the paragraph in all standard editions of the Exercises. The exact relations between the divine director, the terrestrial one, and the trainee continued to bother the Jesuit order. Writing a hundred years later, the French Jesuit Louis Lallemant asked why, if the Holy Spirit is the actual spiritual director, there is a need for a human director. His response, echoing the Spanish mystic and spiritual director Francisco de Osuna, was that the Holy Spirit leads us to consult directors and superiors, as we see the light that shines from them and know that they would help us better comprehend God’s will. Lallemant, La doctrine spirituelle, book 4, chapter 4:4, in La vie et la doctrine spirituelle du Père Louis Lallemant, ed. François Courel (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1959), 211–15. 35. Ignatius of Loyola, “Autograph Directory of St. Ignatius” [4], in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 7. 36. On the large body of treatises on the discernment of spirits, see my Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Clare Copeland and Jan Machielsen, eds., Angels of Light? Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 37. Alonso Rodriguez, L’ejercicio de perfección y virtudes cristianas (chapters 8 and

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15); I have used the English translation, The Practice of Christian and Religious Perfection (New York: P. J. Kennedy, 1900), 1:43–45, 83; see also Francisco de Osuna, Third Spiritual Alphabet 8:4, ed. Mary E. Giles (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 220–24. 38. Juan Alfonso de Polanco, “Directory,” chapter 4, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 123–25. 39. Official Directory, chapter 16, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 318. 40. Official Directory, chapter 24, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 327. 41. Claudio Acquaviva, Industriae ad curandos animae morbos (Florence, 1601). Quote from Bernardo de Angelis, Secretary of the Society of Jesus, in his introduction to this edition, 2r. 42. Pierre de Bérulle, “Mémorial de direction pour les supérieurs: Lettre aux supérieurs de l’Oratoire de Jésus pour leur addresser le mémorial de quelques points servant à leur direction,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: Migne, 1856), cols. 818–19. 43. Lallemant, La doctrine spirituelle, book 4, chapter 4:4, in Courel, Vie et doctrine spirituel, 214–16. 44. Lallemant, La doctrine spirituelle, book 2, chapter 6:1– 8, in Courel, Vie et doctrine spirituel, 121–24. 45. Lallemant, La doctrine spirituelle, book 4, chapter 4:4, in Courel, Vie et doctrine spirituel, 211. See also Jean-Jacques Olier, L’esprit d’un directeur des âmes, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1856), 1195. 46. “Monita circa confessions” (January 1544), in Petrus Faber (Peter Faber), Fabri monumenta: Beati Petri Fabri, primi sacerdotis e Societate Jesu; Epistolae, memoriale et processus, ex autographis aut archetypis potissimum deprompta, MHSI 48 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1972), 245–55; a different English-language version was published as “The Memoriale,” entry 345 (June 30, 1543), in Pierre Favre, The Spiritual Writings of Pierre Favre, ed. Edmond C. Murphy and John W. Padberg (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), 354– 61. 47. Gaspar de Loarte, The Exercise of a Christian Life ([Rouen], 1581), 1v–3v. 48. Teresa of Avila, “Life,” chapter 13, in Peers, The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, 1:75– 82; cf. Life, 19:15, 40:8. All references in the text are to the Peers edition. 49. Juan de Ávila, “Reglas muy provechosas para andar en el camino de Nuestro Señor,” Obras 9:356; François de Sales will later argue that only one in ten thousand directors was qualified. See François de Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote (Paris: Roches, 1930), 1:4: “Choose one among a thousand, [Juan of] Avila says; and I say among ten thousand.” 50. Compare Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle, 6:1. See also Joel Giallanza, “Spiritual Direction According to St. Teresa of Avila,” Contemplative Review 12 (1979): 1– 9; Alison Parks Weber, “Teresa di Gesù e la direzione spirituale,” in Zarri, Storia della direzione spirituale, vol. 3, L’età moderna, 288–309; and Elena Carrera, Teresa of Avila’s Autobiography: Authority, Power and the Self in Mid- Sixteenth- Century Spain (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2005), 108–12.

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51. Ana de San Bartolomé, Autobiography and Other Writings, 49. See also Alison Weber, “The Partial Feminism of Ana de San Bartolomé,” in Recovering Spain’s Feminist Tradition, ed. Lisa Vollendorf (New York: Modern Language Association of American, 2001), 71. 52. Jean Pierre Caussade, A Treatise on Prayer from the Heart: A Christian Mystical Tradition Recovered for All (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1998), 104. 53. Teresa of Avila, “Constitutions Which the Mother Teresa of Jesus Gave to the Discalced Carmelite Nuns” (1567), in Peers, The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, 3:231. And see Weber, “Spiritual Administration,” 123–46; Raft, A Woman’s Way, 129–41; and Weber, “Teresa di Gesù e la direzione spirituale,” for a thorough discussion of Teresa’s direction. See also Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 54. John of the Cross, Dark Night, 1:2:1–3, and Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, Collected Works, 362– 63. All following references in the body of the chapter are to this edition. 55. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1: 122. 56. Foucault, Du gouvernement des vivants, lecture of March 12, 1980, 225–27. 57. Foucault, Abnormal, lecture of February 19, 1975, 184. 58. My argument here is shaped by Giovanni Vassalli, “The Birth of Psychoanalysis from the Spirit of Technique,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 82 (2001): 3–16. 59. Cf. Filoramo, “Introduzione,” in Filoramo, Storia della direzione spirituale, vol. 1, L’età antica, 6. 60. François Vincent, St. François de Sales, directeur d’âme: L’éducation de la volonté (Paris: Beauchesne, 1923), is still the best book on the topic. See also Étienne Delaruelle, Joseph Perret, and Claude Roffat, Saint François de Sales, maître spirituel (Paris: Spes, 1961); Arnaldo Pedrini, “Il discernimento degli spiriti della direzione spirituale di S. Francesco di Sales,” Rivista di ascetica e mistica 54 (1985): 254–75; and Viviane Mellinghoff-Bourgerie, François de Sales (1567–1622): Un homme de lettres spirituelles; Culture— tradition— epistolarité (Geneva: Droz, 1999). 61. De Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote. On the shaping of his spirituality, see Mary Majella Rivet, The Influence of the Spanish Mystics on the Works of Saint Francis de Sales (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1941); Mino Bergamo, L’anatomie de l’âme de François de Sales à Fénelon (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1994); and John D. Lyons, Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 61– 89. 62. François de Sales, Oeuvres (Annecy: Religieuses de la Visitation, 1892–1932), 12:204. 63. Ibid., 18:379; cf. letter to Chantal of June 24, 1604, ibid., 12:282. 64. Jean de Saint-François, Vie du bienheureux Mre François de Sales, in de Sales, Oeuvres, 20:117. Later in the century, the wit Jean de la Bruyère (1645– 96) made fun of devout women who avoid telling confessors their fault and prefer to seek a spiritual director. With the director one gossips about other people’s faults, he claimed. He went on to ask, “What if the confessor and the director do not agree among themselves on the manner of conduct, who should be the third a woman take to arbitrate between them?” Les caractères, “Des femmes,” 37, 39 (London: John C. Nimmo, 1885), 69. 65. See his letter to Mme. de la Croix d’Autherin, Oeuvres 17:13.

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66. “Jamais ouï parlet de directeur, de maître spiritual, ni de rien qui approchât de cela.” Memoires sur la vie et les vertus de Sainte Jeanne- Françoise Frémyot de Chantal, par la mère Françoise- Madeleine de Chaugy (Paris: Plon, 1874), 38. On Chantal, see Françoise Kermina, Jeanne de Chantal, 1572–1641 (Paris: Perrin, 2000). And on her connections with François de Sales, see Wendy M. Wright, Bond of Perfection: Jeanne de Chantal and François de Sales (New York: Paulist Press, 1985). 67. de Sales, Oeuvres, 12:353. 68. St. Francis de Sales: A Testimony by St. Chantal, ed. Elisabeth Stopp (Hyattsville, MD: Institute of Salesian Studies, 1967), 44, translation modified. 69. “Instruction Given in the Novitiate,” 2, in Jeanne-Françoise Frémyot de Chantal, Saint Jane Frances Frémyot de Chantal: Her Exhortations, Conferences and Instructions (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1947), 419. 70. “Avis a une Supérieure par Notre Sainte Mère,” unpublished ms. in the Archives of the Visitation, Annecy; quoted in Wright, Bond of Perfection, 145. 71. Jeanne-Françoise Frémyot de Chantal, Correspondence, ed. Marie-Patricia Bruns (Paris: Cerf, 1986– 96), letter 422 of October 1621, 1:646. 72. Ranft, A Woman’s Way; Jodi Bilinkoff, “Confessors, Penitents, and the Construction of Identities in Early Modern Avila,” in Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800): Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis, ed. Barbara B. Diefendorf and Carla Hesse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 83–100; Bilinikoff, Related Lives; Diefendorf, “Barbe Acarie and Her Spiritual Daughters,” 155–71; and Guido Mongini, “Dall’obbedienza alla libertà dello spirito: Carismi, esperienza mistica e direzione spirituale nella vicenda di Brigida Morello di Gesù,” in Catto, Direzione spirituale tra medioevo ed età moderna, 105–59. Zarri herself offered a revision of her earlier and more one-dimensional view in “Madri dell’anima: La direzione spirituale femminile nell’età moderna,” in Venire al mondo: L’elaborazione della nascita nelle religioni dell’Occidente, ed. Michelina Borsari, and Danielle Francesconi (Modena: Banca popolare dell’Emilia Romagna, 2003), 107–45. 73. Diefendorf, “Barbe Acarie and Her Spiritual Daughters,” 163. 74. Weber, “Spiritual Administration,” 123–46. 75. Madeleine de Saint-Joseph, Avis pour la conduite de novices (Paris, 1672), 26. See also Barbara Diefendorf, “Discerning Spirits: Women and Spiritual Authority in Counter-Reformation France,” in Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women, ed. Margaret Mikesell and Adele Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 251–55. The image of carrying the heart to be examined appears also in Lallemant, Doctrine spirituelle, book 4, chapter 4:4, in Courel, Vie et doctrine spirituel, 211: “All our life we should reveal our conscience to a superior and to a Spiritual Father . . . as if we could have our entire interiority in our hands to show it to them.” 76. Madeleine de Saint-Joseph, Lettres spirituelles (Bruges: Desclées de Brouwer, 1965), letter 236, n.d., 249–52. 77. See additional examples in Diefendorf, “Discerning Spirits,” 241– 65; and Ranft, A Woman’s Way, 112–25. 78. Teresa of Avila, “Book of the Foundations,” in Peers, The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, 1:36–40; María de San José Salazar, “A los cinco sentidos de neustro Redentor,” in Instrucción de novicias [1602], in Escritos espirituales, ed. Siméon de

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la Sagrada Familia (Rome: OCD, 1979), 449–50. See also Alison Weber, “María de San José: Saint Teresa’s ‘Difficult’ Daughter,” in The Heirs of St. Teresa of Ávila: Defenders and Disseminators of the Founding Mother’s Legacy, ed. Christopher C. Wilson (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2006), 1–20; and Weber, “‘Mute Tongues Beget Understanding’: Recovering the Voice of María de San José,” in Teaching Other Voices: Women and Religion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret King and Albert Rabil Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 167–75. 79. Règle des religieuses de l’Ordre de saint- Benoit reformées par R.P. Mr. Étienne Poncher, évêque de Paris (Paris, 1621), 192. 80. Anne-Marie de Flécelles de Brégy, Modèle de foi, et de patience dans toutes les traverses de la vie et dans les grandes persécutions, ou Vie de la Mère Marie des Anges (Suireau), abbesse de Maubuisson et de Port- Royal (n.p., 1754), 24–28. 81. François Guilloré, La manière de conduire les âmes dans la uie spiritvelle (Paris, 1676), 89. See Linda Timmermans, L’accès des femmes à la culture (1598–1717) (Paris: Champion, 1993), 474–79, 553– 99, for additional examples.

Ch apter 3 1. Karl Rahner, “Ignatius of Loyola Speaks to a Modern Jesuit,” in Ignatius of Loyola, ed. and introd. Paul Imhof (London: Collins, 1979), 13–14. See also the new edition: Karl Rahner, Ignatius of Loyola Speaks, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2013). See the best expositions of these and the following statements in Klaus Fischer, Der Mensch als Geheimnis: Die Anthropologie Karl Rahners (Freiburg: Herder, 1974); Declan Marmion, A Spirituality of Everyday Faith: A Theological Investigation of the Notion of Spirituality in Karl Rahner (Louvain: Peeters Press, 1998); Philip Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Michael Paul Gallagher, “Ignatian Dimensions of Rahner’s Theology,” Louvain Studies 29 (2004): 77– 91. 2. Karl Rahner, “The Immediate Experience of God in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola” (1978), in Rahner, In Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews, 1965–1982, ed. Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowons (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 175–76. 3. Karl Rahner, Bekenntnisse: Rückblick auf 80 Jahre, ed. Georg Sporschill (Vienna: Herold, 1984), 58. 4. “Ignatius Speaks to a Modern Jesuit,” 11; “Christian Living Formerly and Today” (1966), in Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations (London: Crossroad, 1961– 92), 7:15. 5. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, lecture of March 17, 1982, 423. 6. Among Karl Rahner’s critics was none other than his brother Hugo (1900–1968). See Hans Rahner, Ignatius von Loyola als Mensch und Theologe (Freiburg: Herder, 1964). 7. Karl Rahner, “Modern Piety and the Experience of Retreats,” Theological Investigations, 16:136, translation modified. 8. Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954– 84, vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997–2000), 281–301.

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9. Rahner is following here the Belgian Jesuit Joseph Maréchal. See Rahner, “Modern Piety and the Experience of Retreats,” 139. 10. Endean, Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality, 145. 11. Rabbow, Seelenführung, offers the most systematic analysis of classical spiritual exercises. He is also responsible for introducing the term “psychagogy” to describe the training of the soul; see p. 17. See Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life. See also Ilsetraut Hadot, “The Spiritual Guide,” in Classical Mediterranean Spirituality: Egyptian, Greek, Roman, ed. A. H. Armstrong (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 436–59; Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject; Foucault, Government of Self; and Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984 (New York: Picador, 2012). See also Pierre Hadot,” Reflections on the Notion of ‘Cultivation of the Self,’” in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, ed. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Knowledge, 1991), 225–32; Arnold I. Davidson, “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought,” in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. Jan Goldstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 63– 80; and Gros and Lévy, Foucault et la philosophie antique, esp. the articles by Lévy, Laurent Jafro, and Alain Gigandet for critiques of Foucault’s reading of the ancient tradition. 12. Joseph Calveras and Cándido de Dalmases, eds., Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Exercitia spiritualis, MHSI ser. 2, vol. 1 (Rome: IHSI, 1969), 39– 60; Ignacio Iparraguirre, Historia de la práctica de los Ejercicios espirituales de San Ignacio de Loyola (Bilbao: Mensajero del Corazón de Jesús, and Rome: IHSI, 1946–73), 1:29–40; Pedro de Leturia, “La ‘Devotio Moderna’ en el Montserrat de San Ignacio,” in Estudios Ignacianos (Rome: IHSI, 1957), 2:73–88; Leturia, “Libros de horas, Anima Christi, y Ejercicios espirituales de San Ignacio,” in ibid., 2:99–148; Maximilian von Habsburg, Catholic and Protestant Translations of the “Imitatio Christi,” 1425–1650: From Late Medieval Classic to Early Modern Bestseller (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 199–209; Juan Plazaola, ed., Las fuentes de los Ejercicios Espirituales de San Ignacio: Actas del Simposio Internacional (Loyola, 15–19 septiembre 1997) (Bilbao: Mensajero, 1998); and Joseph N. Tylenda, “The Books That Led Ignatius to God,” Review for Religious 57, no. 3 (1998): 286– 98. See also García Jiménez Cisneros, “Exercitatorio de la vida spiritual,” in Obras completas, ed. C. Baraut (Montserrat: L’abadia de Monterrat, 1964), 2:91–454; Javier Melloni, ed., Compendio breve de ejercicios espirituales: Un monje de Montserrat (siglo XVI) (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2006); and see Melloni’s introduction for a thorough discussion of the authorship of this anonymous work. See also Terence O’Reilly, “The Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola and the Exercitatorio de la vida spiritual,” Studia monastica 16 (1974): 301–23; and Heinrich Bacht, “Early Monastic Elements in Ignatian Spirituality: Toward Clarifying Some Fundamental Concepts of the Exercises,” in Ignatius of Loyola: His Personality and Spiritual Heritage, 1556–1956, ed. Friedrich Wulf (St. Louis, MO: IJS, 1977), 200–236. Later in his life Loyola allegedly discouraged the reading of Erasmus’s writings. See Pascual Cebollada, “Loyola y Erasmo: Aportación al studio de la relación entre ambos,” Manresa 62 (1990): 49– 60; the magisterial interpretation of John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 260– 64; the classic study by Marcel Bataillon, “D’Erasme à la Compagnie de Jésus,” in Érasme et l’Espagne, ed. Charles Amiel (Geneva: Droz, 1991), 3:279–304; and

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notes to pages 72–75

Terence O’Reilly, “Saint Ignatius Loyola and Spanish Erasmianism,” AHSI 43 (1974): 310–21. But see also the convincing rebuttal of this rejection of Erasmus in Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “Angels Black and White: Loyola’s Spiritual Discernment in Historical Perspective,” Theological Studies 44 (1983): 241–57. 13. Adrien Demoustier, “L’originalité des ‘Exercices spirituels,’” in Les jésuites à l’âge baroque (1540–1640), ed. Luce Giard and Louis de Vaucelles (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1996), 27–31. 14. Numbers in square brackets refer to standard editions of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. For the English I have used Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, trans. George E. Ganss [Chicago: Loyola Press, 1992]), occasionally altering Ganss’s translations according to the original Spanish and according to the translation by Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean (Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings [London: Penguin Books, 1996]). 15. Luís Gonçalves da Câmara, “Memoriale,” in Ignatius of Loyola, Acta Patris Ignatii scripta a P. Lud. Gonzales de Camara, in Fontes narrativi de S. Ignatio de Loyola, MHSI ser. 4, vol. 66, part 1, Narrationes scriptae ante annum 1557 (Rome: MHSI, 1943) paras. 58–71; Iparraguirre, Historia de la práctica de los Ejercicios, 1:91–105; Fernandez Martín, “Iñigo de Loyola y los alumbrados,” Hispania sacra 35 (1983): 585– 680; and Robert A. Maryks, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity- of- Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 47–52. 16. The traditional Jesuit view is presented in John E. Longhurst, “Saint Igantius at Alcalá, 1526–1527,” AHSI 26 (1957): 252–56. For a new interpretation of the relations between Loyola and the Alumbrados, see Guido Mongini, “Per un profi lo dell’eresia gesuitica: La Compagnia di Gesù sotto processo,” Rivista storica italiana 117 (2005): 26– 63; repr., Mongini, “Ad Christi similitudinem”: Ignazio di Loyola e i primi gesuiti tra eresia e ortodossia; Studi sulle origini della Compagnia di Gesù (Alessandria: Orso, 2011), 45– 81. See also Melquíades Andrés Martín, “Common Denominators of Alumbrados, Erasmians, ‘Lutherans,’ and Mystics: The Risk of a More ‘Intimate’ Spirituality,” in The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind, ed. Angel Alcalá (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1987), 457– 94. 17. For a discussion of the Application of the Senses in the Exercises that argues for a similar inherent connection between content and form, see Wietse de Boer, “Invisible Contemplation: A Paradox in the Spiritual Exercises,” in Meditatio— Refashioning the Self: Theory and Practice in Late Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture, ed. Karl A. E. Enenkel and Walter Melion (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 235–56. 18. Suffice it to mention Robert Persons, The First Book of the Christian Exercise (Rouen, 1582), in both its original Jesuit version and bowdlerized Protestant version, published by Edmund Bunny under the title A Book of Christian Exercise (London, 1584). Gaspar Loarte’s The Exercise of a Christian Life (1557) and Robert Bellarmine’s De ascensione mentis in Deum (1615) were equally popular among Catholic and Protestants alike. 19. Boyle, “Angels Black and White,” suggests plausible sources of influence that shaped Loyola’s understanding of the discernment of operations of the different spirits within one’s soul. This discernment is not to be conflated with the ability to distin-

notes to pages 75–77

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guish true from false prophets and visionaries, as discussed in, among others, Cornelius Roth, Discretio spirituum: Kriterien geistlicher Unterscheidung bei Johannes Gerson (Würzburg: Echter, 2001); Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Wendy Love Anderson, The Discernment of Spirits: Assessing Visions and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). 20. On the importance of the cognitive work in meditation and imagination, see Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 195–212; and Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, 105– 69. 21. Good examples of such late medieval collections of spiritual exercises are Girolamo Savonarola, Triumphus crucis, written in 1492, and “Tractato secundo de la oratione,” in Trattati due diversi dell’orazione (Florence, 1495); and Leone Bartolini, Essercitio spirituale per ogni giorno di quaresima sopra la passion e morte di nostro Signore (Bologna, 1564; repr., Il carteggio tra don Leone Bartolini e un gruppo di gentildonne bolognesi negli anni del concilio di Trento [1545–1563], ed. Gabriella Zarri [Rome, 1986]) (= Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà 7 [1986]: 842–77). Bartolini (see previous chapter) based his exercises on Savonarola’s. 22. There is an immense and growing body of literature on these topics. See, among the more recent additions to the corpus, Spijker, Fictions of the Inner Life; Reindert Falkenburg, Walter S. Melion, and Todd M. Richardson, eds., Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007); Enenkel and Melion, Meditatio— Refashioning the Self; and Thomas Lentes, Religion und Sehen in der vormoderne, vol. 4 of KultBild: Visualität und Religion in der Vormoderne (Berlin: Reimer, 2011). Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), offers a convincing gendered reading of this material. 23. Jean Leclercq, “Exercices spirituels,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité: Ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, vol. 4, pt. 2, ed. Marcel Viller, Charles Baumgartner, and André Rayez (Paris: Beauchesne, 1961), cols. 1902–33. 24. Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life, 140. And see also Nikolaus Staubach, Kirchenreform von unten: Gerhard Zerbolt von Zutphen und die Brüder vom gemeinsamen Leben (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2004). 25. Brian Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 8–23, 101–14; Gur Zak, Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 112–15. 26. To the best of my knowledge, Gertrude’s collection of meditations and prayers was the fi rst to be titled Exercitia Spiritualia. See the critical edition: Gertrude d’Helfta, Oeuvres spirituelles I: Les exercices, ed. Jacques Hourlier and Albert Schmitt, Sources Chrétiennes 127 (Paris: Cerf, 1967). On spiritual exercises among male Cistercians, see Anselme Le Bail, “Les Exercices spirituels dans l’Ordre de Cîteaux,” in Mélanges Marcel Viller (Toulouse: Édition de la Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique, 1949), 164–73.

166

notes to pages 77–83

27. Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life, 269–78. 28. Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ (New York: Vintage, 1998), 1:17. But also: “Always take the counsel of a wise man,” ibid., 1:4. 29. Cisneros, “Exercitatorio de la vida spiritual,” chapter 2, p. 98; chapter 6, p. 118. 30. Myers and Powell, Wild Country, 125. 31. Retreat should also be understood as a setting of “treatment” in the medical sense — a space in which the malady of separation between humans and God is being treated. 32. A tendency toward ordering prayers into a precise and predetermines set of exercises had been prescribed by Jen Mombaer (Johannes Mauburnus, 1460–1501) of the Devotio Moderna congregation of Sindesheim. His Rosetum exercitiorum spiritualium et sacrarum meditationum (1494) was very popular among Augustinians (among them Martin Luther) and Benedictines (among them Cisneros, who, in turn, directly influenced Ignatius). 33. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life. 34. For the early Middle Ages, see Carruthers, Craft of Thought. For the Devotio Moderna, see Nikolaus Staubach, “Die Meditation im spirituellen Reformprogramm der Devotio Moderna,” in Enenkel and Melion, Meditatio— Refashioning the Self, 181–207; and for the later Middle Ages in general see the detailed discussion in Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages. 35. Gabriel Codina Mir, Aux sources de la pédagogie des jésuites: Le “modus parisiensis” (Rome: IHSJ, 1968), 109–31; and James K. Farge, The University of Paris in the Time of Ignatius of Loyola (Bilbao: Mensajero, 1992). 36. Da Câmara, “Memoriale,” 676–77; English translation: Remembering Iñigo: Glimpses of the Life of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (St. Louis, MO: IJS, 2004), 149. 37. Achille Gagliardi, Commentarii seu Explanationes in Exercitia spiritualia; Commentaire des Exercices spirituels d’Ignace de Loyola (1590) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1996), 69; cf. Juan Polanco, who instructs spiritual directors to adapt themselves to the exercitant’s needs and abilities. See also Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 124–26. 38. Gagliardi, Commentarii, 60. 39. It was these aspects of obedience to the spiritual guide that attracted the attention of such nineteenth-century French lay luminaries as Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet; see Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet, Des Jésuites (Utrecht: Bosch, 1966). For them, Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises are a method to shatter personal will and reason (165), to subjugate the mind (163) and create a “Christian automaton” (167). The practitioner, they argue, becomes an obedient instrument who lives in terror of the instructor (169). All the quotations are from Quinet’s lectures at the Collège de France, a course he co-taught with Michelet in 1843. 40. See Jules Tuner, A Commentary on St. Ignatius’ Rules for Discernment of Spirits (St. Louis, MO: IJS, 1982); Michael Buckley, “Discernment of Spirits,” The Way, supplement 20 (Autumn 1972): 19–37; Boyle, “Angels Black and White”; and Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise?, 270– 85. This discernment is not to be conflated with the discernment of the spirit of prophecy. 41. Cf. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 73; and Guido Mongini, “Devozione e illuminazione: Direzione spirituale e esperienza

notes to pages 85–87

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religiosa negli Esercizi spirituali di Ignazio di Loyola,” in Zarri, Storia della direzione spirituale, vol. 3, L’età moderna, 269 (cf. his “Ad Christi similitudinem,” 111). 42. Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life, 77. 43. Da Câmara, “Memoriale,” para. 57; Louis Châtellier, L’Europe des dévots (Paris: Flammarion, 1987). 44. Quote from The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus and Their Complementary Norms (St. Louis, MO: IJS, 1996), para. 649, p. 283; compare Official Directory, paras. 68– 89, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 304– 8. 45. Compare Official Directory, para. 76, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 305– 6. 46. Ignatius of Loyola, Epistolae ed Instructiones, ed. Vincentus Agustí and Marianus Lecina (Madrid: López del Horno, 1907), letter 4131 to Felipe Leerno, February 3, 1554, MHSI ser. 1, vol. 6, 280– 82; cf. “Answers of Lawrence Nicolai, 1587,” in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 159. 47. Loyola’s letters to women were collected in Saint Ignatius Loyola: Letters to Women, ed. Hugo Rahner (London: Nelson, 1960); a very good discussion of the early Jesuits’ attitude toward women is offered in Olwen Hufton, “Altruism and Reciprocity: The Early Jesuits and Their Female Patrons,” Renaissance Studies 15 (2001): 328–53. See also Gemma Simmonds, “Women Jesuits?’“ in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 120–35; Molina, To Overcome Oneself, 50– 66; and Silvia Mostaccio, “Shaping the Spiritual Exercises: The maisons des retraites in Brittany during the Seventeenth Century as a Gendered Pastoral Tool,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 2 (2015): 659–84. 48. Da Câmara, “Memoriale,” 21, 37; and “Directives and Instructions of St. Ignatius,” in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 25; cf. Polanco, “Short Instruction,” paras. 76–77, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 109. 49. Official Directory, para. 83, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 307. 50. Ignatius of Loyola, Epistolae ed Instructiones, ed. Agustí and Lecina (Madrid: López del Horno, 1909), letter 5467 to Paul d’Achilles, June 19, 1555, MHSI ser. 1, vol. 9, 220; Loyola, Epistolae ed Instructiones, ed. Agustí and Lecina (Madrid: López del Horno, 1911), letter 6544 to Gaspar Loarte, June 5, 1556, MHSI ser. 1, vol. 11, 495. For examples of giving the exercises to groups of men, see Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice (Chicago: Loyola University and IJS, 1964), 303–4; and O’Malley, First Jesuits, 128–29. 51. Terence O’Reilly, “Melchor Cano and the Spirituality of Saint Ignatius Loyola,” in Ignacio de Loyola y su tiempo, ed. Juan Plazaola (Bilbao: Mensajero, 1992), 369– 80; O’Reilly, “The Spiritual Exercises and Illuminism in Spain: Dominican Critics of the Early Society of Jesus,” in Ite Inflammate Omnia, ed. Thomas M. McCoog (Rome: IHSI, 2010), 199–228; and his transcription of Melchor Cano, Censura y parecer contra el Instituto de los Padres Jesuitas, in O’Reilly, From Ignatius Loyola to John of the Cross: Spirituality and Literature in Sixteenth- Century Spain (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), 1–22. See also Iparraguirre, Historia de la práctica de los Ejercicios, 1:94– 98; and O’Malley, First Jesuits, 292– 95. On Cano’s own trajectory, see Michele Olivari, “Le faccie diverse di Melchor Cano,” in Il piacere del testo: Saggi e studi per Albano Biondi, ed. Adriano Prosperi and Massimo Donattini (Rome: Bulzoni, 2001), 149–76.

168

notes to pages 88–90

52. Ángel Alcalá Galve, “Control de espirituales,” in Historia de la Inquisición en España y America, ed. Joaquin Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1984–2000), 1:780– 842; Gigliola Fragnito, La bibbia al rogo: La censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471–1605) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997); Fragnito, Proibito capire: La chiesa e il volgare nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005); Maria Pia Fantini, “Censura romana e orazioni: modi, tempi, formule (1571–1620),” in L’Inquisizione e gli storici: un cantiere aperto (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2000), 221–443; Edoardo Barbieri, “Tradition and Change in the Spiritual Literature of the Cinquecento,” in Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy, ed. Gigliola Fragnito (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 111–33; and Giorgio Caravale, L’orazione proibita: Censura ecclesiastica e letteratura devozionale nella prima età moderna (Florence: Olschki, 2003). See also Joseph Veale, Manifold Gifts: Ignatian Essays on Spirituality (Oxford: Way Books, 2006), in which the author reflects on how changes in twentieth-century Catholicism shaped the Jesuits’ contemporary understanding of the Exercises. 53. Iparraguirre, Historia de la práctica de los Ejercicios, vol. 2; and Guibert, Jesuits, 218–47. 54. Cándido de Dalmases, Francis Borgia: Grandee of Spain, Jesuit, Saint (St. Louis, MO: IJS, 1991), 159– 66; and Guibert, Jesuits, 192– 99. 55. Pedro de Leturía, “Lecturas ascéticas y lecturas místicas entre los Jesuítas de siglo XVI,” in Estudios Ignacianos, 2:269–331; Michel de Certeau, La fable mystique: XVIe– XVIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 340–45; John O’Malley, “Early Jesuit Spirituality: Spain and Italy,” in Christian Spirituality: Post Reformation and Modern, ed. Louis Dupré and Don. E. Saliers (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 14–17. 56. José Martínez Millán, “Transformación y crisis de la Compañía de Jesús (1578– 1594),” in I religiosi a Corte: Teologia, politica e diplomazia in Antico regime, ed. Flavio Rurale (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998), 101–4; Alessandro Guerra, Un generale fra le milizie del Papa: La vita di Claudio Acquaviva scritta da Francesco Sacchini della Compagnia di Gesù (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001), 115–30; Guerra, “‘Os meum aperui et attraxi spiritum quia mandata tua desiderabam’: Claudio Acquaviva nella direzione spirituale della Compagnia di Gesù,” in Catto, Gagliardi, and Parrinello, Direzione spirituale tra ortodossia ed eresia, 219–45; Stefania Pastore, Il vangelo e la spada: L’Inquisizione di Castiglia e i suoi critici (1460–1598) (Rome: Storia e Letterature, 2003), 420–35; Pastore, “La ‘svolta antimistica’ di Mercuriano: i retroscena spagnoli,” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 1 (2005): 81– 93; Philip Endean, “‘The Strange Style of Prayer’: Mercurian, Cordeses, and Álvarez,” in The Mercurian Project: Forming Jesuit Culture (1573–1580), ed. Thomas M. McCoog (Rome and St. Louis, MO: IHSI, 2004), 351– 97. 57. See the Official Directory and Mercurian, “Short Instruction on Giving the Exercises,” in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 289–349. 58. Claude Acquaviva, “Quis sit orationis et paenitentiarum usus in Societate iuxta nostrum Institutum,” in Epistolae Praepositorum Generalium ad Patres et Fratres Societatis Iesu (Brussels: Sumptibus Provinciae Belgicae, 1908– 9), 1:248–70. On the importance of ministry, see Official Directory, para. 11, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 292. On hours of prayer, see Official Directory, para. 34, in Palmer, On

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Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 297– 98. On moderation, see Official Directory, para. 65, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 303. 59. See the articles in the collection Enenkel and Melion, Meditation— Refashioning the Self, especially de Boer, “Invisible Contemplation,” and the bibliographies there. On the importance of rooting imaginations in precise spaces (“the composition of place,” as the Official Directory calls it), see Official Directory, para. 122, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 314; Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Ignace de Loyola: Le lieu de l’image (Paris: Vrin, 1992); and Marc Fumaroli, L’école du silence: Le sentiment des images au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994). On Jesuit imaginings, see Ralph Dekoninck, Ad imaginem: Statuts, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du XVIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2005). On the other reforms, see Iparraguirre, Historia de la práctica de los Ejercicios, 2:361; Michela Catto, “Dagli Esercizi spirituali alle constituzioni della Compagnia di Gesù: Il discrimento spirituale e il governare; La struttura di ‘Un modo di procedere,’” in Strutture e forme del discorso storico, ed. Achille Olivieri (Milan: Unicopli, 2005), 208–31; and Catto, “I ‘Directoria’ degli Esercizi spirituali da Sant’Ignazio a Scaramelli,” in Zarri, Storia de direzione spirituale, vol. 1, L’età moderna, 331–51. 60. Philip Endean, “‘The ‘Original Line of Our Father Ignatius’: Mercurian and the Spirituality of the Exercises,” in Mercurian Project, 42. 61. Official Directory: para. 277, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 347; para. 19, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 292; and para. 69, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 304. 62. Pedro de Luteria, “Cordeses, Mercuriano, Colegio Romano y lecturas espirituales de los Jesuítas en el siglo XVI” and “Lecturas ascéticas y lecturas místicas entre los Jesuitas del siglo XVI,” both in Estudios Ignacianos, 2:333–78 and 2:269–331. For the debate, compare, for example, Henri Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, depuis la fi n des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1916–36), 8:229–31; and Michel de Certeau, “Crise sociale et réformisme spirituel au début du XVII siècle: Une ‘Nouvelle spiritualité’ chez les Jésuites français,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 41 (1965): 339–86; to Endean, “Strange Style of Prayer” and “‘Original Line of Our Father Ignatius.’” 63. Alfonso Rodríguez, Ejercicio de perfección y virtudes cristianas (Madrid: Editorial Apostolado de la Prensa, 1954). Other examples include Jacob Gretser, Vitae D. Mariae Virginis (Ingolstadt, 1592); Johannes Busaeus (Johann Buys), Enchiridion piarum meditationum (Meinz, 1606); Luis de la Puente, Meditationes de los misterios de nuestra Santa Fe (Valladolid, 1606, and many abbreviations and translations); Luca Pinelli, Libretto d’imagini, e di Brevi Meditationi Sopra Quattro Novissimi Dell’Huomo (Naples, 1594), and Quaranta Essercitii spirituali per l’Oratione delle Quaranta Hore (Naples, 1605); and François Véron, Manuale Sodalitatis Beatae Mariae Virginis (Liège, 1608). Guibert, Jesuits, 317–73, lists many additional texts, and see a discussion in Catto, “‘Directoria’ degli Esercizi spirituali,” in Zarri, Storia della direzione spirituale, vol. 3, L’età moderna, 333–35, 349–51. See also Massino Marcocchi, “Modelli professionali e itinerari di perfezione nella trattatistica sugli ‘Stati di vita,’” in Lombardia borromaica, Lombardia spagnola, 1554–1659, ed. Paolo Pissavino and Gianvittorio Signorotto

170

notes to pages 92–98

(Rome: Bulzoni, 1995), 2:859–76. For a collection by an abbess, see Fr. Léon [Léon de S. Jean; maybe Jean Macé], La vie de la venerabe mere Marie de S. Charles, religieuse de Saint Elizabeth, dite au siecle, Madame la baronne de Veuilly (Paris, 1671). 64. Luis de la Puente, The Life of Father Balthasar Alvarez, 2 vols. (London: Thomas Richardson, 1868); Paul Dudon, “Les leçons d’oraison du P. B. Alvarez,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 2 (1921): 36–57. 65. Pastore, Il vangelo e la Spada, 420–35, offers an excellent summary of the similarities among these tendencies in Italy and Spain. See also Endean, “Strange Style of Prayer”; Pietro Pirri, “Il P. Achille Gagliardi, la dama milanese, la riforma dello spirito e il movimento degli zelatori,” AHSI 14 (1945): 1–27; Michela Catto, La compagnia divisa: Il dissenso nell’ordine gesuitico tra ’500 e ’600 (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2009), 71–111; Michel de Certeau, “Histoire des jésuites,” in Le lieu de l’autre: Histoire religieuse et mystique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), chapter 7, 155– 65; Dudon, “Les leçons d’oraison du P. Lallement, ont- elles été blâmées par ses supérieurs?” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 11 (1930): 394–406; Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, vols. 5 and 8. And see Endean, Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality, and Terence O’Reilly, “Joseph Veale and the History of the Spiritual Exercises,” Milltown Studies 66 (2011): 1–18, for twenty-fi rst-century reiterations of this ongoing discussion concerning the “right” interpretation of the Exercises. 66. The warning attributed to Ignatius is quoted by Nicolau Orlandino in his Historia Societatis Iesu, Prima pars (Rome: Zannetti, 1615), 570; quoted in de Certeau, “Crise sociale et réformisme spirituel au début du XVIIe siècle,” 363. 67. Rahner, “Being Open to God as Ever Greater,” in Theological Investigations, 7:38.

Ch apter 4 1. Ignatius of Loyola, “The General Examen and its Declarations” 4:9 [65], in The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. George E. Ganss (St. Louis: IJS, 1970), 96. 2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977), 27; Delumeau, Péché et la peur; and Delumeau, L’aveu et le pardon. 3. Michel Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude” (1980), in Michel Foucault: Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 182–83, translation modified. 4. Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter–Reformation, and the Early Modern State; John Bossy, “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (1975): 21–29; W. David Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk.” Confession and Conscience in CounterReformation Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 188–202; Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza; Oscar di Simplicio, Peccato, penitenza, perdono: Siena, 1575–1800; La formazione della coscienza nell’Italia moderna (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1994); Giovanni Romeo, Ricerche su confessione dei peccati e Inquisizione nell’Italia del cinquecento (Naples: Città del Sole, 1997); Romeo, Esorcisti, confessori e sessualità femminile; de Boer, Conquest of the Soul; Vincenzo Lavenia, L’infamia e il perdono:

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Tributi, pene e confessione nella teologia morale della prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004); and Patrick J. O’Banion, The Sacrament of Penance and Religious Life in Golden Age Spain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). 5. Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation; Reinhard, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung?”; Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Early Modern State”; Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, eds., Die katholische Konfessionalisierung: Wissenschaftliches Symposion der Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe des Corpus Catholicorum und des Verein für Reformationsgeschichte (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1995); Heinz Schilling, Religion, Political Culture, and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Schilling, “Confessional Europe,” 2:641–75; and Brady, “Confessionalization.” 6. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1937; Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 7. Michel Foucault developed this connection mostly in his writings on late antiquity, but morphologically and contextually the same could be said of early modern Europe. See especially his “‘Omnes et singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” in Foucault, Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 298–325 (= “Pastoral Power and Political Reason,” in Foucault, Michel Foucault: Religion and Culture, 135–52; and “Christianity and Confession,” in Foucault, The Politics of Truth (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997), esp. 199. He addressed the same themes in an early modern context in his Abnormal, lecture of February 19, 1975, 167– 99; Security, Territory, Population; and Du gouvernement des vivants, lectures of January 9 and March 12, 1980, 3-22 and 219–46. His lectures at Louvain in 1981 repeat much of what he argued in Du gouvernement des vivants but relates it even tighter to nineteenth-century secular and medical notions of confession. See Foucault, Mal faire, dire vrai: Fonction de l’aveu en justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, and Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2012). For Delumeau, similarly, the most important impact of confession was the creation of guilt, fear, and shame. See Péché et la peur, 10. 8. H. J. Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 14.5 (Rockford, IL, 1978), 92– 93. 9. Teresa of Avila, “Life,” in Peers, The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, 1:23, 151–52. See also Félix Rodríguez, “Santa Teresa de Jesús y sus consejeros jesuitas,” Manresa 59 (1987): 309–11. 10. O’Malley, First Jesuits, 137–39; and Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza, 487– 95. 11. Among them Louise de l’Hôpital, abbess and reformer of the Benedictine convent of Montivilliers in Normandy, who made her general confession in the chapel in Acarie’s home. Yves Chaussy, Les Bénédictines et la réforme catholique en France au XVIIe siècle ([Paris]: Source, 1975), 1:176. 12. Marie de l’Incarnation [Madame Acarie], Les vrays exercices de la bienheureuse soeur Marie de l’Incarnation (Paris, 1623), 3. 13. [P. Raphaël], La vie et les vertus de la soeur Jeanne Perraud, dite de l’EnfantJésus (Marseille, 1680), 29; Soeur Jeanne des Anges, Autobiographie d’une hystérique possédée, ed. G. Legué and G. de la Tourette (Montbonnot-St. Martin: Jérôme Millon, 1985), 60, 118–20. Alas, des Anges’s natural evilness soon led her back to sin, and a few months after undergoing her fi rst general confession she undertook another one.

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But the demons which possessed her prevented her from enjoying the benefits of this confession too. 14. Vincent de Paul, Correspondance, entretiens, documents, ed. P. Coste (Paris: Lecoffre, 1920–1925), 2:429. 15. José Calveras, “Los ‘confesionales’ y los Ejercicios de San Ignacio,” AHSI 17 (1948): 51–101; Pierre Michaud- Quantin, Sommes de casuistique et manuels de confession au moyen âge (XII– XVI siècles) (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1962), 86– 91; Roberto Rusconi, “‘Confessio generalis’: Opuscoli per la pratica penitenziale nei primi cinquanta anni dalla introduzione della stampa,” in I frati minori tra ’400 e ’500: Atti del XII convegno internazionale, Assisi, 18– 20 ottobre 1984 (Assisi: Università di Perugia, 1986), 189–227; Rusconi, L’ordine dei peccati: La confessione tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 229–76; Miriam Turrini, La coscienza e le leggi: Morale e diritto nei testi per la confessione della prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991), 33–139, 315–497; Bert Roest, Franciscan Literature of Religious Instruction before the Council of Trent (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 339–53. See also Anne T. Thayer, Penitence, Preaching, and the Coming of the Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 53– 64. 16. Olivier Maillard, La Confession generale (n.p. [Paris], n.d.); And see Andrés de Escobar (1348–1450), whose Modus confitendi (which also circulated under the title Confessio generalis) was printed in more than ninety editions in the fi fteenth century. Other examples of such manuals include Guillaume Letard, Confession générale sur les dix commandemens de la Loi (Toulouse, 1555); Jehan Columbi, Confession générale avec certaines reigles au commencement, très utiles tant à confesseurs qu’à pénitents (Lyon, 1548); Pietro Conciarino, Confessione generale (Rome, 1567). 17. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation, 111–16; Nicole Lemaître, “Pratique et signification de la confession communautaire dans les paroisses au XVIe siècle,” in Pratiques de la confession des Pères du désert à Vatican II, ed. Groupe de la Bussière (Paris: Cerf, 1983), 139– 64; Lemaître, “Confession privée et confession publique dans les paroisses du XVIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire de l’église de France 69 (1983): 189–208. 18. De Sales, Oeuvres complètes, 12:352; and Vincent de Paul, Correspondance, entretiens, documents, 13:772. In 1634 the new lay group of the Dames de la Charité de l’Hôtel Dieu in Paris took over caring for the sick and dying in this hospital. Among the 120 women in the group, 14 were charged with instructing women in how to make a general confession “for better preparing them for a good death . . . and for those who recover to resolve not to offend God.” Ibid., 13:766. 19. Lemaître, “Pratique et signification de la confession”; Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk,” 87– 88. 20. Armando Guidetti, Le missioni popolari: I grandi gesuiti italiani (Milan: Rusconi, 1988), 25–28; and Eugénio Dos Santos, “Les missions des temps modernes au Portugal,” in Histoire vécue du peuple chrétien, ed. Jean Delumeau (Toulouse: Privat, 1979), 1:431–54. 21. Vincent de Paul, Sermons de saint Vincent de Paul, de ses coopérateurs et successeurs immédiats (Paris: Baldeveck, 1859), 1:203. For similar missions in the diocese of Milan, see de Boer, Conquest of the Soul, 177–79. 22. Guillaume Daubenton, Vie de St Jean- François Régis de la Compagnie de Jésus

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(Lyon: Perisse, 1844); Joseph Vianey, Saint François Régis: Apôtre du Vivarais et du Velay (1597–1640) (Paris: Lecoffre, 1914), 132–33. For additional examples, see Bernard Dompnier, “Mission et confession au XVIIe siècle,” in Groupe de la Bussière, Pratiques de la confession, 201–22; and François Lebrun, “La pastorale de la conversion et les missions intérieurs: L’exemple des lazaristes en Haute-Bretagne au XVIIe siècle,” in La conversion au XVIIe siècle: Actes du XIIe Colloque de Marseille (janvier 1982) (Marseille: Centre Méridional de Rencontres sur le Dix-Septième Siècle, 1983), 247–55. And see the two tractates by two leading missionary confessors: Jean Eudes, Le bon Confesseur ou Avertissemens aux confesseurs (Lyon, 1689); and Leonardo da Porto Maurizio, Direttorio della confessione generale (Rome, 1731). 23. Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk,” 96, 171. 24. On the history of confession in the Middle Ages, see Henry Charles Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1896; repr., New York: Greenwood Press, 1968); Delumeau, Péché et la peur; Nicole Bériou, “Autour de Lateran IV (1215): La naissance de la confession modern et sa diffusion,” in Groupe de la Bussière, Pratiques de la confession, 73– 92; and the recent survey of the literature in Peter Biller, “Confession in the Middle Ages: Introduction,” in Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (York: York Medieval Press, 1998), 3–33. 25. Pierre Favre (Peter Faber), “Capita quaedam de fide et moribus,” in Fabri monumenta: Beati Petri Fabri primi sacerdotis e Societate Jesu; Epistolae, memoriale et processus, ex autographis aut archetypis potissimum deprompta (Madrid: Gabrielis Lopez del Horno, 1914–15), 120; and Favre, Spiritual Writings, 356–57; cf. Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti, Le directeur dans les voyes du salut (Courbeville, 1742; originally published as Il direttore, 1705), 13. 26. Loarte, The Exercises of a Christian Life, 1v. 27. Official Directory, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 309; cf. 317. 28. Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, “General Examen,” 4:41 [98], 106. The founder of the French Oratory, Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629), instructed that each new member make a general confession and set aside three days each month to renew it. Michel Dupuy, Bérulle et le Sacerdoce: Étude historique et doctrinal (Paris: Lethielleux, 1969), 342. 29. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation; and Alois Hahn, “Zur Soziologie der Beichte und anderer formen institutionalisierter Bekenntnisse: Selbstthematisierung und Zivilisationsprozess,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 34 (1982): 407–13. 30. Jean Gerson, “On the Art of Hearing Confessions,” in Jean Gerson: Early Works, trans. and introd. Brian P. McGuire (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 365– 68. 31. Cajetan, De confessione quaestiones (Paris, 1530); quoted in Foucault, Du gouvernement des vivants, lecture of January 30, 1980, 79; and see the discussion there, 78– 82. 32. Ignatius of Loyola, Autobiography, 3:17. On the specific sources of Loyola’s spirituality of general confession, see Calveras, “Los ‘confesionales’ y los Ejercicios”; Guibert, Jesuits, 152– 67; Pierre Gervais, “Ignace de Loyola et la Confession générale,” Communio 8, no. 5 (1983): 69– 83; and de Boer, “Invisible Contemplation.” Loyola

174

notes to pages 107–112

recommended to Pierre Favre during their very fi rst meeting in Paris in 1529 that he make a general confession and a daily examination of conscience. Favre, “Memoriale,” in Fabri monumenta, 494, and Spiritual Writings, 65. Favre, in turn, recommended it to the German prelates he met and instructed in Regensburg in 1541 during his mission to Germany. Fabri monumenta, 119, and Spiritual Writings, 356. 33. Melloni, Compendio breve de ejercicios espirituales, 9. 34. All the quotations from Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises are from Ganss’s edition, checked against Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean, Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings (London: Penguin, 1996). 35. Directory of Gil Gonzáles Dávila, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 248. 36. It is important to note that the Council of Trent also demanded that the penitent recount “the circumstances of the specific sin” (Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 14.7). 37. José Calveras, “Notas exegéticas sobre et texto de los Ejercicios,” Manresa 23 (1951): 211–17. 38. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 39. Paolo Segneri, Il penitente istruito (Bassano, 1669), 72. 40. Jean-Pierre Schaller, Direction spirituelle et temps moderns (Paris: Beauchesne, 1978) addresses the distinction between the two roles in twentieth-century Catholic pastoral duties. 41. “Second Directory of St. Ignatius to the Spiritual Exercises,” in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 171; and The Autobiography of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, trans. Sisters of the Visitation, Partridge Green (Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1986), 46. 42. Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life, 289. 43. Lea, History of Auricular Confession, 1:225–26. 44. Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 317. It is important to note, though, that a number of late medieval confessionals already demanded a preparatory period of a few days prior to auricular annual confession. See, for example, Alonso de Tostado de Madrigal, Confesional (Salamanca, 1498), sig. b(2). 45. See the criticism of the Dominican Bartolomé de Medina in his Breve instrucción, fols. 44–47. 46. Carlo Borromeo, Avvertenze . . . ai confessori nella città et diocese sua; in Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, ed. A. Ratti (Milan: Pontificia Sancti Ioseph, 1890– 96); JeanLouis Quantin, “Le Rigorisme: Sur le basculement de la théologie morale catholique au XVIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire de l’église de France 89 (2003): 23–43; Quantin, “De la Rigueur au rigorisme: Les Avvertenze ai confessori de Charles Borromée dans la France du XVIIe siècle,” Studia Borromaica 20 (2006): 195–251; and Wietse de Boer, “At Heresy’s Door: Borromeo, Penance, and Confessional Boundaries in Early Modern Europe,” in A New History of Penance, ed. Abigail Firey (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 343–75. 47. Jeanne-Françoise Frémyot de Chantal, Correspondence, ed. Marie-Patricia Bruns (Paris: Cerf, 1986– 96), letter 1984, June 1637, 5:349. The instruction was also included in all editions of the Petites coutumes of the order. See, for example, Petite coutume de ce monastère de la Visitation Sainte Marie d’Annessy (Paris, 1642).

notes to pages 112–116

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48. Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza, 504–5; and Bottoni, Scritture dell’anima, xix–xx. Deaf and mute penitents were exempted. 49. Luis Pujadas, “La ‘Confesión general’ con la Comunión,” Manresa 9 (1933): 45–53. 50. Ignatius of Loyola, Autobiography, 3:22–25; Pierre Favre also remembered that it was only after he had undertaken a general confession that he was able, for the fi rst time in his life, “to see clearly within his conscience” without being obstructed by scrupulous thoughts. Favre, “Memoriale,” in Fabri monumenta, 493, and Spiritual Writings, 65. 51. “To Father Antonio Brandão,” in Counsels for Jesuits: Selected Letters and Instructions of Saint Ignatius Loyola, ed. Joseph N. Tylenda (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985), 44; “Second Directory of St. Ignatius to the Spiritual Exercises,” in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 10; cf. 13. 52. “Directives and Instructions of St. Ignatius,” in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 25. 53. Loarte, The Exercises of a Christian Life, 4; Louis Châtellier, Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Michael William Maher, “Reforming Rome: The Society of Jesus and Its Congregations at the Church of the Gesù” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1998), vol. 2; Lance G. Lazar, Working in the Vineyard of the Lord: Jesuit Confraternities in Early Modern Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Ulderico Parente, “Aspetti della confessione dei peccati nella Compagnia di Gesù a Napoli tra XVI e XVII secolo,” in Ricerche sulla confessione dei peccati a Napoli tra ’500 e ’600, ed. Boris Ulianich (Naples: Città del Sole, 1997), 145–48; Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk,” 175–79. 54. Jean-Marie Prat, Recherches historiques et critiques sur la Compagnie de Jésus en France au temps du Père Coton, 1564–1626 (Lyon: Briday, 1976), 705– 6. See additional examples in Robert A. Maryks, Saint Cicero and the Jesuits: The Infl uence of the Liberal Arts on the Adoption of Moral Probabilism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 21–25. 55. Molina, To Overcome Oneself, 116–30. 56. Luis de Granada, “Primera Guía de pecadores,” in Obras castellanas (Madrid: Turner, 1994), 1:499–500. 57. Borromeo, Avvertenze . . . ai confessori, 2:1870– 93. See also Giovanni Sofi a, La dottrina di S. Carlo Borromeo sui doveri del confessore (Rome: Anonima, 1938); and de Boer, Conquest of the Soul, 77–79. 58. De Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote. 59. Cf. Gaspar de Loarte, Esercitio della vita Christiana (Cagliari, 1567 [1568]), fols. 5–7; quoted in O’Malley, First Jesuits, 139. 60. See also de Sales, “Avis touchant la Confession générale,” in his Conduite pour la Confession et la Communion (Lyon: Rivoire, 1820), which summarizes late sixteenth-century Jesuit writings of confession and general confession. 61. Guibert, Jesuits, 347–51. See, for example, Nicolas Caussin, Traité de la conduite spirituelle selon l’esprit du Bienheureux François de Sales (Paris, 1637). 62. Jeremy R. Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2000), 38. Chloë Taylor, The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the “Confessing Animal” (New York: Routledge, 2009).

176

notes to pages 117–122

63. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1: 61. See also Foucault, Abnormal, lecture of February 19, 1975, 167– 99, and Du gouvernement des vivants, especially the lectures of February and March 1980. See also the literature mentioned in n. 5 above. For the most thorough discussion of Foucault’s views of Christianity in general and confession in particular, see Philippe Chevallier, Michel Foucault et le christianisme (Lyon: ENS, 2011); and Taylor, Culture of Confession. 64. Foucault, “Christianity and Confession,” 202. 65. Foucault’s archives, Document D250(7); conversation with P. Rabinow, B. Dreyfus, C. Taylor, R. Bellah, M. Jay, and L. Lowenthal, Berkeley, CA, April 21, 1983; quoted in James Bernauer, “Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religions: An Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life,” in Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience, ed. James Bernauer and Jeremy R. Carrette (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 97; and Foucault, “On Religion (1978),” in Michel Foucault: Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 109. 66. See, for example, “Omnes et singularim,” in Faubion, Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 298–325. 67. Augustine, De vera religione, 39.72; and see the discussion in Taylor, Sources of the Self, 127–42. See also J. Joyce Schuld, Foucault and Augustine: Reconsidering Power and Love (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). 68. Michel Foucault,” The Battle for Chastity,” in Michel Foucault: Religion and Culture, 196. 69. Luis de la Puente, Directorio espiritual para la confesion, communion, sacrificio de la misa (Seville, 1625); Segneri, Il penitente istruito; Nicolas Caussin, La cour sainte (Paris, 1625); Thomas Le Blanc, Le bon valet (Dijon, 1660); Barthélemy Jacquinot, Instruction spirituelle pour une âme qui desire se conserver dans le ferveur (Paris, 1620); Florent Vaillant, Instructions spirituelles aux personnes dévoutes et religieuses pour bien pratiquer les exercices journaliers (Lille, 1627); and many additional examples in Turrini, Coscienza e le leggi, Maryks, Saint Cicero and the Jesuits, 32–47, and Maryks, “La Consolatio nel ministero della confessione dei primi Gesuiti,” in I Gesuiti e la “Ratio Studiorum,” ed. Manfred Hinz, Roberto Righi, and Danilo Zardin (Rome: Buzoni, 2004), 217–23. 70. Bossy, “Social History of Confession”; and Turrini, Coscienza e le leggi, 212–24.

Ch apter 5 1. Foucault, Du gouvernement des vivants, lectures of March 12, 19, and 26, 1980, esp. 231–313; and Foucault, Mal faire, dire vrai. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, esp. lectures of January 6 and January 20, 1982, 1–41 and 81–124, analyzes in detail the radical break between Greco-Roman and Christian traditions. It was important for Foucault’s overarching argument to posit that self-examination in antiquity did not include a psychological dimension and that it was a form of aesthetics more than of ethics. Hadot, “Reflections on the Notion of ‘The Cultivation of the Self,’” rebuts Foucault’s generalizations, while Davidson, “Ethics as Ascetics,” attempts (successfully, I would argue) to rescue Foucault from Hadot’s criticism. The collection of Frédéric Gros and Carlos Lévy, eds., Foucault et la philosophie antique (Paris: Kimé, 2003), offers detailed

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criticisms of Foucault’s omissions and exaggerations in his discussion of Greek and Roman spiritual exercises and examination of conscience. 2. Foucault, “Christianity and Confession,” 214. 3. Jean- Claude Guy, “Examen de conscience,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité: Ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, vol. 4, ed. Marcel Villar, Charles Baumgartner, and André Rayez (Paris: Beauchesne, 1961), 1801–7, and many more examples there; Athanasius of Alexandria, Life of St. Anthony, chapter 55: “Let us each one note and write down our actions and the impulses of our soul as though we were going to relate them to each other.” 4. John Chrysostom, cited in Foucault, “Christianity and Confession,” 212–13; and see Foucault’s discussion of Chrysostom in Du gouvernement des vivants, lectures of March 19, 1980, 252–55. Interestingly, while Chrysostom emphasizes “to ourselves” and the fact that one practices these examination when one is not disturbed, Foucault uses this example to document the practice of exagoreusis, the constant verbalization of one’s actions and thought in the presence of another, who scrutinizes the practitioner’s innermost truth. 5. See Foucault’s discussion of Cassian in “Christianity and Confession”; in Du gouvernement des vivants, 255–320; and in Mal faire, dire vrai, lecture of May 6, 1981,. 123– 60. See also Taylor, Culture of Confession, 22–26. 6. Guy, “Examen de conscience.” 7. Irénée Noye, “Examen de conscience,” in Villar, Baumgartner, and Rayez, Dictionnaire de spiritualité, 4:1807–19. 8. St. Bernard, The Twelve Degrees of Humility and Pride (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1929), 17; “De Consideratione,” 2:3–4; in Opera (Rome: Editiones Cisterciensis, 1957–77), 3:413. 9. St. Bernard, “In circumsicione Domini” 3:8– 9; in Opera, 4:288– 89. 10. St. Bonaventure, The Enkindling of Love, also called The Triple Way, chapter 3 (Paterson, NJ: Saint Anthony Guild, 1957), 43–49; and Bonaventure, De perfectione vitae ad Sorores, 1:6, in Opera omnia (Quarracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1882–1902), 8:120. On Bonaventure’s method of examination, see Philotheus Boehner, Examination of Conscience According to Saint Bonaventure (New York: Franciscan Institute, 1953); Bernardino of Siena, Le prediche volgari inedite (Siena: Cantagalli, 1935), 472; and additional examples in Noye, “Examen de conscience,” 1819–22. 11. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, book 1, 19. 12. Beati Petri Canisii, Epistulae et acta, ed. Otto Braunsberger (Freiburg, 1896– 1923), 1:117–18. 13. Girolamo Savonarola, “Regola del ben vivere,” in Operette spirituali, ed. Mario Ferrara (Rome: Belardetti, 1976), 2:187– 94; García Jiménez de Cisneros, Exercitatorio de la vida spiritual), chapter 21; (Monsterrat, 1500), fols. 73–77; and Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life, 294– 97. 14. Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1983), 197–205; Roest, Franciscan Literature of Religious Instruction, 338–47; Turrini, Coscienza e le leggi, 219–41; and Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk,” 173–76. 15. See, for example, Cisneros, Exercitatorio de la vida spiritual, and the anony-

178

notes to pages 127–136

mous L’examen de conscience du mal et du bien de l’âme (Rouen, 1500), and additional examples in Noye, “Examen de conscience,” 1819. 16. Calveras, “Los ‘confessionales’ y los Ejercicios”; and de Boer, “Invisible Contemplation,” 242–48. 17. Monumenta Xaveriana, ed. Marianus Lecina, MHSJ 16(Madrid: Augustin Avrial, 1899), 1: no. 150:8; p. 861. 18. Official Directory, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 313. 19. Pedro de Ribandeira, “De actis Patris Nostri Ignatii,” no. 42, in MHSJ, Fontes narrativi de S. Ignatio de Loyola, 4 vols. (Rome: MHSJ: 1943– 65), 2:345. 20. Pierre Coton is quoted in de Certeau, “Crise sociale et réformisme spiritual au début du XVIIe siècle,” 348. See also Surin, Correspondance, letter 226 of April 6, 1659, to Mère Anne Buignon. 21. Acta Ecclesiae mediolanensis (Lyon, 1648– 83), 2:909–10; Teresa of Avila, “Constitutions Which the Mother Teresa of Jesus Gave to the Discalced Carmelite Nuns,” in Peers, The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, 3:219–20. 22. Jeanne-Françoise Frémyot de Chantal, Correspondance, ed. Marie-Patricia Burns (Paris: Cerf, 1986– 96), letter 1793 (no date), 4:746–47; and letter 1518 of February 1632 to de Sillery, 4:296; cf. letter 2114 of July 18, 1638, 5:591. 23. Coutumier et directoire pour les Sœurs religieuses de la Visitation Saincte Marie, art. 16 (Paris: Huré, 1637), 73; Marguerite de Veni d’Arbouze, Exercice journalier pour les religieuses Benedictines de Nostre- Dame du Val- de- Grace . . . avec un traité de l’oraison mentale par la mesme (Paris, 1676), 47 and 69. 24. Favre, “Memoriale,” in Spiritual Writings, 263. 25. George A. Schenbrenner, “Consciousness Examen,” Review for Religious 31 (1972): 13–21. See also Adrien Demoustier, Les exercices spirituels de S. Ignace de Loyola, 58– 87. 26. Michel de Certeau, introduction to Pierre Favre, Mémorial (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1960), 17–18. 27. See, for example, Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk,” 157–58; Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, vol. 5; Turrini, Coscienza e le leggi, 228–41; O’Malley, First Jesuits, 136–57; and Guibert, Jesuits, 374– 85. 28. Pierre Favre, letter of September 7, 1540, in Spiritual Writings, 321–22 (modified); original Latin in Fabri monumenta, 39–44. Favre repeats the recommendation in many of his letters and instructions. See, for example, instructions of spring 1541 to a group of notables in the German city of Regensburg “on individual self-reformation,” in Spiritual Writings, 327, and Fabri monumenta, 119–25; and in a letter to the Carthusians of Cologne in spring 1544, Spiritual Writings, 366. 29. O’Malley, “Early Jesuit Spirituality,” 14; see also O’Malley, Saints or Devils Incarnate? Studies in Jesuit History (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 121–45. 30. Alfonsus Rodriguez, The Practice of Christian and Religious Perfection, 7th treatise, chapter 1 (New York: P. J. Kennedy, 1900), 1:349. 31. Lorenzo Scupoli, Il combattimento spirituale [1589], chapters 11–16, in Theatine Spirituality: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. William V. Hudon (New York: Paulist Press, 1996), 128–37. 32. See William V. Hudon, “Introduction,” in Hudon, Theatine Spirituality, 42– 61.

notes to pages 136–145

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33. De Sales, Oeuvres, 13:304; de Sales, letter 104 in Correspondance: Les lettres d’amitié spirituelle (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1980), 239; and Jean-Pierre Camus, L’esprit de saint François de Sales, evêque et prince de Genève (Paris, 1747), 104; see also 419 and 430. 34. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, book 2, 10 (translation modified). 35. Sales, Introduction, book 2, 11 (translation modified); see also La véritable conduite de Saint François de Sales pour la confession et la Communion . . . fi dèlament extradite de ses écrits (Paris: Hérissant, 1748), 10–11. 36. Coton’s memorandum was published in de Certeau, “Crise sociale et réformisme spiritual au début du XVII siècle,” 347–48. Cf. de Certeau, La fable mystique: XVI– XVII siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 337–44. 37. Lallemant, Doctrine spirituelle, book 4, chapter 4:7, in Courel, Vie et la doctrine spirituelle, 228–29. 38. Ibid., book 5, chapter 3:2, and 261– 62; book 4, chapter 1:2, and 172. Cf. book 5, chapter 1:1, and 248; book 4, chapter 4:1, and 197. 39. Pierre Champion, La vie du P. J. Rigoleuc avec ses traitéz de dévotion et ses lettres spirituelles (Paris, 1686), 235, 225. 40. I have dealt with this issue in my Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment of Spirits in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 41. See Maryks, Saint Cicero and the Jesuits, 19–26, and the detailed bibliography there. 42. Epistolae P. Hieronymi Nadal (Madrid and Rome: MHSI, 1898–1905, 1962), 5:860; and Juan Alfonso de Polanco, Vita Ignatii Loiolae et rerum Societatis Jesu historica (Madrid: MHSI, 1894– 98), 1:83, para. 13. 43. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1: 20. Foucault goes on to argue that everything that happened in “the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex,” and that therefore a concern with sexual matters dominated early modern desiring souls and early modern examinations of conscience. I am not sure this assertion is reflected in the documents. 44. Paolo Segneri, Il penitente istruito (Bassano, 1669); and Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1:19–22.

Epilogue 1. Augustine, De vera religione, 39.72. 2. Pierre Nicole, “De la connaissance de soi-même,” in Essais de morale, ed. Laurent Thirouin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 309–79.

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Index

absolution, 22, 40, 51, 100, 103, 109–11, 116, 133, 141 absorption, 29 Acarie, Madame Barbe, 60, 63, 101 Acquaviva, Claudio, 89; Industriae pro Superioribus Societatis jesu ad curandos animae morbos (Resources for Therapy for Illnesses of the Soul), 48–49; Official Directory to the Spiritual Exercises of the Society of Jesus (1599), 47, 86– 87, 90, 104, 110, 128 actus veritatis, 106 Adam and Eve, 107– 8 agency, 2, 5, 12, 14–15, 17–24, 27, 43, 69–70, 100, 118, 144, 146 Alacoque, Margaret Mary, 109, 111, 145 Alcalá, 73, 85 Alumbradismo, 44–53, 70, 73, 87, 92, 116, 132, 140, 142–44 Álvarez, Balthasar, 92 Ambrose of Milan, St., 123 amendment, 104, 110 Amiens, 103 Ana de San Bartolomé, Sister, 30, 54 Angelic Sisters of St. Paul, 42 angels, 75, 77, 84, 107– 8 Anges, Jeanne des, 101, 104 Anglican, 69 Anthony, St., 123 Antonino of Florence, 40–41; Summa Confessionalis, curam illios habes, 40 anxiety, 6, 22, 49–50, 52, 56, 59, 78, 88, 133, 141 apostolic ministry, 89, 92

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 41, 64; Summa, 9 Aristotle, 74 Arnauld, Angélique, 60 Asad, Talal, 6, 8, 14–15, 21 Ascension, the, 96 asceticism, physical mortification, 42, 48–49, 59, 62, 76, 79, 89, 135, 139 Aschenbrenner, George A., 131 Athanasius of Alexandria, St., 123 attrition, 111 audition, 79 Augustine of Hippo, St., 23, 25, 74, 77, 117–18, 123, 142, 145 Aurelius, Marcus, 25 authority, 2, 16–17, 21, 24, 34, 39–40, 44, 50, 52–53, 56–59, 63, 66, 70, 77, 79, 80, 82– 83, 87, 111, 117–19, 122, 126, 145 autonomy, 2, 4, 6, 15, 18–19, 28, 117 baptism, 77 Barcelona, 85 Barnabites (Clerics Regular of St. Paul), 42 Bartolini, Leone, 42–44, 80 Basil the Great, St., 123 Basque pilgrim, 68 Beauvilliers, Marie de, 31 belief, 1, 3–14, 17, 21, 23–25, 27–31, 38–39, 62, 65– 66, 69–70, 73–74, 78, 87, 91, 97, 105, 110, 117, 119, 123, 126, 130, 132, 139–43, 145–46 Benedict of Nursia, St., 31, 64 Benedictines (Order of Saint Benedict), 64, 106, 125, 130 Bernardino of Siena, 124

207

208

index

Bérulle, Pierre de, 49 Berze, Gaspar, 128 Bilinkoff, Jodi, 63 Biller, Peter, 102 Bologna, 43–44 Bonaventure, St., 80, 124 Borja (Borgia), Francisco, 89 Borromeo, Carlo, 128; Avvertenze . . . ai confessori nella città et diocese sua, 111, 114–15 Bossuet, Jacques- Bénigne, 20 Bossy, John, 98 Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 7, 10 Brandão, Antonio, 112 Brégy, St. Eustochie de, 65 Brethren of the Common Life, 41, 125 Brulart, Noël, 129 Bryan, Jennifer, 26 Burckhardt, Jacob, 3 Cajetan, Cardinal Thomas, 106 Cajetan, St. (St. Gaetano da Thine), 42 Calveras, José, 102 Calvin, John, 67, 87 Calvinism, 22, 103 Câmara, Luís Gonçalves da, 81 Camus, Jean-Pierre, 136 Cano, Melchor, 87– 88 Capuchins. See Order of Preachers caritatiue ammonicione (charitable admonition), 41 Carmelites, Reformed Carmelites. See Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel Carruthers, Mary, 13 Carthusian Order, 125 Cassian, St. John, 123 Cassirer, Ernst, 7 Castile, 73, 87, 108 Catalonia, 106, 125 catechism(s), 13–14, 29, 77, 102 Caussade, Jean Pierre, Treatise on Prayer from the Heart, 54 censorship, 56, 95 ceremony/-ies; ceremonialism, 21, 43, 69 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 6 Chantal, Baronne de (a.k.a. Madame de Chantal), 60– 63, 103, 111–12, 129, 136, 145 charisma, 30, 34, 37, 39, 42, 46 charitable admonition, 41

charity, 2, 41, 47, 65 Charmoisy, Madame Marie de, 60 Chaugy, Françoise-Madeleine de, 62 Chrysostom, John, 123 church fathers, 123, 134 Cisneros, Montserrat García Jiménez de, 72, 76, 80; Compendio breve de ejercicios espirituales, 71, 77; Ejercitatorio de la vida espiritual, 71, 77, 125 Cistercian Order, 76, 91, 123 Clairvaux, Bernard of, 25, 38, 124 Clement VII, Pope, 43 clericalization (of spiritual life, etc.), 51, 63, 66, 110 Clerics Regular of St. Paul, 42 cognitio Dei experimentalis. See self: self-knowledge Coimbra, 89 commandments of the church, tenets of Christianity, 21, 30–31, 41, 122, 125–26, 143 Communion, 42, 50, 123, 140 Compagnia die Figlioi e delle Figliole di Paolo Santo, 43 compassion, 37, 48, 66 confessio. See spirituality: spiritual colloquy confession, 1, 5, 11, 16, 19, 22–25, 27, 42, 51, 117, 139–41; auricular confession, 97, 102–3, 105– 6, 108, 110–11, 121; confessionalization, 24, 33–34, 98– 99; confessor as physician of the soul (see curing of souls); deathbed confession, 103; general confession, 1, 11, 19, 25, 27, 41, 47, 83– 85, 87, 96–21, 123, 126–27, 138–41, 144; public confession (Confiteor), 102– 3; sacramental confession, nonsacramental confession, 22, 24, 31, 38, 43, 51, 97– 98, 100, 102, 105, 107, 109–13, 115–16, 121, 127, 131, 133, 140, 141, 144; spiritual confession (see self: self-examination); written confession, 111–12 Congregation of Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, 85, 114, 127, 132 Congregation of the Mission, 103 conscience, 1, 16, 19, 24–26, 28, 37–38, 46, 48–49, 61, 76, 86– 87, 96– 98, 103–4, 112– 13, 116, 120–46 consecration, 61, 77, 115 contemplation, 19, 33, 74, 78–79, 81, 84, 88, 89, 91– 92, 96, 130, 132

index contritio in corde. See contrition contrition, 105–7, 121, 125, 134 copying manuscripts, 75–76 Cordeses, Antonio, 89, 92 Cordova, 134 Coton, Pierre, 114, 128, 138 Crucifi xion, 21, 25, 69, 75 culpability, 34 cura animarum. See curing of souls cura sui ipsius, 26, 71 curing of souls; advisor/confessor as physician; healing wounds, 31, 38–40, 48–49, 64, 71, 109, 135 da Crema, Giovanni Battista, 43; Del modo di acquistare devotione et conservarla, 42–44; Via de aperta verità, 42 Dávila, Gonzáles, 108 de Certeau, Michel, 6, 27; “What We Do When We Believe,” 10 de la Puente, Luis, 92 de Sales, François, 59– 66, 87, 129, 136–38, 141; Conduite pour la Confession et la Communion, 115; Introduction à la vie dévote, 59, 61, 115–16; Oeuvres complètes, 103; Traité de l’amour de Dieu, 19 death, 19, 29–30, 55, 61, 77, 96, 103, 115, 121, 133 Decartes, René, 2, 19 Delumeau, Jean, 24; L’aveu et le pardon, 98; Péché et la peur, 99 demon(s); demonic spirits, demonic energies, demonic deceit, demonic desires; evil spirits, evil desires, evil inclinations; the devil, the Master of Lies, Satan, the Other, the Enemy, 6, 18, 20–21, 32, 54– 55, 58, 63, 75, 87, 92, 101–2, 109, 112–13, 117–19, 125, 129, 130, 136, 139 desert fathers, 23, 48, 113 desire(s), 2, 4– 6, 8, 10, 12–13, 17–18, 20–21 detachment, indiferencia, 49, 81 Devotio Moderna, 26, 41, 44, 71, 73, 76–77, 80, 85, 87, 93, 110, 124–25, 142 devotional practices, exercises; dedication, 1–2, 4, 6, 8–12, 14, 17–18, 23, 25–26, 29, 49, 76, 88, 90– 92, 97, 111, 114–15, 123, 125–26, 130 Diefendorf, Barbara, 63 Discalced Carmelites (Order of the Discalced Carmelites of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel), 63– 64, 100–101

209

discernment, 37–38, 45–46, 61, 65, 74, 76, 79, 82– 83, 90, 112, 138 disconnecting from the physical body, 44 discretio. See discernment divine illumination, divine infusion, 29, 72–73, 82, 88– 89 divine participation, 18, 52 divine spirit, Holy Spirit, 33, 54–55, 64, 102, 112, 137, 139 divine will, 19, 83, 87, 92– 93 Dominican Order. See Order of Preachers Dominici, Giovanni, Regola del governo di cura familiare, 40 doubt(s), 26, 36, 48, 58, 113, 133 Durkheim, Émile, 7, 23 Eckhart, Meister, 26 Election (discovering one’s vocation), 81– 84, 86– 88, 112 Elias, Norbert, 72, 99 embodiment; embodied practice, 5– 8, 10–12, 23, 33, 37–38, 61, 71, 97, 122, 130–31 Endean, Philip, 70, 91 Engelke, Matthew, 24 Engen, John Van, 76 Erasmus, Desiderius Roterodamus, 87; Enchiridion militis Christiani, 72 Evans-Pritchard, Edward E., 7 exacuere in cirumspectio sui. See self: self-examination exercitant(s), 5, 10–11, 19, 45–47, 53, 60, 65– 66, 77– 84, 89– 90, 107, 127–28, 139 existentialism, 68 exorcism. See demon(s) exteriority, 12, 22–23 faith; the faithful, 8–10, 12–14, 29, 70, 78, 100, 102, 123 Fall, the, 18, 20, 75, 104, 107– 9, 144 Favre, Pierre, 50–51, 104, 130, 132–33, 135, 140 fear, 24, 37, 49, 62, 100, 138 Flanders, 50, 89 Florence, 44 Folleville, 103 Fontaine, Madeleine de Saint-Joseph de, 64 Foucault, Michel, 15, 17, 57, 69, 72, 82, 91, 94, 105, 116–20, 131, 146; Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974– 1975, 24, 34, 56, 99, 117; “The Battle for Chastity,” 119; “Christianity and

210

index

Foucault, Michel (continued) Confession,” 99, 117, 122; The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, 16–17, 20; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 98; Foucault archives, Document D250(7) (conversation with P. Rabinow, B. Dreyfus, C. Taylor, R. Bellah, M. Jay, and L. Lowenthal, Berkeley, CA, April 21, 1983), 118; Fourth Lateran Church Council of 1215, 104; Du gouvernement des vivants: Cours au Collège de France, 1979–1980, 16–17, 24, 56, 117, 122; The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982– 83, 5– 6; The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981– 1982, 16, 20, 68, 122; History of Sexuality, 16–17, 24, 55, 117, 141; Mal faire, dire vrai: Fonction de l’aveu en justice, 99, 122; “‘Omnes et singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” 99, 118; “Pastoral Power and Political Reason,” 99; Security, Territory, Population; and Du gouvernement des vivants (lectures of January 9 and March 12, 1980), 99; Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, 34; “Sexuality and Solitude” (1980), 98; “Truth and Power,” 15; Wrong- Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, 24 France, 27, 31, 49, 52, 60, 63, 92, 101, 103, 111 Franciscans, 44, 50, 87, 91, 93, 97– 98, 102, 108, 109, 124, 140 fraterna correctione. See fraternal reproach fraternal reproach, 41 free will, affections, 19, 26, 41, 48–49, 52, 70, 73, 75, 112 Frémyot, Madame Jeanne-Françoise, 60 Freud, Sigmund, 5– 6, 15, 20 Gaetano, St. da Thine, 42 Gagliardi, Achille, 81, 92 garde du coeur, 139 Geertz, Clifford, 8 generosity, 48, 124 Germany, 50, 103, 125 Gerson, Jean, 26, 48, 53, 140; De mystica theologia, 2; “On the Art of Hearing Confessions,” 106

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 22 good works, 37, 51, 61, 64, 91, 140 goodwill, 48 governmentality, 34, 56, 98, 118 grace, God’s grace, divine grace, 9, 14, 17–18, 21, 26–27, 29, 31–33, 42, 44, 46–47, 56, 61, 66– 68, 75, 81– 83, 91– 92, 107, 111, 115, 129–32, 135, 138, 140 Granada, Luis de, 116; Guía de pecadores, 114 Greece, 37, 71, 122 Gregory, Brad, 23 Gregory of Nyssa, 106 Gregory the Great, Pope St., 25, 85 Grote, Geert, 26, 41 guide(s), written/printed; manuals; booklets; epistolary spiritual direction/guidance, 30, 32, 34, 36, 39, 41, 60, 62, 73, 76–77, 79, 91, 102, 107, 113, 116, 124, 126, 132, 137, 141 Guilloré, François, 65 guilt, 24, 34, 70, 98, 100, 105– 6, 118 Gusdorf, Georges, 22 Habermas, Jürgen, 22 habitus, 7 Hadot, Pierre, 78 Halloy, Arnaud, 12 Helfta, St. Gertrude of, 76 hell, damnation, 61– 62, 65, 75, 84, 108, 115, 133, 145 Henry IV, King of France, 31 heresy, 73, 99 Herp, Henri de, 89 heterodoxy, 87, 111 Holy Thursday, 103 Holy Week, 104 hominem. See self homo internus, 26, 75 humility, 2, 32, 36, 38, 42, 107, 115, 124, 130, 137 Illuminist. See Alumbradismo images, illustrations, emblems, imagination(s), 1–2, 5, 9, 11–14, 40, 71, 75, 78–79, 82, 84, 88– 90, 109, 130 imitation, mimetic behavior, 8, 11, 30–31, 33, 36–38, 49, 51, 58, 80, 90 Incarnation, the, 14 Index of Forbidden Books, 43 individualism, individuality, 17, 19, 21–23, 36, 38, 59, 73, 82, 93 indoctrination, 29, 67– 68,

index indulgences, 43 initiation, 29, 77 Inquisition, the, 44–45, 53, 56, 73, 89, 132 intellect, reason, cognition, 2–3, 5, 12–13, 26, 30–31, 49, 71, 75, 87, 122, 142 interiority, 1, 6, 12, 14, 16, 20–23, 25, 26, 31–32, 34, 42, 44–45, 49, 54, 57, 69, 87, 93– 94, 97– 98, 113, 118, 120–21, 143, 146 internal clock, 78 introspection, 3, 5, 11–12, 17–21, 23–27, 31, 35, 45, 51, 65, 71–72, 74, 76, 78, 81– 84, 86, 89, 90, 93– 96, 119, 121, 124, 131, 135, 138–39, 141–44 Italy, 27, 34–35, 44, 59, 81, 85, 92, 99, 102, 109, 111, 136, 141, 144 Jansenism, 8, 110–11, 113, 133 Jesuits. See Society of Jesus Jesus, 29, 37, 49, 60 John of Ávila, 55 John of the Cross, St., 62; Ascent of Mount Carmel, 55; Dark Night, 54; Flame of Living Love, 33; Living Flame, 55 Juan of Ávila, 52 Judaism, 13, 23, 73 Justice, Steven, 5 Keane, Webb, 6, 10–11, 13 Kempis, Thomas à, 26, 41, 75, 140; Imitatio Christi (The Imitation of Christ), 41, 69, 71–72, 77, 124–25 Kierkegaard, Søren, 109 knowledge, learning, 6, 12–14, 20–21, 24, 30–31, 37, 42, 46–47, 49, 53, 57, 58, 60, 62, 66, 78, 85, 87, 98 Labadie, Jean, 92 Lacan, Jacques, 6 laity, laypersons, 3, 14, 25, 27, 35, 39, 41–44, 46, 49, 51–52, 55–58, 64, 68, 72–74, 76–77, 83, 85, 87– 89, 90– 91, 93, 101–2, 106, 110, 113–16, 124–29, 132–40, 143–44 Lallemant, Louis, 49, 92, 138–39; Spiritual Doctrine, 49 Lambek, Michael, 14 Landini, Silvestro, 103 Last Judgment, the, 61, 103, 115, 133 laxism, 113, 133 Lazarists (Congregation of the Mission), 103 Le Cerf, St. Candide, 64 Lent, 102–4, 108, 131

211

Lester, Rebecca, 8, 18, 21 liberation, 4, 24, 83, 119, liberty; Christian Liberty; freedom, 15, 17– 19, 21, 26, 33, 56, 59, 70, 75, 80, 83, 89– 90, 95, 112, 117, 119, 122, 145 Liguori, St. Alfonso Maria de, 35 likeness of Christ, 32 liturgy, 9, 29, 36, 67, 76–77, 102 Loarte, Gaspar de, Exercitio della vita spiritual (The Exercises of a Christian Life), 51, 104, 113 Lollardy, 42, 44 love; divine love, God’s love, 2, 5, 12, 14, 17– 18, 25, 33, 48, 49, 54, 59, 62, 75, 76, 84– 85, 89, 93, 100, 119, 133, 138 Low Countries, 26, 80, 103, 124 Loyola, St. Ignatius of, 49–52, 55, 97, 106, 111, 114, 117–20, 126, 128, 130–31, 134– 39, 143; Autobiography, 74; Diary, 74; Spiritual Exercises, 11, 25, 45–47, 59– 60, 67–76, 78– 96, 100, 103–4, 107–10, 112–13, 115–16, 127, 132, 144 Ludolph of Saxony, 80; Vita Christi, 71 Luhrmann, Tanya, 12–13 Luther, Martin, 67– 68, 87 Mack, Phyllis, 18 Mahmood, Saba, 6, 8, 14, 21 Maillard, Olivier: La confession de Frère Oliuier Maillard, 102; La confession generale, 102 Manresa, 74, 86 manual(s). See guide(s) Marguerite de Veni d’Arbouze (a.k.a. Mère Marguerite de Saint- Gertrude), 129–30 Mascuch, Michael, 22 Mass, 8, 101, 103–4 Maubuisson, convent of, 60, 64– 65 Mauss, Marcel, 7 meaning(s), 5, 7– 8, 10–11, 15, 21, 29, 50, 76, 79, 85, 101, 110 mediation(s), meditatio, 1–2, 13, 19–22, 25– 26, 44–46, 48, 50, 53, 61– 62, 69, 71–76, 78, 80, 83, 84, 88– 92, 103, 107, 110, 113, 115–16, 123, 126–27, 129, 137, 143 Medina, Bartolomé de, Breve instrucción de cómo se ha de administrare el sacramento de la penitencia, 40 memory, memorization, mnemonic devices, 10, 13, 29, 75, 97, 105, 107– 8, 112, 125–26, 131

212

index

mendicant(s), 38–39, 43, 124 Mercurian, Everard, 12, 89– 92 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 6–7 Merton, Thomas, 32 Mexico, 8, 77 Michaud- Quantin, Pierre, 102 Milan, 42–43, 111, 114 modernity, Christian modernity, 2, 5, 21–24, 27, 67–70, 98– 99, 117, 142–45 Modes Parisienesis, 80 Molina, Michelle, 18, 21, 26, 114 monasticism, monastery, monasteries, monks, novices, etc., 2, 16, 25, 27, 31, 36– 39, 41, 48–50, 54, 57, 64, 72–73, 76–78, 85, 90– 91, 106, 111, 113–14, 123–26, 128, 132, 134, 139–40, 143 Montmartre, 31 Montrocher, Guy de, Manipulus Curatorum, 39 Montserrat, 71, 106–7, 112, 125, 127 Morgan, Ben, 26 movements, motions (in the self), 14, 18, 32–33, 40, 43, 45–47, 49, 51, 60– 61, 65, 75, 82– 83, 85, 90, 95, 112, 131–32, 139 mundane, 14, 19, 46–47, 76, 85 Myers, David, 104 mysticism, mystics, 2, 19–20, 26, 32–33, 39, 44, 53, 54, 59– 61, 63, 67– 68, 74, 76, 79– 81, 85, 88– 92, 95, 101, 113, 128, 135 Nadal, Jérôme, 104, 140 Nativity, the, 69, 75 nature, 42, 75, 122 Naumescu, Vlad, 12 Needham, Rodney, 7 Negri, Angelic Paula Antoinette, 43 Nicole, Pierre, 145 Oaxaca, 77 obedience, 2, 21, 28, 31, 34, 43–44, 47, 52–53, 57, 69, 75, 79– 83, 90, 94, 99, 119, 122 Old Testament, 21 O’Malley, John, 101, 134 Order of Preachers, 25, 37, 40, 42–44, 50, 59, 73, 87, 89, 93, 100, 103, 106, 114, 124–25, 144 Order of Saint Benedict, 64, 106, 125, 130 Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, 30, 52–55, 57, 60, 63– 64, 101, 135

Order of the Discalced Carmelites of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, 63– 64, 100–101 Order of the Theatines, 42, 59, 136 Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary, 60, 62– 64, 109, 129 orthodoxy, 45, 67, 72–74, 78–79, 82– 83, 88– 89, 116, 132 Osuna, Francisco de, Third Spiritual Alphabet, 47, 50, 52–53 Padua, 59 Paige, Nicholas, 26 panopticon, 131 paradise, 61, 103, 115, 133 Paris, 59, 62– 64, 68, 80, 101, 106, 130 Parma, 132, 140 Pascal, Blaise, 9; Pensées, 8; Wager, 8 Paul, St., 1–2, 9, 123 Paul, Vincent de, 101, 103 Paul III, Pope, 73 Paul of Hungary, Summa Magistri Pauli, 37 Peace of Augsburg, 73 pedagogy, 13, 31–32, 39, 57, 66– 67, 78, 144 Pelagianism, 43, 51, 132 penance, 1–2, 7– 9, 11–12, 21–24, 29–31, 34, 37, 39–40, 46–51, 53–54, 65, 69, 75–77, 88, 97–116, 118–20, 122–27, 131, 133–35, 140–44, 146 penitence. See penance Perraud, Jeanne, 101 Peter, Canisius, 125 philosophical discussion, philosophia perennis, 67, 70 piety, 8, 13–14, 22–23, 31, 68– 69, 101, 128, 137 Polanco, Juan Alfonso de, 47, 113 Port-Royal, 60, 64 Possevino, Antonio, 59 post-Tridentine Catholicism, 34, 57, 68, 70, 87– 93, 140 prayer, 13, 19, 29, 33, 37, 44, 48, 50, 53–55, 62, 67, 71, 75–77, 79– 80, 86, 88– 92, 95, 100– 102, 113, 123, 126, 129, 132, 134–36 pride, 48, 55, 130 Prosperi, Adriano, 72, 98, 101 Protestant, 3–4, 8, 21–24, 26–27, 69, 74, 99, 101, 143 Provence, 101, 103, 114 Pseudo-Bonaventure, Meditationes vitae Christi, 80

index psychagogy, 31, 33, 36–37, 39, 55, 58–59, 65– 66, 71–72, 93, 97, 116, 135, 144 Puritanism, 22–23 Quakerism, 18 quietism, 140 quietude, peace, tranquility, 12, 19, 25–26, 33, 56, 62, 75, 84, 104, 113–14 Rahner, Karl, 67–70, 72, 87, 94 Ranft, Patricia, 63 Recollection, recollections, recollection of sins, 34, 44, 61, 66, 101, 107– 8, 115–16, 126, 131–32 Reformation, the, 51 Reformed Benedictines (Order of Saint Benedict), 64, 106, 125, 130 Régis, Jean-François, 103 Reinhard, Wolfgang, 72 repentance. See penance Resurrection, the, 14, 21, 75, 78, 84, 96 retreat(s), 27, 40, 45, 60– 61, 77–79, 83– 85, 90, 92, 116, 127, 132 Revelation, the; revelation, 16, 29 Réville, Albert, 23 Ribadeneyra, Pedro de, 128 Rigoleuc, Jean, 49, 139 ritual. See penance Robertson Smith, William, 7 Rodríguez, St. Alfonso, Ejercicio de perfección y virtudes Cristianas, 91– 92 Roest, Bert, 102 Roman Ritual of 1614, 40 Rome, 37, 50, 71, 114, 122 Rousset, Anne-Marie of Bourges, 63 Ruel, Malcolm, 8 Ruusbroec, Jan van, 26, 89 Sacrament, Holy; sacraments; sacramentality, 22, 24, 35, 39–40, 48, 51, 65, 96– 97, 100, 102, 105, 107, 109–13, 116, 123, 134, 140 Sacred Heart, cult of the, 109 Salamanca, 64, 73 Salazar, María de San José, On the Instruction of Female Novices, 64 Salcedo, Don Francisco de, 52 salvation, 2, 9, 14, 16, 18, 22, 24, 39, 42–43, 58, 62, 69, 75, 87, 122, 126, 142–43, 145 satisfactio. See penance

213

Savonarola, Girolamo, 42–43, 76, 80, 87, 93, 125, 140, 143; Regola del ben vivere, 125; Triumphus Crucis de fi deli veritate, 25, 69 Savoy, 50, 115–16 Scupoli, Lorenzo, Spiritual Combat, 136–37 Segneri, Paolo, 109, 141 self: modern self, 3–4, 19–20, 22–24, 26–27, 94, 145; self-abnegation, selfannihilation, self-negation, 2, 18–19, 36, 61, 79, 81, 133; self-actualization, self-legitimization, self-empowerment, self-realization, 2, 3, 12, 17, 20, 22–23, 25, 51, 66– 67, 81, 83, 86, 91, 93, 100, 138; self-awareness, self-attunedness, self-knowledge; spiritual knowledge, 1, 2, 4, 12, 15–16, 19–20, 22, 26, 32, 35, 40, 48–49, 66, 70–71, 81, 84, 93– 94, 102, 104– 8, 110, 112, 130–35, 139, 142, 145; self-conversion, self-transformation, 1–2, 5, 16–17, 26–27, 31, 40, 51, 57, 71–72, 78, 81, 84, 90– 91, 101– 9, 114–16, 129, 131, 138, 143; self-cultivation, self-care, selfdevelopment, self-help, self-growth, 1– 6, 11, 16, 18–27, 34, 42–44, 49, 51–52, 58– 61, 71–72, 76–77, 79– 80, 85– 86, 89, 91, 94– 95, 97, 106, 113, 123, 126, 135, 138–40, 144; self-debasement, 107; self-delusion; vainglory, 36, 48, 87, 124, 130, 132, 135, 138, 140; self-discipline, self-comportment, self-control, self-mastery, self-policing, self-possessing, 2–3, 7– 8, 13, 15, 18–19, 22, 24–27, 34, 36–37, 40, 42, 49–51, 56–59, 66, 72, 74–76, 78, 81– 83, 85, 91, 93– 95, 98–100, 109, 112–13, 118–19, 123–25, 131, 135, 138, 145; self-examination, examination of conscience, self-investigation, self-exploration, self-interrogation, self-reflection, spiritual confession, self-discovery, 1–2, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22–28, 33, 40, 46, 48–51, 61, 71, 76, 81, 86– 87, 94, 96– 98, 103–4, 110, 113, 116, 120–41, 143–46; self-formation, self-creation, 1, 3– 6, 18–21, 23–25, 27–28, 34, 44, 55–56, 59, 66, 69–72, 74, 76, 88, 93– 94, 96, 98– 99, 105, 110, 116–17, 119–22, 139, 141–45; selfhood, hominem, personhood, 1–4, 6, 15–16, 19, 27, 69, 97, 117, 141–43, 145–46; self-reliance, self-trust, 70, 132–33, 139– 41, 143; self-subjugation (see subjugation)

214

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Sevilla (a.k.a. Seville), 64 shame, 24, 49, 70, 100, 115, 118 Sillery, 129 sin, 18, 25, 38–43, 48, 50–51, 58, 61, 65– 66, 69, 75, 84, 96– 98, 100–116, 119–21, 123, 125– 28, 130–37, 139, 141, 144, 146 singularity, 17, 32, 36, 94, 144 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 10 Society of Jesus, 12, 25, 32, 40, 44–52, 54, 57, 59, 61, 65, 67– 68, 70, 72–74, 81, 85– 94, 96– 98, 100, 103–4, 107–16, 125–38, 140–41 sorrow, 38, 103, 107, 110–11, 113, 115, 131, 133–34 sovereignty, 3–4, 15, 75 Spain, 27, 44, 52–53, 63, 89, 92, 102 spirits, instincts, passions, desires, 4, 8, 10, 18, 20, 36, 45–47, 56, 58– 60, 63, 69, 72, 74–76, 82– 83, 85, 91, 94, 109, 112, 119, 122, 128, 133, 136, 138, 141, 145 spirituality: ecstatic, 2, 6, 12, 14, 17–18, 24, 29, 38, 45, 47, 51, 58–59, 64– 65, 74, 79, 81, 89, 91, 112, 138; extravagant, excessive, 47, 89, 140; New Age, 20, 142; spiritual colloquy, 38, 84; spiritual diaries, 23, 34, 36; spiritual injury and rupture, bad spiritual direction, 52–54, 60; spiritual friendship, 39, 45; spiritual growth, 11, 25, 43–44, 49, 52, 58, 71–72, 76–77, 80, 85– 86, 89, 113, 135; spiritual independence, homo internus, homo pacificus, 59, 75; spiritual joy, spiritual consolation(s), spiritual maturity, spiritual perfection, 2, 26, 33, 36, 38, 44, 49, 56, 58–59, 62– 63, 83– 85, 94, 134, 136, 138, 145; spiritual purity, purity of conscience, purity of the soul, purity of the heart, 49, 69, 76, 128, 138; spiritual tribulation, interior tribulation, spiritual desolation, 36, 45, 47, 58, 65, 74, 76, 93, 112; spiritual virtuosity, 47, 133 Stoic, Stoicisim, 2, 122 subjecthood, 1–2, 4–7, 15–19, 21–22, 27, 35, 56, 59, 66, 69, 83, 94, 98– 99, 113, 117, 126, 139, 141, 143–46 subjection, 4–5, 15–17, 55–59, 66, 69, 83, 98– 99, 122, 131 subjectivation, 3–5, 15–18, 21, 25, 27, 45, 56, 59, 61, 66, 69–72, 81, 83, 88, 93– 99, 105, 109, 113, 116, 120, 131, 139, 140–46

subjectivity, 5–7, 15–19, 21, 28, 93– 94, 100, 105, 119 subjugation, 2–4, 6, 14, 16–19, 21, 24, 28, 34, 36, 38–40, 52–53, 56, 58– 61, 64, 66, 70, 79, 82– 83, 88, 93– 95, 98–100, 117–19, 122, 131, 144–45 submission. See subjugation Suireau, Marie des Anges, 64– 65 Surin, Jean-Joseph, 20, 30, 92, 94, 128 Suso, Henry, 80, 89 Tauler, Johannes, 89 Taves, Ann, 13 Taylor, Charles, 3 Taylor, Edward B., 7 temptation(s), 18, 20, 26, 32–33, 37, 43, 45, 47–50, 58, 64, 76, 74, 98, 100, 124, 128, 130–31, 134, 136–37, 139, 146 Ten Commandments, the, 102, 108, 112, 125 Tentler, Thomas, 98– 99 Teresa of Ávila, St., 30, 45, 51–56, 62– 64, 92, 100–101, 145; “Constitutions Which the Mother Teresa of Jesus Gave to the Discalced Carmelite Nuns,” 54, 129; The Interior Castle, 19; Way of Perfection, 54, 101 Toledo, 89 Torelli, Countess Ludovica of Guastalla, 42–43 Toulonjon, Countess Françoise de, 129 transubstantiation, 21 Trent, Council of, 24, 39–40, 51, 74, 89, 100– 101, 110–12 Tridentine Catholicism, 64, 90 Trinity, the Holy, 21, 84 trust, 9, 48–49, 55, 58, 65, 79, 94, 126, 140 truth-telling, truth, inner truth, core truth, the Truth, divine truth, 1, 6, 9, 16–17, 20, 22, 24, 31, 56, 61, 70, 80, 94, 96–100, 109–10, 112–13, 117–18, 122, 124, 126, 141–42, 144–46 Tuscany, 103 Ulloa, Doña Guiomar de, 52 union with God; union with Christ, 2, 20, 26, 44, 49, 77, 81 University of Paris, 80, 106 Val-de- Grace, 130 van Esch, Nicholas, 125

index

215

veridiction, 24 vernacular, 73–74, 76, 85, 88, 90, 92– 93, 95, 102–3, 124 Vernet, Jacob, 23 Virgin Mary, the, 29, 84, 108, 130 virtue(s), 51, 91, 94, 102, 110, 124, 126–27, 136 Visitandine (Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary), 60, 62– 64, 109, 129 visualizing, visualization(s), visions, prophecy, prophecies, 12, 19, 30, 39, 50, 61, 71, 73–75, 77–78, 84, 89, 90, 92, 108– 9, 113, 130 Vivarais, 103 volitionalism, 9 von Ranke, Leopold, 23

Wischaven, Cornelius, 50 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 7 women, 15, 17; laywomen, 1, 3, 14, 17, 35–36, 39, 43–44, 57, 73, 85– 87, 89– 90, 93, 101, 110, 112–16, 138, 145; novices, 54, 64; sexual and gendered dynamics between directors and trainees, 36, 43–44, 63, 85; women with spiritual authority (nuns, prioresses, abbesses, mothers, mothers superior, prophets), convents, 2, 8, 14, 17, 27, 30–31, 34–36, 39–41, 43–44, 51–55, 59– 66, 76–77, 85, 87, 101, 103, 109, 111, 124–25, 129–30, 136–38, 143, 145

Weber, Alison, 63 Weber, Max, 3, 22–23, 46

Zaccaria, St. Antonio, 42 Zarri, Gabriella, 44

Xavier, Francis, 128