To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–1767 9780520955042

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To Overcome Oneself

“Horoscopium Catholicum” from Athanasius Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae. Rome, 1646.

To Overcome Oneself The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–1767

J. Michelle Molina

U N I V ER SIT Y OF CA LIFOR N I A PR E SS Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Molina, J. Michelle. To overcome oneself : the Jesuit ethic and spirit of global expansion, 1520–1767 / J. Michelle Molina. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-27565-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Ignatius, of Loyola, Saint, 1491–1556. Exercitia spiritualia. 2. Spiritual exercises. 3. Jesuits—Spiritual life. 4. Self— Religious aspects— Christianity. 5. Self (Philosophy) I. Title. BX2179.L8M59 2013 271'.53—dc23 2012050209 Manufactured in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100 post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified. Cover illustration. Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae, in X. libros digesta [etc.]. Editio altera priori multò auctior. Amstelodami, Apud Joannem Janssonium à Waesberge, & Haeredes Elizaei Weyerstraet [1671]. By courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

To Samuel and Theo: Thank you for being my in-house artists, inventors, lizard hunters, animal trainers, trenchant observers of humanity, hilarious YouTube finders, and so much more.

Con t en ts

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction: “To Overcome Oneself”

1

Grassroots Monasticism, or, “The Modern Self ” as Medieval to the Max Embodiment as a Paradigm for Historians The Trajectory of the Project, or, How Merleau-Ponty Answered a Foucauldian Question The Shape of the Book

7 9

1. The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises: Conquest of the Self, Conquest of the World From Cell to World “To Awaken in Them a Desire to Be Themselves Helped” “To Overcome Oneself, and to Order One’s Life” Imagination, Redemption, and Global Expansion

2. Women’s Devotional Labor Spiritual Daughters, Spiritual Mothers Pious Frenzy The Gender of Obedience?

3. Consolation Philosophy: Or, How Prayer Moved People in an Age of Global Expansion Passions, Virtue, Action Experiments in Consolation Philosophy

16 20 24 25 31 36 45 50 52 56 65 67 72 77

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Contents Spinozist Interlude The Fourth Week Consolation in/as Action in the Indies, East and West

4. Evangelization and Consolation: Or, Philosophy in the Mission Field Father Juan Bautista Zappa, SJ Rituals of Reform Talk as Touch

5. Facts: Houses, Books, and Other Remains Houses Books Remains

6. Colonial Indifference? Another Approach to the Colonial Other Indians: The Devil Is in the Details Missionary Fantasies: A Desire for Difference Compañeros Spiritual Difference: A Devotional Eye, a Sacramental Map

7. A Heart-Shaped World

87 89 93 104 108 110 114 131 131 137 142 150 151 157 162 166 171

“María Josepha, Your Unworthy Daughter”: Self-Negation and Self-Formation Desire for Presence, or, Love in a Mexican Convent: Petra de San Gabriel The Shape of the Heart Heart in the World

173 179 184 192

Conclusion: Re-membering the Past

197

Re-membering the Mexican Baroque Re-membering Spiritual Exercises

202 207

Notes Bibliography Index

211 255 271

I l lust r at ions

1. Horoscopium Catholicum frontispiece ii 2. “Contemplation to Attain Love” from Exercitia spiritualia S.P. Ignatij Loyolae 90 3. Illustrated mnemonic for examining the conscience prior to making a general confession from Exercitia spiritualia S.P. Ignatij Loyolae 120 4. The Adoration of the Sacred Heart with Saints Ignatius Loyola and Aloysius Gonzaga (La Adoración del Sagrado Corazón con Ignacio de Loyola y Luís Gonzaga) 185 5. The Cult of Devotion That Every Christian Ought to Give to the Sacred Heart of Christ as Man and God 187 6. El Alma Victoriosa 190

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Ac k now l ed g m en ts

It is probably not obvious in these pages how much I owe to an African economic historian, Ralph Austen, for putting me on this path. The questions about the history of New Spain in a global frame began to percolate in his graduate course on European expansion and the postcolonial world. Friends, colleagues, and teachers from those Chicago days, now scattered across the United States, who made it such an incredible place to think about colonialism and whose influence continues to shape my thought include Andrew Apter, Dipesh Chakrabarty, John and Jean Comaroff, Robin Derby, Rachel Fulton, Jan Goldstein, Tamar Herzog, Joshua Kaplan, Daniel Klingensmith, John MacAloon, Maria Elena Martínez, Erica Peters, Paul Ross, David Scott, Alex Stern, and Shields Sundberg. I am forever indebted to the Chicago workshop system, those lovely thought laboratories dedicated to intellectual experimentation, fermentation, occasional explosion. I owe much to institutions that, to my great delight, are committed to taking such great care of the records with which historians think and, yes, play. Thank you to the archivists and staff at the Archivo General de la Nación de México, Archivo Romanum Societatus Iesu, the Bancroft Library, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Biblioteca Nacional de México, the Bibliothèque St. Sèvres, Paris, and the Burns Collection at Boston College. Special thanks to Robin Rider at Special Collections at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and to Leticia Ruíz Ramírez at the Biblioteca Eusebio F. Kino de la Provincia Mexicana. My former colleagues and graduate students in the Department of History at University of California, Irvine, contributed much to this book. I thank Marc Baer, Nicole LaBouff, Kurt MacMillan, Laura Mitchell, and especially Ulrike Strasser, who continues to be a fabulous interlocutor. Thanks to Roxanne Varzi, xi

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friend and colleague whose gorgeous prose inspires; and finally, a shout-out to my hilarious colleagues and laid-back Irvine neighbors, Amy dePaul and Rodrigo Lazo. The Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School provided a magical year in which to write, not to mention a regular format for sharing work in progress with such smart women who, importantly, became very good friends. Thanks to Joan Branham, Anne Braude, Ronit Irshak, Mónica Maher, Miryam Segal, and Elizabeth Sutton for making the Carriage House a wonderfully productive place to think and write, not only about women, gender, and religion but, even more often, about life in general. I brought this book to a close in the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University with the support of insightful colleagues and graduate students. Mira Balberg, Sarah Jacoby, and Barry Wimpfheimer comprised a team of incredibly supportive and inspiring junior faculty friends. It has been a privilege to poke my head out of my office door to find a cohort of impressive senior Catholic Studies scholars in Richard Kieckhefer, Robert Orsi, and Cristie Traina. Cristie and Richard have read numerous drafts and offered extended and quite brilliant feedback, for which I am of course very grateful. Perhaps like the late medieval and early modern Catholics whom I study, I wonder if I, mere mortal, can ever attain the sanctity of these exemplary figures. I have learned so much from a dazzlingly unique philosopher, Brook Ziporyn, a larger-than-life figure who is a bit hard to wrap one’s head around, but therein lies the pleasure. I have loved teaching the graduate students at Northwestern and appreciated thinking, sparring, and laughing at the conference room table. Special thanks to a very sharp and dedicated graduate student, Kristi Bain, for her conversation and thoughtful readings of so many drafts of my work. I have drawn upon the brain power of scholars in the wider Northwestern community, notably Ken Alder, Yarí Pérez Marín, and Claudia Swan. With great pleasure I acknowledge Mary Weismantel and Lars Tønder, who have shared in the immense fun of reading through the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology Workshop sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. AKIH has supported two other ventures of mine: a symposium, Vibrant Materiality: Religion, Embodiment and the Life of Things (2012), and what has become a biannual tradition of convening Jesuit studies scholars for a day-long roundtable (2009, 2011). Thanks to the scholars who have sat around the table to discuss the Society of Jesus: Steve Andes, Luke Clossey, Emanuele Colombo, Stephen Harris, Florence Hsia, Kristin Huffine, Karen Melvin, Kenneth Mills, Robert Orsi, Ulrike Strasser, Karin Vélez, and Thomas Worcester. This book has been improved immensely by the feedback and conversations I have had with scholars at a variety of institutions. I presented preliminary parts of this book at a number of institutions, including Boston College, Harvard Uni-

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versity, Holy Cross College, the University of Chicago, the University of Toronto, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The latter to be noted for its scintillating workshop on “Lived Inquiry.” Formal and informal conversations with Antonella Romano have been incredibly stimulating. Thank you to Alan Cole, for insightful hilarity and the wry editorial eye that he ran over the introduction. I am grateful to Florence Hsia for reading through an early draft of the manuscript, for being an excellent dinner companion, and for her infectious laughter. Ken Mills’s intellectual generosity is enjoyed by all of us in the field of colonial Latin American history and, over these many years, I have not only benefited from his informal mentorship, but also treasured his friendship. That the anonymous readers of the manuscript made this a better book is an understatement. Thanks to Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matthew O’Hara, and Valentina Napolitano for their generous and insightful feedback. Three cheers for Reed Malcolm, senior acquisitions editor at University of California Press, who has been a rock-solid source of support for this project. Thank you, Reed. “How’s the book?” “I can’t talk about it.” Thanks to my parents for putting up with years of that tireless nonconversation, and love to my sisters, Jennifer, Johanna, and Erica, for their steady support and shared laughter about things large and small, happy and tragic. I nod toward the long history I have shared with Gary Wong, who has done much to make my academic life very possible. Two sisters, two kids, and three dogs? Special thanks to Jennifer for engaging in these periodic experiments in domestic living wherein we have agreed with Woody Allen that we do not belong to that very special group called “the horrible,” rather, we prefer to be lumped in with the merely “miserable.” The ensuing laughter has done much to release the pressure valve on single parenting. Thanks to friends and family who wander in and out the front door, making domestic life a little more like living in a village. Love to a brave band of women who crossed oceans to put an interesting accent on the venture of raising kids: thank you to Camille George, Naïma Bouaziz, and Mirka Lassakova. I am eternally grateful to Pamela Lui and George Bucciero, whose love, support, frequent dinners, and memorable nights at local music venues have been essential to surviving these past few years; love and thanks to my adopted extended family, Simon Aronoff and Mary Weismantel; to Barb Ciesemier, who navigates this post-divorce world with me; to Barry Wimpfheimer, my friend and academic comrade in arms; to Brook Ziporyn, with whom I negotiated a tequila-for-music exchange; to my wry yogi, Lane Fenrich; to Andrew Jankowski, my interpreter of dreams; to Jackie Winter, who shares her fabulous colonial art books with me; to Liz Fitzgerald and Lisa Lipkind for being such wonderful and much-anticipated extended guests;

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to Nils Halverson, for his enduring friendship; to Ana Maria Apodaca, my touchstone since sixth grade; and to the baristas and regulars at Peet’s who make scholarly life anything but scholarly. I dedicate this book to my boys, the absolute best sources of love, challenge, and enjoyment in my life.

Introduction “To Overcome Oneself” SPIRITUAL EXERCISES To Overcome Oneself, And to Order One’s Life, Without Reaching a Decision Through Some Disordered Affection —Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola

Alone. Ignatius of Loyola was alone in Manresa, Spain, in 1522. From this solitary period of meditative introspection, the sixteenth-century Spaniard wrote the Spiritual Exercises to share with others a method of self-evaluation that could lead to personal and spiritual transformation. But what was it about interior movement of the soul that set in motion prayers and persons around the expanse of the globe? Why didn’t Ignatius join a monastery, become a hermit, and inspire others to a life of prayerful contemplation? Instead, by the time of Ignatius’s death in 1556, there were thirty-five Jesuit colleges in Europe alone and, by the close of the sixteenth century Jesuits had established mission stations in the Americas, China, Japan, and India. How did a focus on the self become a will to transform others? Ignatius of Loyola wrote and revised the Spiritual Exercises over a period of approximately twenty years, dating from his “second conversion” at Manresa in 1522. Circulating in manuscript from 1541 and published in 1548, the Exercises were written in a very functional manner, as a series of instructions, details, and suggestions for the Jesuit director who assisted another person through the course. Commenting upon the mélange of literary genres comprising the Spiritual Exercises, John O’Malley has observed: “[Containing] directives, meditations, prayers, declarations, procedures, sage observations and rules . . . the very diversity of genres at first glance suggests a scissors-and-paste composition.”  Offering a condensed, simplified, and adaptable format, the Exercises offered neither a philosophical exposition on spiritual life nor a series of prayers. Rather, the book is 1

2

Introduction

best described as a “teacher’s manual.”  Ignatius presented the Spiritual Exercises as a program to be carried out over four weeks (First Week, Second Week, etc.) with each week comprising a series of reiterative meditative exercises that would be built upon and expanded in the ensuing weeks. The “week” format was loosely interpreted: one might take longer or shorter than seven days to complete the various exercises. The entire program was a retreat that took approximately thirty days to complete, although a shortened version was swift ly made available to laity. In the opening pages of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola stated that the purpose of this program was “to overcome oneself.” I take my title from this phrase because this book is a meditation on the meaning and practice of selfovercoming in early modern Catholic contexts. The irony is that a “self” must be forged before it could be overcome. In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius put together a series of techniques that required the continuous (re)construction of a self that one also aimed to (but could never quite) transcend. At stake was not only an increased intensity in one’s relationship with the divine; Jesuit devotional practices also involved a reordering of one’s social reality through a rigorous ordering of time. A practitioner of the Exercises constructed narratives about the par ticular sins that had plagued his life, producing an ordered understanding of his individual history. Here the exercitant paid attention to place and context, marking the hours, days, and years of his life, providing the practitioner a method for making decisions in a rational manner. This practice was intended to combine past, present, and future in a deepened relationship with one’s Maker. The Spiritual Exercises encouraged autobiographical accounts shaped around what had been undisclosed or hidden, ultimately contributing to a conception of religion as a private, personal practice, representative of one’s individual relationship with God. This sounds like the makings of a story about Jesuits and Catholic interiority and, in part, it is. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) wrote the Spiritual Exercises—a meditative program geared toward spiritual renewal—in the early sixteenth century. The band of men who formed around Ignatius and his Exercises conceived of their collective lives as dedicated to walking with Christ; thus they named themselves the Society of Jesus. Their oft-stated mission was the “help” or “consolation of souls,” and Loyola’s Exercises functioned as the active core of all Jesuit ministries, as well as a key component of Jesuit self-understanding, both individual and corporate. To Overcome Oneself treats early modern Jesuit techniques of self-formation, namely, spiritual exercises, confessional practices, and the relationships between spiritual directors and their subjects from the 1550s through the 1760s. My study of Jesuit spirituality historicizes a par ticular mode of selfobjectification practiced by early modern Catholics in Europe and in New Spain in an effort to understand the epistemological shifts that produced a version of

Introduction

3

self, to study at close range a moment in the formation of a concept, and, ultimately, to produce a more complex history of the “Cartesian moment” that expands our understanding of early modern subjectivity beyond the realm of European philosophers. The terrain that produced the individual knowing subject was rich and the sources of the modern self more varied and dispersed than scholarship has thus far allowed. But I offer what is perhaps a paradoxical view of self because in the course of this book, I will insist upon saying and praying as embodied practices. My aim has been to write an intellectual history that is grounded in the study of personto-person interactions, to answer (from the vantage point of the ground) the very big question: How did the so-called Western self become a disembodied self? The short answer: it was through embodied processes that humans have come to experience themselves as split into mind and body. Despite the self-congratulatory role assigned to “consciousness” in the Western intellectual tradition, early moderns did not think themselves into thinking selves. Rather, “the self” was forged from embodied efforts to transcend self. To complicate matters, this was not a solo enterprise: Catholic spiritual healing practices in the early modern era relied upon the intersubjective relationships fashioned between the spiritual director and his subject. Furthermore, despite a discourse that situates self as interior, the actual fuel for continued self-transformation required an object-cum-subject: someone else to transform. A constant question throughout the book: Why does the effort to know and transcend self require so many others, and what can we learn about the inherent intersubjectivity of self-making in the process? The Spiritual Exercises offer a good case study of a Catholic “technique of the self” that was available, accessible, and very popular among early modern Catholic laity. Despite being forged in retreat, this self would not remain behind the walls of a Jesuit college or retreat house. The various exercises were designed to become part of an exercitant’s everyday life. The exercitant could be renewed and improved through worldly action geared toward “the help of souls.” Intimate rituals of self-formation linked to a global vision of a triumphant worldly Christianity underpin my argument that care of the self propelled the Christian into the world. This is how the Jesuits understood themselves. The early Jesuit Jerome Nadal (1507–80) described the desire to be mobile in the following terms: “[The Jesuits] consider that they are in their most peaceful and pleasant house when they are constantly on the move, when they travel throughout the earth, when they have no place to call their own.” The Jesuits thought of themselves as contemplatives in action. Throughout the book, I hone in on the meaning of contemplation in action in order to write a history of bodies in motion. I continually refer to active bodies, first, because this has seemed to be the best way to understand and describe how this Jesuit-styled subjectivity was brought into being. Second, I have not wished to privilege the reflective or conscious aspects of personhood as

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Introduction

the sole means of shaping what has been understood to be “modern” about subjectivity. I will say more on this later in this introduction. For the moment, it is important to know that Ignatian spirituality was driven by an understanding of individual salvation to be achieved by mobility in a world that had only recently become a globe to be traversed. This was the age of exploration, and Jesuits were key players in molding the conceptual contours of both self and world. The transregionalism of the Society’s missionary efforts has attracted scholarly attention in the past two decades. Studies on the Jesuits have also emphasized the contributions that the Society of Jesus made to science—a much-studied topic in recent years. As Luce Giard commented upon the publication of a weighty collection of essays titled The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773, the tome is remarkable for the number of specialists who are not Jesuits themselves who have stumbled upon the archives of the Society of Jesus to write an increasingly interdisciplinary study of religion, the history of science, and intellectual history. She has dubbed this the “désenclavement of the study of Jesuit history,” in other words, a sign that the study of Jesuits no longer belongs solely to a semi-hagiographical historiography written by the Society itself. However, she also remarked that the edited collection contained practically nothing on Jesuit spirituality or, in her words, that the essays “missed the problem of their motives, their inspirational drive, and the problem of the successive versions of their specific identity. . . . Historians who are attracted to the Jesuits because of their mobility and because of the eventful history of the order have to address the ‘hard core’ of Jesuit identity, that is, Ignatian spirituality.” I have written this book to kill multiple birds with a single stone. We can pay attention to spirituality, motivation, mobility, evangelism, and science by honing in on what might appropriately be labeled a Jesuit science of the self. There have been relatively few studies on Jesuit contributions to early modern forms of subjectivity. As will soon become evident, the Exercises in par ticu lar (and Jesuit spiritual direction more generally) provided a methodology aimed at gaining reliable knowledge about one’s own sinning self. This Jesuit scientia aimed to name and identify a self that was subsequently to be overcome through discerning action. Clearly, the Spiritual Exercises were the “hard core” of Jesuit spirituality, but the techniques therein can hardly be said to belong to the Society of Jesus alone. Rather, interwoven in these spiritual practices were long-standing Western philosophical deliberations (and practices) about the nature of “reason” in relation to “the passions.” With roots in ancient philosophy, these debates were revitalized in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as early modern philosophers sought to answer questions about the ability of reason to control the passions, and the mechanisms by which it might do so, and, broadly construed, how both hereditary and external conditions (from climate to motion of the planets)

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could affect the “passions.” In a similar vein, Jesuits advocated experimental spiritual techniques to separate a knowing subject from a knowable object. The target in this case—the object to be controlled by rational method, more precisely—was the sinning self. Yet this history of the formation of Western subjectivities cannot be bound to European terrain. If we can speak of an “early modern self,” this book compels its reader to take note that it emerged in Europe and Latin America simultaneously. The arc of my inquiry about spirituality and subjectivity includes the experiences of Catholics in Europe and New Spain in an effort to highlight shared aspects of a transatlantic Catholic cosmopolitan culture. Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic were folded into a dynamic that not only forged new concepts of self but, in so doing, fueled the global Catholic missionary movement. This inclusion of Latin America in the history of what was “early” about globalization remains woefully underexplored. Catholic techniques of the self took shape on the European continent and in the kingdom of New Spain simultaneously because Western consciousness declared itself vis-à-vis “others” who were both local and distant, regardless of geographic location. In other words, New Spaniards also imagined distant others in need of salvation. Attention to distant souls from the vantage point of New Spain is evident in the example of those who donated New World silver wealth toward the ransom of Spanish captives in North Africa. Another example is the seventeenth-century group of laity in Mexico City who formed a congregation with the specific aim of praying for martyred Christian laity in Japan. In this powerful instance of imagined Catholic community, it is important to emphasize that the object of their prayerful imaginative attention was not the much-lauded martyred Jesuit missionaries, but the Japanese Christian converts who had attempted to continue some form of Christianity after all missionaries had been expelled from Japan. To Overcome Oneself pays attention to the way the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises encouraged this kind of worldview. The globe—newly configured, still emergent—shaped the religious imaginary of Catholics in both European and extra-European locales. As we shall see, formation of Christian “selves” moved missionaries and their followers to take steps that were small as well as large, to cross cities and towns and seas as they claimed the territory of individual souls. A focus on the mobility of Catholic subjectivities provides a rich opportunity to provincialize Europe by shedding strange light on the history of one of the Western intellectual tradition’s most prized possessions: the self. Grafting together the disparate area studies branches of Latin America and Europe produces a history of a self that emerged in relation to a globalizing Catholic missionary impulse. In the process, we collapse an exaggerated sense of cultural distance between Europe and New Spain. Instead, New Spain is situated, in Claudio Lomnitz’s terms, as “Eu rope’s westernmost extremity.” Moreover, we dismantle a reified notion of “Europe” itself

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Introduction

because “the Indies” were everywhere. How else are we to understand the proliferation of “Indies” in Jesuit discourse? There were Jesuit missions in India, Jesuit missions for Indians in the Americas. Not only the rural regions of southern Italy and southern Spain but also urban prisons were given the moniker “our Indies.” The Indies were in the heart of Europe because, in fact, they could be found in the depths of one’s own heart. Jesuit spirituality needs to be understood in a transregional context because the Jesuits themselves envisioned their spiritual practices as key to shaping and expanding the early modern Christian world, one soul at a time. Taking cues from colonial and postcolonial studies, this work situates metropole and colony within a single frame. Nationalist historiographies and area studies foci have divided the globe with boundary markers that were unnatural to the early modern world, and even bridging the Spain/New Spain divide is insufficient for understanding the nature of Jesuit influence across protonational and ocean boundaries. Some have embraced Atlantic history as a means of moving beyond nationalistic histories, yet as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra reminds scholars, early modern empires were driven by global concerns. The history of the Society of Jesus refuses the easy reach for the nation-state as an analytical lens, and I have clawed at the straitjacket that is “area studies.” Consider a very par ticular case to demonstrate my point: A young man began his formation as a Jesuit in Genoa (Italy) and then Nice (France), expressed his innermost wish to be a missionary in China, but then traversed the Atlantic and finished his formation at the Jesuit novitiate and colleges in Mexico City. At what longitude and latitude did his historiographical situation alter? Why in Europe is he dubbed an “early modern” subject, but in New Spain transformed into a “colonial” subject? Why is Latin America’s history colonial while Europe’s is early modern? I understand the value of the term “colonial” in that it signals a period of time when the viceroyalty of New Spain was subject to the Spanish crown. Yet “colonial” as a historiographical term makes a normative claim that Mexico’s history was one of delayed integration into a temporality (“modern”). To Overcome Oneself shifts our attention from arguments that implicitly or explicitly reify nationalistic historiographies. Rather, by attending to Jesuit spirituality, this study brings into view practices of ethical self-formation that produced a global imaginary that, in turn, propelled Catholics into the early modern world. Readers unfamiliar with Latin American history may need to check certain expectations at the door: When we cross the Atlantic at the end of Chapter 3, the New Spain encountered is not the site of the exotic in this story. The grueling sixteenth-century story of contact and conquest was, by and large, over by the time the Jesuits arrived in the central valley of Mexico in the 1570s. Although I write about colonial difference (see Chapter 6), alterity plays second fiddle to the shared Catholic practices that forged transatlantic connections. Mine is an intel-

Introduction

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lectual history of Western subjectivity that focuses on individual Christian efforts to forge and overcome selves on both sides of the Atlantic. As Cañizares-Esguerra has lamented, scholarship in North America continues to represent Latin Americans as non-Western Others. “An intellectual history of the West that includes Latin America seems ludicrous at this stage.” But what if we provincialize Europe by tossing “ludicrousness” squarely into the lap of European history? For, if we pause to notice, there is something inherently preposterous about the just-so histories of Western modes of subjectivity that have taken Rene Descartes’s “I think therefore I am” as paradigmatic: In contrast, I contend that whether in Europe or in New Spain, the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury inhabitants of these Western worlds did not always think their way into modern selves. This emergence was an embodied person-to-person process: talking, mimicking, crying, praying, self-flagellating selves into existence. If we pay attention to these details about the birth of the so-called modern self, these very details about the active religious body that have been strenuously disavowed are revealed to be absolutely and, yes, ludicrously central. The Western disembodied self appears as the end product of an embodied process; in fact, if we take embodied perception seriously, the “rational self” emerges as something of a punch line in a riddle we can never escape. Accordingly, my study admittedly contributes an odd strand to the genealogy of Western subjectivity, but one that can be productively woven in with other histories of subjectivity to see how the shape, color, and weight of this thread alternatively jars, complements, and shimmers in a fabric composed of countless studies that explicitly or implicitly take Weber’s notion of a “Protestant ethic” as the paradigmatic link between religion and what has tirelessly been called modernity. G R A S S RO O T S MO N A S T IC I S M , O R , “ T H E MODE R N S E L F ” A S M E DI E VA L T O T H E M A X

In European historiography, the early modern era represents the historical moment when religion came to be perceived as a matter of individual choice. Yet this was not only because there was something new called Protestantism to consider. Rather, centuries of spiritual practices conditioned Christians to think of themselves in a new light. In a rough gloss, one could say that monastic devotions had been performed on behalf of Christian populations but, by the late Middle Ages, not only did Christian theologians begin to place greater emphasis on the spiritual labors of each individual, many individuals also sought multiple ways to deepen their own spirituality. The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises popularized monastic techniques, leading to an intensification of personal piety. Monastics were skilled at making thoughts about God, a technique that relied on honing memory, not as a holding place, but as a tool or a machine. Because the

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Ignatian Spiritual Exercises made these same techniques of memory, imagination, and composition of place easy and accessible, Jesuit ministries in Europe and Latin America can be characterized as a means of monasticizing the laity—a process of bringing monastic devotional practices to laypersons. Techniques of meditation—what Mary Carruthers has referred to as “an architecture for thinking”—were brought outside the highly structured and embodied routines that governed life within monastery walls. In fact, Jesuits adapted monastic practices to a life in motion, for both themselves and their followers. Here we can locate the Jesuits and their par ticular spiritual methods as crucial components in the historical transformations by which religion made its appearance as a matter of private devotion to be taken up by all Christian laity, no longer just the exclusive practice of monks (or elites) devoted to the secluded contemplative life. The import of the Society of Jesus was not in inventing new techniques, but rather, in universalizing long-standing elite monastic practices that themselves had roots in Hellenistic philosophy, and then mobilizing them across distances previously unimagined. Indeed, the persistence of these long-standing techniques of self-formation is just as intriguing as the new shape taken in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Continuity and transformation converge in the presence of the strand that weaves its way from Hellenistic philosophy through monastic Christian practices, finally, to this Jesuit technique of an active and globally oriented self. Monastic practices sparked the Jesuit global imaginary. The techniques codified as “Ignatian” provided a do-it-yourself guide that situated embodied perception as central to constructing an “architecture for thinking” about God, self, and world. This meditative blueprint traveled on Jesuit missionary networks as both a text and a series of practices. This study of an action-oriented spirituality forms part of the history of what we now call globalization because the Exercises asked the practitioner to meditate on the globe and to imagine himself as active in the world, walking at Christ’s side. The techniques in this small handbook encouraged exercitants to develop a narrative sense of self. When anthropologist Arjun Appadurai published a book on the culture of globalization in the mid-1980s, he took note of the multiple means of imagining oneself as contributing to a modernity that was now “at large.” I mention in par ticular his notion of “mediascapes” because his concept provides a useful frame for understanding how global missionary forces put monasticism at large: Mediascapes . . . tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots, and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places.

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The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises unleashed a par ticular brand of image-centered and narrative-based “strips of reality” that animated the body. Deployable narratives—not only of martyrs and saints, but also of struggling sinners reformed by the Spiritual Exercises—moved people. Allowing for the very important caveat that all early modern communication traveled on a vastly slower scale, it is nonetheless critical to take note that, in globalization’s earliest moments, a great number of Catholics engaged in this brand of literary invention; they not only imagined themselves, but also composed themselves, according to the contours of spiritual scripts that followed par ticular plotlines, one of which entailed the reform of self, the other the salvation of pagan souls. We know much about the trade and commerce that moved on Catholic imperial networks, but in this book I point to “self” as both a concept and practice that traversed the same imperial networks. Jesuit missionaries inculcated a way of thinking about the ideal universal “human” as a Christian engaged in ethical self-formation. From its slow-moving beginnings, globalization has been relational, a human encounter between selves and others, but also between a person and his own self. E M B ODI M E N T A S A PA R A DIG M F O R H I S T O R I A N S

The Society of Jesus was a corporate body whose identity was forged through spiritual practices that centered on the individual bodies of its members and its followers. The practices outlined in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises aimed to channel fleshly experiences into narratives of sinning selves who, via Jesuit spiritual therapeutics, would be capable of overcoming the passions and could emerge as contemplatives in action. Reading these historical documents, one is immediately struck by the physicality of Jesuit spiritual discernment because the various devotional practices in the Exercises were designed to console souls by putting bodies in motion. But for early moderns, what kind of body was this? And what kind of therapy was on offer? As we shall see, in Jesuit spiritual direction, diagnosis was grounded in the relationship between the spiritual physician and his patient, and therapeutics was based upon a principle of opposition to restore balance. In this early modern era when confidence ranged widely in the ability of postlapsarian humans to call upon reason to control the passions, the Jesuits clearly offered an optimistic reading of relatively flexible or fluid bodies that could be fine-tuned to resonate with God’s will. But that leaves us with a crucial methodological question: how might we approach this language that situates persons as embodied beings? Theories about affect, embodiment, and techniques of self-formation have provided very useful tools for thinking about how making the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises was an embodied experience whose popularity can, in part, be explained in terms of the transmission of affect. The book demonstrates these features of

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self-making—the active, mobile, perceiving body—as pertains to the Society of Jesus, but the problem of how religious subjectivities emerge from embodied perception can be extended to problematize mobile religious bodies in other evangelical moments in global history. What follows in the next two sections are thoughts on the challenges of incorporating phenomenology and affect theory into historical writing. For some readers, these very words evoke a sinking feeling, as if a lover turned over to say, “Honey, there is something important we have to discuss.” Escape hatch: if you are a reader who prefers theory or methodological discussions in the footnotes (if at all), feel free to skip ahead to the chapter descriptions under “The Shape of the Book.” I am a historian who takes pleasure in critical theory and philosophy, but, more to the point, I am committed to the view that “facts” are born of theoretical adventures and also that “theories” are only as convincing as the facts with which they explicitly engage. These are two sides of the same coin; the two share space on the same page, whether stated explicitly in the paragraph, decorously in the footnote, or unconsciously in language that was once considered “theoretical” but is now accepted as a kind of “fact.” An example: scholars no longer feel compelled to elaborate on theories of gender construction when they describe something as “gendered.” It is no longer necessary. In a relatively short space of time, what once came with much necessary saying now goes largely without saying at all. The difference between language that is considered “theoretical” and what slides by unnoted is, indeed, historically and contextually contingent. Not all of our presuppositions ought to be made explicit, but I do contend that, at this moment, there are some provocative avenues of thought that provide par ticular challenges to those wedded to historical method; in other words, I believe some saying is required. Accordingly, I devote some pages to phenomenology and affect theory as productive avenues for thinking, as a historian, about the emergence of mobile religious selves in any time period. How can historians write about embodiment? To begin, the task is greater than acknowledging the simple and indisputable reminder that historical actors had bodies. Rather, theories of embodiment complicate the very notion of an actor having a body in the first place. The sentence “I have a body” positions me as conscious subject reflecting on body as object. “I” call this entity “mine.” This is not necessarily misguided, but it is an abstraction that has been much fetishized in the Western intellectual tradition. For the philosophically attuned historian, the question is, how did the shape of this abstraction emerge from the fabric of lived experience? To speak of the modern self is to speak of consciousness that has forgotten its own body, its own history. Famously, Descartes’s “I think” posits consciousness as the first premise, and his subsequent classification of the body (and its passions) was required to enable any subsequent formation of clear and distinct ideas. Historians exploring the

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body have been held hostage to this mind-body split even as they have attempted to overcome it. A case in point: Caroline Bynum struggles with the ramifications of this par ticular history of mind-body dualism for scholars of premodern subjects. In her 1992 article “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Bynum specifically opposes importing a Cartesian dualism into medieval history and, in par ticular, she challenges a dualist tradition that reads medieval subjects as “despisers” of the body, as wishing to take flight from the body. Her point (and much of her scholarship) has brilliantly demonstrated how complex an object was “the body” in the lives of medieval men and women. Bynum uses the term “embodiment” to explain the ways that medieval theorists debated the polymorphous aspects of Christian personhood, illuminating medieval conceptions of the Christian body for her modern audience. My point is quite simple: she deploys the terms “body” and “embodiment” interchangeably when, in fact, she is speaking about varied medieval ideas about body-as-object. The fuss about the body for historians, if we follow Bynum’s logic in this essay, is to determine what kind of object body is. Her answers have provided fascinating accounts of the relationships between the living and the dead, the body in life and after death. Notably, her investigations pertaining to relics and the resurrection of the body take up a notion of a “split self”—but particularly after the Second Coming—split into how many pieces, and would they be put back together? A recent interest among historians in writing histories of the senses is positioned precariously between mind (subject) and body (object). Here I take as a case in point the special edition of the American Historical Review, “The Senses.” In the introductory essay, Martin Jay notes that senses are “natural corporal endowments that provide access to the world, also to the meanings we attribute to the results.” This provides an avenue toward understanding spiritual practice for, indeed, the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises asked exercitants to hone their sensory skills and make use of the five senses to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the flames of hell, for example. This practice objectified the senses as categories but also—and this is important—oriented the exercitant toward a fully embodied experience. Jay’s phrasing expertly captures the way in which the sensorium positions one in the world, as well as how “the senses” become objects themselves as we proceed to categorize them. This is the never-ceasing dynamic that is embodied perception, or, as Jay notes, “we have come to acknowledge the mediation of the two in such a way that it has become increasingly difficult to isolate one entirely from the other.” And yet historians seem to privilege the latter: we move to categorize the senses, or as Jay describes the project shared by the authors of the AHR essays, “It is, however, the senses understood historically that are our concern here.” My point is to emphasize the replication of the mind-body split when we write intellectual histories of categories, as do these five essays arranged to correspond to the five senses: hearing, smelling, seeing, tasting, touching. The

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sensorium thus split into “senses,” the historical body remains divided into parts, which continues the trend to write about “body” as subordinate to “mind.” We have become astute readers of bodies as culturally formed objects. How many king’s horses and men to put the mind and body back together again? My distinctions here—body as subject and body as object—are equally false, abstract, problematic, and I will do my best to work with and push through this language to show how representations emerged from embodied experience, which in turn, reshaped experience. Representation and being-in-the-world are inescapably intertwined, inseparable. I have overdrawn these distinctions to bring into sharp relief how our intellectual inheritances have obfuscated what is embodied about culturally informed “selves,” born in motion, through experience, in action. In sum, the quest for the body-as-object is one useful approach, but different from attempts to narrate the body as an actor (or more specifically, as we shall see below, as an actant) in historical narratives. The study of Jesuit spiritual therapeutics provides an opportunity to engage in a more experimental form of historical writing. Like the medicine of the age, Jesuit spiritual healing drew upon high culture—theology/moral philosophy and natural philosophy—but also included techniques that engaged living people from all walks of life and, like medicine, was thus both a form of knowledge and an activity. And, similar still to medicine, the cure of souls was a system that was concerned with the dispositions of the human body because both sin and self were understood as embodied conditions. As Eric Midelfort has shown, attention to sin was a critically important aspect of “mental health,” or, as he says, awareness of sin was “an actual disease, an aegritudo animae.” But most important, Jesuit spiritual directors, confessors, and their subjects listened to what body did and what body communicated. Body was an actant positioned within an affective nexus. This language draws from what has been described as an “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences. The word “actant” signals the language of critical theorists and philosophers who have been influenced by Spinozist philosophy and, although “actant” is not a word I use often in the book, it is an important concept in theories of embodiment that indicates a form of agentive action that is not born of conscious intention. When I ask what it means for historians to approach the task of writing embodied history, I am asking how we situate the body as agentive, how we take account of the ways in which body may have acted preobjectively. A leading scholar, Jane Bennett, draws upon Latour and Spinoza, to develop a theory of distributive agency to situate all bodies (human and nonhuman) as not only objects but agentive forces. This trend in humanities and social science scholarship aims to understand not only the way in which the affective capacities of human bodies exceed that which consciousness can contain, but also how affective forces exceed the boundaries of individuated personhood. As Lauren Berlant says so well, “Its strength [affect theory] as

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a site of potential elucidation comes from the ways it registers the conditions of life that move across persons and worlds, play out in lived time, and energize attachments.” To Overcome Oneself is not only about spiritual experiences but how such experiences moved—again, quoting Berlant, how “the singular becomes delaminated from its location in someone’s story or some locale’s irreducibly local history and circulated as evidence of something shared.” These early modern transregional connections were affective and by that I mean relational, both in ways that were reflected upon, but also in ways that were not at all cognitive. When appropriate, I will point toward correspondences of bodily capacities, how bodies were affected and affecting, and to do so, I will refer (largely) to the work of Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza’s philosophy sits at very important juncture for historians of the early modern period because many of his ideas about the body and human emotions not only animate critical theory today, but also would have been intelligible to many inhabitants in the seventeenth century. How very handy that Spinoza developed a system to account for the causal order of things (with body as “thing”), a system that took into account passion and action. Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of Spinoza zeroes in on the crux of what concerns us here when he exclaimed delightfully about one of Spinoza’s most critical insights: Spinoza offers phi losophers a new model: the body. He proposes to establish the body as a model: “We do not know what the body can do.” . . . This declaration of ignorance is a provocation. We speak of consciousness and its decrees, of the will and its effects. Of the thousand ways of moving the body, of dominating the body and the passions—but we do not even know what a body can do. Lacking this knowledge, we engage in idle talk.

With Spinoza we can approach the study of spirituality without assuming the Cartesian dualism that obtains if we simply determine that prayer, meditation, and spiritual exercises moved people because considered thought was the cause of action. Rather, as Deleuze helpfully points out, in providing the body as a model, Spinoza shows that “body surpasses the knowledge we have of it, and that thought likewise surpasses the consciousness that we have of it.” This helps us to understand evangelical movements in terms of bodies that acted. In other words, how were individuals who engaged in Ignatian spiritual practices moved to cross towns, countries, oceans? Jesuits would assign causality to God; historians in search of a more “rational” explanation might look toward political and economic factors, or describe their religious motivations in theological or functionalist terms. These latter interpretations are all valid ways of approaching the Jesuit missionary impulse. Yet my aim is to foreground “the pulse” of missionary action and to analyze the movement of these Jesuit bodies. Spinoza’s work on the passions remains a provocation to historians. What do we

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know of what the body has done in history? In To Overcome Oneself, we see how the language and practices of prayer and meditation extended beyond the subject herself. Furthermore, the spiritual director’s own body was also an actant, as he endeavored to be attentive to his own embodied desires at the same time that he remain attuned to the affective disposition of his spiritual subject. In this study, we see the spiritual director and his subject fused together as a single striving body. Affect theory would leave the analysis there. But the result of making the Spiritual Exercises was that the spiritual subject also became an object to himself. Michel Foucault’s later work does a great deal of heavy lift ing in this book because his notion of “techniques of the self” usefully describes the conscious labor that one undertakes to be attentive to the shaping of an ethical self. We will get there shortly. But if we move in Foucault’s direction too swift ly, we pass over the way in which this individuated self emerged as the product of processes of embodied perception. So to get some leverage on this emergence of self, I will also make use of a set of theoretical tools provided by phenomenology. Like affect theory, phenomenology (and especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s very important work on perception) disallows thinking’s pretensions to understand the nature of its own thought. The task of phenomenological reflection is to expose the unreflected. Accordingly, in my own reflections on Catholic techniques of the self in the early modern world, I have taken up the phenomenological task of writing a form of intellectual history that critiques intellectualism; in other words, I aim to unravel the concept of “self” while telling a history of its creation. To Overcome Oneself asks readers to attend to the problem of how “I think” negates everything that preceded it, much that accompanies it, and a number of things that are left trailing in its wake. I have been inspired by phenomenological philosophy as a means of experimenting with history writing that is attentive to embodied corporeal action and objective representations. My express aim is to diminish the divide between them. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theories of embodiment are an inspiration because he asks us to pay attention to processes of perception prior to that very late arrival to the party called “I think.” Merleau-Ponty’s notion of being or being-in-the-world posits the phenomenal body as starting point for this process and argues that to perceive is to bring objects and concepts into shape as they are grasped, such that body itself is always intertwined within the matrices of time (habit-body) and space (body-of-thismoment). Taking embodiment as a paradigm for the history of subjectivity, we situate body as the horizon of an inchoate world, we write a history of what the body does to bring “self” into being, and we understand this self as both emerging in context and as ultimately illusory. In the course of the book, we see how speech extended itself, how talk was tactile, and how, in fact, tactile perception was  dispersed not only across human flesh in the concrete, but how the

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sensorium—the sum of sensorial experience—is enfleshed and enfleshing, object and agent. “The world,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “is not what I think, but what I live through.” To Overcome Oneself draws attention to the way concepts emerge, as well as to the work that such concepts do. More specifically, Jesuit embodied meditative memory exercises shaped the early modern conception of activity in a world, a “globe.” “To look at an object is to inhabit it,” writes Merleau-Ponty to describe how perception is embodied. But note—he attributes a unique meaning to the verb to inhabit. According to Merleau-Ponty, we do not inhabit our own homes because, in phenomenological terms, we can never perceive the “entire” house. Given that perception is embodied, living humans never experience more than a single facet of an object at any one moment. We can extend this view to the concept “world.” A person can never inhabit the world. “World” or “globe” is an object conceived by consciousness. There is no vantage point from which the human gaze can rest upon the totality of the globe, not even from the now-defunct space shuttle. Bodies and objects are intersubjective: body shapes object and vice versa. But—and this is important—Merleau-Ponty directs us toward the construction of phrases unlike the one I just wrote: his phenomenology invites us to drop the notion of body and space as separate. Rather, we posit the world as an intertwining of body/object that, in his later work, he began to denote with the phrase “world as a flesh.” What I ask the reader to take away from this brief but important cautionary note about world as a concept versus world as perceived is that the term “world” is necessarily limited to a momentary coherence derived from firsthand perception as well as an expansive but very abstract concept. Here we see how prayer and meditation are related to the history of consciousness’s role in superimposing a distinct (and illusory) vantage point of a totality impossible to ever perceive. Now I began this section with the question, what can historians do with concepts of embodiment and affect? The voices of protest are audible: objects or fragments of objective representation are what remain for the historian. These are our sources. Yet my main bone of contention with history writing is that we still write as if there is (or was) instead of noting horizons, moments, and possibilities as emergent. We seem to shy away from the fact that our interpretations are not only inexhaustible but “rest upon the hidden art of imagination.” Note that even the most Rankean reader of a document will allow that slip of paper and ink to speak to many more issues than the text itself literally refers. I have invoked imaginative privilege, which really is no privilege at all. Imagination is the necessary crutch upon which all human action relies, the way we make the partial and half-hidden objects in the world around us emerge as three-dimensional concepts. Any reading of documents is interpretation built upon imagination, in quite the same way that we build complete houses and spherical globes in our

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minds’ eyes despite the fact that we never experience them as such. We nonetheless dwell in those concepts. T H E T R AJ E C T O RY O F T H E PROJ E C T, O R , HOW   M E R L E AU P O N T Y A N S W E R E D A   F OUC AU L DI A N   QU E S T IO N

The puzzle began as a long engagement/argument with Michel Foucault’s notion of “techniques of the self.” After writing Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, Foucault left behind “the classical age” for good, instead searching out the roots of Western technologies of the self in Greco-Roman and Christian philosophy during the Roman Empire. Foucault expressed his own dissatisfaction with the nature of the questions he had asked and the answers thus produced; his new goal was greater conceptual clarity, or (better put by Paul Rabinow) “to make visible a bygone way of approaching the self and others which might suggest possibilities for the present.”  Foucault’s backward glance mirrored the historical consciousness of early moderns themselves. The “little family” of philosophes were enchanted with the ancient philosophers, from whom they sought answers about their own lives. Peter Gay offers a poignant portrayal of Gibbon on the steps of the Forum, expressing a profound longing to know the distant past: “The dramatic moment on the Capitol confirmed for Gibbon what he, like the other philosophes, had always felt: ‘. . . that classicism was a bridge thrown across the swamp of the Christian millennium; with a bold stroke of the imagination, he, like they, repudiated the recent past to fashion his ideals from a past remote only in time.’ ” The philosophes’ desire to bridge the swamp was intimately related to a self-conscious disavowal of their own Christian experience. They imagined themselves the philosophical heirs of the ancients because they had “dared to know” their beloved Cicero, all the while conveniently overlooking the fact that Cicero had formed the bedrock of a solid Jesuit college and university education for two centuries prior. Of course Gay hastened to add that we “no longer think of the Christian millennium as a swamp.” But is that really the case, especially when attempting to write histories that consider the fragments of Catholicism that inform the history of our present? Foucault braved the murky waters of the Catholic “confession of the flesh” when he attempted to differentiate the moral-theological from the psychoanalytic-sexual field of power, before taking the bridge across and away from the muddied status of Christianity. This is a complicated period of European history if the historian’s goal is to attain some clarity about what, precisely, makes our own world “modern.” Perhaps Foucault sought to avoid the conceptual morass of “modernity” itself. As Foucault understood it, while the Catholic confession was rooted in ascetic and monastic settings, “the seventeenth century made it into a rule for every-

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one.” Yet, similar to the way in which Max Weber left the pinnacle of Catholic rationality burrowed away in remote monasteries, Foucault abandoned this “rule for everyone” as an ideal articulated only at the discursive level: “It would seem in actual fact that it could scarcely have applied to any but a tiny elite; the great majority of the faithful who only went to confession on rare occasions in the course of the year escaped such complex prescriptions. But the important point no doubt is that this obligation was decreed, as an ideal at least, for every good Christian.” Thus, Foucault differentiated between the “invention of techniques” of selfdiscovery, which he periodized as belonging to the history of the development of rules and regulations pertaining to penance in the seventeenth century, and a “calendar of diffusion,” which he marked very differently as scientific techniques of the self that were actualized and popularized beginning in the nineteenth century. Foucault posited a rupture, then, between the field of moral-theological power that shaped possibilities for self-formation in his classical period and the field of sexuality produced by psychoanalytic technologies of the self. In The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts, Arnold Davidson insists on this rupture even more rigorously than does Foucault. “Sexuality” exists only within a psychological style of reasoning. Davidson’s firm stance upon this point is worth quoting at length: Chastity and virginity are moral categories denoting a relation between the will and the flesh; they are not categories of sexuality. Although we tend to read back our own categories of sexuality into older moral categories, partly because it is often so difficult for us to distinguish them precisely, it is crucial to my argument that we separate the two. Blurring the two kinds of categories leads to epistemological and conceptual lack of differentiation, and results in the historiographical infection that the great French historian of science Georges Canguilhem has called the “virus of the precursor.” We perpetually look for precursors to our categories of sexuality in essentially different domains, producing anachronisms at best and unintelligibility at worst.

I take seriously this effort to avoid anachronistic readings of modernity into the past. Yet how do we study moments of transition without being simultaneously teleological and anachronistic? As a historian, I want to recognize movement and transformation without confining interpretation to the straitjacket of an already known outcome. Davidson recognizes this: “Of course in concentrating on the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, I have passed over many intervening years.” His goal is epistemological contrast, but Davidson’s emphasis on conceptual clarity has a cost. The past can be flattened by our own destructive longings to make history comprehensible. My quarrel with Foucault is not so much with the characterization of what lies on either side of his “decisive break.” My objection, rather, is that such depictions offer little room for analyzing the

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nature of the transition itself. In other words, we have a description of a before and an after but no account of the historian’s mainstay: change over time. In this spirit, I leave to others the problem of a precise conceptual epistemology. Bridges ease passage from one side to the next, to pass over, as it were, what remains problematic below: A river? Slow-moving traffic? A complicated religious history? Were I to continue to employ Foucauldian categories, the subjects of my book could be categorized as Catholics whose technologies of reading and enacting the self occupy a space between moral-theological and psychiatric styles of reasoning. But I prefer to follow Michel de Certeau’s characterization of historical change in this time period as “baroque metamorphosis.” He described a “world poised between what is disappearing and what is beginning.” Is what we are studying here “an outbreak of something new or a repetition of the past?” Fragments hailing from historically distant times and places are wielded unwittingly by the historical subjects themselves, who, like Levi-Strauss’s bricoleurs, manipulate the fragments they have at hand, to form wholes that then break again into different kinds of fragments. History writing in this mode aims to capture a momentary coherence. A minute of the world is going by which must be painted in its full reality. One might say that I am offering a portrait of “the Catholic self” with an emphasis on its transatlantic, New Spanish instantiation. But this Catholic self would have to be painted by an artist more interested in having her subjects sit still. Mine is more sketch than portrait and purposefully so. How else to keep this momentary shaping of self and globe simultaneously in view? How, possibly, to paint it in its full reality? How can historians translate this into a methodology of sorts? Here I take a cue from the lyricism of Merleau-Ponty and use his writing as a lantern, not so much to “bring to light” but rather to shape the shadows of embodied transformation inside Foucault’s black box of rupture. Merleau-Ponty wrote about Cézanne’s painting style to think through what it might mean to suspend habits of thought, but without naively denying the enduring power of prior forms of thought. Although these inheritances have shaped the tools used to capture the moments under study, he calls this attitude of adopted naïveté “circumscribed ignorance.”  The rules of anatomy and design are present in each stroke of his brush just as the rules of the game underlie each stroke of a tennis match. But what motivates the painter’s movement can never be simply perspective or geometry or the laws governing color, or, for that matter, par ticu lar knowledge. Motivating all the movements from which a picture gradually emerges there can be only one thing: the landscape in its totality and in its absolute fullness.

“Fullness” is not achieved in a minutely detailed painting, but following Cézanne’s way of looking “with widened eyes,” fullness is aimed at with a willful

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forgetting of all learning to recapture an “emerging organism,” by welding “partial views” together such that “all that the eye’s versatility disperses must be reunited.” In the essay “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty speaks of painting in a way that captures this suspension of habits of thought in ways that can provide a useful methodology for historians who aim to write histories that maintain something called “global” and “local” simultaneously in view within a single horizon. Sometimes those of us who work on the history of the Society of Jesus feel that in the process of keeping the Jesuits in full view, our eyes get so wide that, like a cartoon character, the eyeballs might pop out, springs and all. In my engagement with the early modern Jesuits, it has been something of a struggle to keep eyes safely in sockets. The Jesuit self and globe were concepts that emerged in relation to each other, an illuminating example of Merleau-Ponty’s body-in-the-world. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of motility is critical as the body in motion operates on an intentional arc that is subtended by habit while aiming toward a “task that always has to be performed afresh”  We are both “habit-body” and the body of this moment. Habit-body underwrites body-of-the-moment. Body is both temporal anchor and openness to possibility. Those are the features of what Merleau-Ponty calls “intentionality.” But this form of “intention” is embodied rather than cognitive. Because the word “intention” is so often construed as “I think to make it so,” I prefer to use Merleau-Ponty’s term “motility” to signal this kind of embodied intentionality that captures what it means to be a contemplative in action. From all of the above, the most pertinent question for us is the following: if world is not thought but lived, then we shall ask, how does one live a self or live a globe? “Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?”  Accordingly, I have sought to fi nd ways to ground historical actors, to capture both the concreteness and density of a spiritual experience that was individualized. But I have not wanted to privilege grounding to the detriment of fluidity. Attention to viscosity makes visible a person-to-person stretch across the Atlantic, to understand the how and why of reproduction, of the reiterative improvisations that account for a recognizably transatlantic Catholic culture. The fullness of the landscape I paint has included multiple focal points, the most local of which was the soul, but I also have insisted that the inward turn forged the global. Per Cézanne, to see all at once is to flatten and make full in a single move, to see how ground and figure form one another. In this book, self and world serve as background to one another, bringing each other into fuller view. My canvas is peopled with a small number of figures to allow for closerange analyses of emerging selves. But this is also absolutely necessary to make the point all the more emphatically that what emerges from the experience of living becomes something larger than life. I have welded together fragments of

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personal accounts in an attempt to sketch an embodied history of epistemological change. The result is my necessarily wide-eyed and unavoidably partial view of the emergence of what I can only gloss with the reductive term “the early modern self.” T H E S H A PE O F T H E B O O K

Historians face a relatively simple but overwhelming dilemma: how do we get strips of paper and print to tell us what we want to know? The specifics of my own dilemma take this par ticular shape: how does one fi nd transformations in embodied being in archives? I have access to a series of texts, not to elusive experience. Can I do more than gesture toward embodied experience? Once again, Merleau-Ponty is my guide. He characterized Cézanne’s style of painting as “aiming for reality while denying himself the means to attain it.” This book is an experiment in doing just that: I utilize mostly Jesuit descriptions as a vantage point on the repetitive rituals that primed the self—not just consciousness but embodied self—to be open to the possibility of perceptual transformations. All the while I am under no illusion that this forms much more than my own meditative practice. History writing is its own leaning-toward the unattainable. Knowledge is not reflection upon a preexisting truth but the act of bringing truth into being that, again, requires that hidden art of imagination. A hand swirling through pools of evidence, those pieces of flotsam and jetsam converge as if in formation, my words forge the links between them, and I load this word-made barge with explanatory weight, perhaps more than these disparate fragments of facts are capable of bearing. In Chapter 1, we see that the fragments that cohere in the Spiritual Exercises were Hellenistic and monastic. Given my emphasis on action, the chapter accounts for the way the Exercises were practiced in the sixteenth century. To do so, I read both the Exercises and instructions for giving them to provide an outline of what the exercitant was intended to experience, showing how this Jesuit ethic utilized the body to produce a disembodied sense of “self.” The converted self would be capable of reining in the passions to allow rational decision making to come to the fore. “Imitation of Christ” propelled the early modern Christian to delve inward while simultaneously seeking a form of consolation garnered by understanding herself as active in the physical and geographical world. In Chapter 2, I use the term “devotional labor” to refer not only to the effort to bring order to one’s life but also to describe the effort expended to communicate one’s spiritual experience to others. In the parlance of the time, “interiority” was intimately linked to the development of a “universal Christian empire” envisioned by Jesuits as outposts throughout the early modern world. To demonstrate the widespread popularity of the Exercises, this chapter highlights lay

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women’s experiences of the Exercises. When making the Exercises, a woman developed a sense of herself as active in the world; many women were moved to wish to be Jesuits themselves. Understanding women’s devotional labor utilizes a revised understanding of spiritual agency to offer a way to begin to read Jesuit sources for a new history of women’s role in the expansion of Christianity in the early modern world. Chapter 3 delves into an elusive embodied experience that Christians called “consolation.” I begin with a guide to spiritual direction written by the Jesuit General Claudio Acquaviva in 1601. This book of instructions offered advice as to how the Jesuit superior might console the varying types of flawed human constitutions that would come before him. A good spiritual director must develop his consolatory skills in order to offer a spiritual path accommodated to each spiritual subject, making the task of spiritual direction a particularly rigorous and potentially exhausting practice of self-negation for the director. Here we confront the great irony that the fluidity of the director’s being, his ability to contort himself, to fuse with his spiritual subjects, enabled the spiritual subject to become an object to himself. This guide for spiritual direction opens a window to the therapeutic aspects of Jesuit spirituality. In so doing, we see the way medicine and spiritual healing shared a similar language. Understandings of the passions were vital to the hermeneutic of the flesh that informed this early modern culture of therapeutics—in Deborah Harkness’s words, the “cure, counsel and the ways in which illness and health were articulated”—an expansive cultural field to which Jesuit spiritual direction properly belonged. Here I contend that certain questions about Christianity’s influence in the early modern global world can be answered by problematizing the connection between self-reflection, affect, and action. I draw upon Spinoza’s reflections on passion and action to understand spiritual experience as ultimately intersubjective in cause and effect. We can grasp the effectiveness and subsequent popularity of the Spiritual Exercises if we conceive of spiritual direction and the evangelical drive as forged by an assemblage of conative bodies striving to imitate or re-create the very same postures, prayers, and emotive states of being. An embodied desire for ever-elusive glimmers of consolation is the historical actant that literally drove Jesuits and their followers in the world in search of access to spiritual solace. In Chapter 4, we see how these Catholic technologies of the self moved across the Atlantic, not only via the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises but also through a very specific Jesuit effort to reform penitential practices. This is yet another means by which Christianized Neoplatonic practices of self-formation that had formerly been confi ned to monasteries became a part of lay Catholic spiritual practice. While Enlightenment philosophes self-consciously reached back across the

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centuries to claim Hellenistic values as their own, the fact remains that emerging concepts about “self” circulated not only among lettered circles, but were enacted among a wide variety of laypersons. Thus I draw evidence from Jesuit evangelical revivals, which I refer to as a form of philosophy in the mission field. This chapter examines the experiences of an Italian Jesuit who was an itinerant doctor of souls. He practiced the methods that his Jesuit superiors had used on him. Prick the conscience. Provoke an emotional response in the penitent. Have paternal patience. And understand that sinners often are unable to aid themselves. Their secret maladies must be brought forward, as the Jesuit ministered to those who would come to the confessional unable to speak their sins, sometimes not even able to name what they could only articulate as pain and anxiety. Chapter 5 provides a summary of some “tools” that facilitated the spread of the Spiritual Exercises in Europe and in New Spain, laying out the trends that began in Europe and continued, with slight variations, in New Spain. We look at the development of the retreat house, dedicated to making the Spiritual Exercises available to both religious and laity. We also open some of the devotional literature that aimed to expand the reach of the Spiritual Exercises by translating them into a method that could be practiced alone and in the home. Finally, we move to appreciate the inquisitorial take on the fine line between proper Ignatian spirituality and “Lutheran” heresy. In so doing, we gain a greater appreciation not only of the facts and artifacts pertaining to the Exercises but also the sometimes tragic “remains” in an Inquisition case that was intended as a cautionary tale. Chapter 6 returns to our Italian Jesuit’s experiences in New Spain. This chapter juxtaposes his experiences preaching in the countryside with his perspective on a life ministering to sons of the Indian elite in Mexico City. I read and interpret his accounts of the itinerant missions he made each year, as well as the letters that he wrote to his father in Milan. In the process, I use these sources to comment upon Indian “acculturation” to Christian practices, as well as this Jesuit’s missionary desire to be further afield from cosmopolitan Mexico City. He desired a life of greater mobility on the northern Mexican frontiers and, importantly, within reach of the martyr’s death. In this chapter I suggest that our notions of “colonial difference” ought also to take into consideration spiritual status because Christian practices were important factors in assessing ethno-socio status (calidad) in an increasingly heterogeneous colonial society. Chapter 7 begins with a particularly intriguing archival find, the letters of two women in different Mexico City convents, who wrote to their Jesuit confessor. Among all the examples in this book, the anguished struggles of these two nuns allow us to examine at close range the labor of submitting to a regimen of Ignatian spirituality. These nuns’ writings were paradigmatic of the way that early modern Jesuit spirituality inhabited the interstices between what Foucault described as a “rupture” between moral-theological versus psychoanalytical tech-

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niques of self. This chapter revisits discussions of spiritual obedience taken up in Chapters 2 (women) and 3 (men). I frame their letters with a critique of scholarship on women’s writing and female agency in Latin American historiography that has overlooked the dynamics of spiritual obedience. The nuns’ letters provide yet another example of an articulation of “self” as or through the desire to submit to a spiritual director. Spiritual discourse of the heart serves as the pivot upon which I turn back to the question of mobility. The Exercises encouraged a heart-centered mobility that left an iconographic trail in its wake. The second half of the chapter discusses how a worldly Catholic activism emerged from an intensification of heartcentered spirituality that was simultaneously accompanied by a shift in the shape of the heart in devotional iconography. That is, Christ’s heart was no longer represented in a valentine shape but began to be depicted realistically as an anatomically correct carnal heart. I demonstrate how this convergence of natural philosophy and spiritual practice grew out of the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises that prompted the practitioner to envision herself as a contemplative in action—in other words, she ought to contemplate God’s works in the natural world and take action in that world.

1

The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises Conquest of the Self, Conquest of the World

As Ignatius declared in the opening pages of the Spiritual Exercises, the variety of mental exercises and sage observations found in the Exercises offered an individualized technique to conquer the self and regulate one’s life. The First Explanation. By the term Spiritual Exercises we mean every method of examination of conscience, meditation, contemplation, vocal and mental prayer, and other spiritual activities, such as will be mentioned later. For, just as taking a walk, traveling on foot, and running are physical exercises, so is the name of spiritual exercises given to any means of preparing and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections and then, after their removal, of seeking and finding God’s will in the ordering of our life for the salvation of our soul.

The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises offered the individual a program of meditative prayer directed toward spiritual improvement. In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatian discourse emphasizes both God’s grace and human effort to cooperate with grace. To this day, Jesuits continue to describe the Exercises as a way of opening themselves to God’s consoling presence in their lives, with the various techniques and meditations in the Exercises facilitating a heightened attention to God’s actions. A Jesuit’s deeds (or “good works”) constituted an expression of gratitude for what God had done for him. Yet the timelessness of this relatively stable theological discourse belies both the Hellenistic roots of philosophical spiritual exercises more generally, and the historicity of embodied experience more specifically. One of the aims of To Overcome Oneself is to bring theology to the ground of history: What kinds of human efforts were deemed cooperative and which humans could cooperate in which ways? How did historical bodies 24

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experience the consolation that the Spiritual Exercises promised? What, in fact, was a consolatory experience? This chapter introduces the Spiritual Exercises and addresses a very par ticular question: how, born of techniques wrought in monastic seclusion, did the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises promote a notion of worldly mission? Notably, the formalization of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises converged with a historical moment in which Europeans were actively expanding their presence in a world only recently conceived as a globe, thus in this chapter we will begin to see how “the Indies” became an ever more important metaphor for the kinds of good works possible. F RO M C E L L T O WO R L D

To speak of the historical importance of the Spiritual Exercises, one must nod toward the very lengthy history of spiritual practices that made them possible. To begin, Ignatius’s Exercises had been adapted from earlier monastic techniques, which themselves had taken cues from Hellenistic modes of self-examination. The Jesuits would not have thought it politic to dwell upon this long history. Nadal reassured his readers that the Spiritual Exercises “contain almost nothing that cannot be found in other books: it is from the will of God that they possess the efficacy we see,” asserting that the Exercises had followed “the methods handed down by the holy Doctors.” The statement is vaguely apologetic. Attentive to issues of orthodoxy, was he smoothing the feathers of readers worried about “novelty” in Ignatius’s guide? We might read this as Nadal’s effort to put a decidedly Christian stamp on a series of techniques that had not only monastic but also clear Hellenistic precedent. In his work on the genre of “spiritual exercise,” the scholar of ancient philosophy Pierre Hadot interprets the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises as directly tied to a pre-Christian past. He states unequivocally that the Jesuit Exercises “are nothing but a Christian version of a GrecoRoman tradition.”  Scripture alone, concerned as it was with the imminent return of Christ, “could never have supplied a method for practicing these exercises.” Hadot’s ambivalence about the Christian tradition notwithstanding, he is correct to point out the importance of Hellenistic techniques of “attention to oneself— the essence of prosoche—[which] gave rise to a series of techniques of introspection.” Where one can quibble with Hadot is in his conclusions. He ends with a cautionary note about the historical importance of Christian spiritual exercises for everyday Christians: “We must not, however, exaggerate the importance of this phenomenon. . . . we have said, it manifested itself only in a rather restricted circle: among Christian writers who had received a philosophical education.” This is an important point: while Hadot sought to expand our notion of philosophy as a way of life, he nonetheless preferred to keep it segregated from Christian practice. The history of the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises makes this problematic, if

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not impossible. The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises are philosophically informed Christian practice and, as I argue in later chapters, provided the means and method through which the philosophical imperative to know oneself was taken up as a way of life by Catholic laity across the globe. Catholic spiritual exercises (broadly construed) did not remain limited to monastic elites or those closely in their circle; scholarship on the Christian Middle Ages makes Hadot’s assertion impossible to uphold. In fact, the late medieval period marked the beginnings of a move toward greater introspection and interiority and an increasing investment in now-Christianized spiritual exercises that moved well beyond their monastic beginnings. Rachel Fulton has argued this began when imitation of Christ’s passion helped to remedy the disillusionment experienced when, at the end of the millennium, Christ disappointed so many with his failure to return to earth. Transferring the search for Christ inward, Fulton argues persuasively, Jesus would be found in one’s heart, marking the advent of an imitation of Christ—feeling and suffering as if with Christ in his passion and death—a critical turning point in Christian piety. Suffering with Christ became the lynchpin of late medieval imitation of the god-man. To sketch this history in strokes perhaps too broad, we can take the example of the late twelft h-century mystic, Angela of Foligno, for whom knowledge of self was a necessary step toward perfect love of God. Such love moved her, not toward a worldly spirituality, but to a life of seclusion lived as an elaboration of Christ’s suffering through, as she described it, “poverty, suffering and contempt.” In writing to some of her followers by way of explanation for her lack of correspondence, she made her position clear: “There are only two things in the world that I find pleasure in speaking about, namely, knowledge of God and self, and remaining continually in one’s cell and never leaving it. If you leave your cell, you should strive to return to it with sorrow and true contrition. I believe that anyone who does not know how to stay put and remain in a cell ought not to go anywhere; it is not for them to seek out any other kind of good, and they ought not to probe into things which are above them.” Striking a similar tone, the fifteenth-century Dutchman Thomas à Kempis developed a notion of interiority as disavowal of the world. Silence equaled safety, while words bound one to the cares and distractions of the world. Kempis’s Imitation of Christ (1418) remained crucial “suggested reading” for those undertaking the Jesuit exercises well into the eighteenth century, as both Kempis and Ignatius advocated imaginative reflection on Christ’s passion and death. Yet members of late medieval religious orders were often torn between vocations to be of active ser vice in the world or to remain living in cloistered contemplation. Jesuit writings reflected a corporate identity as an order of “pilgrims” and “apostles” who must minister to “the Turks or any other infidels, even those who live in the region called the Indies, or . . . any heretics whatever, or schismatics,

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or any of the faithful.” This is quite different from the monastic tradition. Monks were certainly called to be active in the world. St. Gregory, for example, descended from his hilltop monastery to assume the office of pope (590–604). Yet in contrast to an enthusiastic engagement with the world, Gregory has been characterized as “the contemplative condemned to action.” Ignatius presented the choice as clear. There would be no Jesuit monasteries, as one Jesuit writer often proclaimed: “We are not monks! . . . the world is our house.” But who was this figural monk against whom the Jesuits positioned themselves? Here it is important to acknowledge the mendicants (also known as friars) as the unacknowledged missing link in Jesuit discourse. The mendicants offer an example that falls between the retreat-from-world of pure monasticism and the Jesuit form of worldly Catholicism. Late medieval Christianity has been characterized by the multiplicity of devotional options for lay and religious alike. Following the formation of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, these mendicant brotherhoods took the first steps in distancing themselves from traditional monasticism. The Franciscans, for example, were an order of brothers dedicated to a life of itinerant poverty in imitation of Christ’s passion. Their ministries moved them into urban and rural spaces outside monastery walls. Along with the Dominicans, a spiritual brotherhood dedicated to preaching, these mendicant orders initiated the worldly trend in the thirteenth century. In the century that preceded the formation of the Jesuits, the lines between contemplation and worldly action became increasingly blurred. Yet in comparing the Society of Jesus with the mendicant orders, we must bear in mind that it was the conventual life of the friars that made worldly activity possible. Franciscan monasteries, for example, were situated in urban locales to allow access to the laity but—and this is critical—the monastery enabled the friar’s return to this stable locale to renew himself as a brother (frere), where he expressed his primary dedication to communal life by singing the Divine Office. Bert Roest reminds historians not to get “carried away by the astounding development of the Franciscan order as a major pastoral taskforce.” To emphasize the mendicants’ work in the world tells only half the story. “For ultimately,” Roest contends, “all ‘worldly’ activities (begging, handicrafts, teaching and probably even preaching) had to be subservient to it [contemplation].” To compare Franciscans with the more hermetic monastic lifestyle that preceded them, we can rely upon Elizabeth Rapley’s very succinct and helpful description of the primary aims that differentiated monastics and mendicants: “Monasteries, as expressions of the aspirations of the medieval world, had been built on the principle of flight from the world; friaries, responding to the changing spirit of the high Middle Ages, were built within the world, but also served as sanctuaries to which their members could withdraw, though temporarily, from its entanglements. Divine office and community life were seen as antidotes to the contamination that came

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from association with the world.” Praying the Divine Office was a labor of love that consumed many hours of the day. The thirteenth-century Spanish friar Lopez de Salinas outlined a devotional life that placed friars together, praying the Divine Office, between six and nine hours per day, longer on Sundays and feast days. The friars would follow these prayers with another hour and a half of mental prayer, while still in community. The Villacreceans, an extreme example of mendicant contemplation, gave approximately two hours per day to manual labor. In his study of Spanish mysticism, Melquiades Andés Martín describes early sixteenth-century Spanish devotional life as dominated by the Franciscans and, particularly, the practice of recogimiento or withdrawal. This spiritual environment produced Ignatius, yet ultimately the Jesuits were compelled to distance themselves from Franciscan mysticism. Following the alumbrado crisis of the 1520s and 1530s, Ignatius had several run-ins with Spanish inquisitors who were very skeptical about his Spiritual Exercises. The alumbrados were a group of laypersons who had been condemned for Lutheranism in Spain in the 1520s, charged with denigrating confession and the saints. Notably, the alumbrados had pursued a quiet relationship with the Divine and sought to be alumbrado—illumined— from within. The group eschewed both clerical intermediaries and external or bodily expressions of divine ecstasy. In light of that controversy, the Spanish Inquisition regarded Ignatius and his Exercises with suspicion, which in part explains why Ignatius found it expedient to leave Spain and take up his studies in Paris at the Collège de Montaigu (and later at the Collège Sainte-Barbe). But after Ignatius’s death, when the Jesuits had recently established their new corporate identity based upon worldly activism, they ran into difficulties among themselves as members of this international order of men held conflicting ideas about the value of contemplative withdrawal. At the leadership level, the Society had distanced itself from Spanish mysticism. Yet a group of Spanish Jesuits had vociferously advocated recogimiento in order to facilitate an infused contemplation. This was worrisome to the Jesuit Provincial of Aragon, Diego de Avellaneda, who warned in a series of letters to the Jesuit General Everard Mercurian that this trend could pose a serious threat to the Spiritual Exercises and thus to the very foundation of Jesuit devotional life. Mercurian moved to quash what came to seen as an internal spiritual rebellion, especially when Jesuits intent on seclusion formed a spiritual circle in the new Jesuit college in Gandía. Recogimiento was a spiritual trend that so dominated the sixteenth century that, as Andrés Martín points out, “Today it is difficult to ignore the fact that [the first Spanish Jesuits] Borja, Nadal, Plaza and perhaps even Polanco practiced and defended a contemplation that had characteristics similar to those of Cordeses [a Jesuit accused of promoting an overly recollect form of devotional life].” These first Jesuits adapted: in the 1550s, Nadal spent six hours in sleep and two hours engaged in mental (silent) prayer, one in the morning, the other in the af-

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ternoon. Yet by the 1560s, in the wake of accusations that the Company “was the source of those dejados and alumbrados,” Nadal weaned himself of this habit and limited himself to one hour of prayer, a tenet that was incorporated into the Jesuit Constitutions. The case of the Jesuit Baltasar Alvarez also demonstrated the necessity to transform the prayer habits of early Jesuits. Alvarez spent sixteen years praying and meditating according to the Spiritual Exercises before he reached a state of infused contemplation, after which he became a strong proponent of this style of prayer. Chastised by Jesuit leadership, he responded using language that precisely summarized the way in which the Jesuits were moving beyond their spiritual roots. His letter argued quite logically that to restrict the spiritual life of the Society of Jesus to the mode of prayer taught in the Spiritual Exercises would be to reject one of the paths that Ignatius himself had followed. He valued Ignatius’s guide to meditation, Alvarez wrote, “but there is another position, different and higher . . . that is the way of silence.” The response? Firm. He should use no method that differed from the Spiritual Exercises. Another Spanish Jesuit, Diego Alvarez de Paz (1560–1620), was described as following a mode that was “more hermetic and akin to a friar [ frailero]” and decidedly not in keeping with the Jesuit way of proceeding. In his capacity as visitor, Miguel de Torres described Alvarez de Paz in similar terms but offered an even more definitive statement: His prayer life posed an obstacle to the Jesuit way of proceeding: He is a good friend to the solitary life and quite enveloped in prayer which he communicates with the Fathers and Brothers, [but as such he is] not attempting to conform himself to the Exercises that the Compañía uses. In my humble judgment, it seems that this prayer attempts to unite the soul with God, which although this is very good, peaceful, and delightful to those who know to give over to her [saben dar a ella], but it does not extend itself very well to those exercises of the active life, it is not appropriate to the Company, whose end is this [the active life], nor does such prayer allow one to reach the purity and perfection of obedience, she is such a substantial column; and to think that only with this prayer one can reach the proper mortification of the passions does not apply very well to the action of the ministries of the virtuous active life; finally, this prayer has, in my view, many occasions for illusions and deceptions.

The Jesuits at Coimbra (Portugal) remained defiant recogidos, defining themselves as cloistered (claustrales) in contrast to los de allá—“those other Jesuits.” The Society’s leadership disciplined the Coimbra men, too. Gil Gonzales Dávila explained that prayer is a gift from God that comes in two forms: one is an ordinary gift, the other extraordinary. He stated firmly that the Society teaches ordinary prayer “accommodated to human nature.” Th is restructured notion of contemplation as attainable through ordinary prayer extended beyond the Iberian peninsula to the overseas branches of the Society in Goa Province (India

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and Japan) under the leadership of Francis Xavier. “Perhaps,” muses historian Andrés Martín, “this Jesuit attitude provided some serenity in a Spain shot through with desire for austerity and perfection.” These few examples sketch a moment in history in which the newly founded Society of Jesus worked to clearly define the institutional boundaries of Jesuit spiritual culture. While the sixteenth-century Jesuits had been born into this milieu and raised on a Franciscan-inspired culture of recogimiento, the Society of Jesus nonetheless had to wean its members from certain aspects of its roots. But so did the Spanish Franciscans who traveled to the New World in the early sixteenth century have to shake off any excessive attachment to contemplation. “Hurry down now to the active life!” was the battle cry of mendicants engaged in spiritual conquest in New Spain. In those early years of conversion, all forms of contemplation took a backseat to the tremendous worldly labor of preaching, baptizing, and caring for the ever-increasing number of indigenous Americans who were rapidly falling prey to warfare, dislocation, and, dramatically, to the germs against which they had no immunity. This hectic pace was unique to sixteenth-century America, yet, even in the late eighteenth century, mendicants in Mexico City balanced the needs of their flock with the demands of their own prayer life. “Even though the work of this convento grande is so great,” claimed a Mercedarian father, “and so greatly increased with many sung Masses, responses, burials, necessary attendances, and precious accomplishments, we sing terce and vespers everyday with the required attendance of friars to the choir, except those who are legitimately unable.” Let us situate this information about the mendicant orders with reference to Jeronimo Nadal’s statement: “[The Jesuits] consider that they are in their most peaceful and pleasant house when they are constantly on the move, when they travel throughout the earth, when they have no place to call their own.” Later in this chapter we will see how the Spiritual Exercises fomented a notion of spiritual renewal and consolation that could be found in a mobility understood as walking with Christ, under his banner, in an effort to combat the work of a Satan whose minions were active in every corner of the world. Here it is important to know that when the Jesuits proclaimed “We are not monks!” they eschewed any ritual that tied them to a monastic setting, whether the full seclusion of the monastery or alternating between contemplation and action that was the mendicant model. Even more important, “world” had taken on a positive valence in Jesuit discourse. To understand the emergence of a Catholicism even more worldly than that imagined by the mendicants, we need only turn to the way in which Ignatius built upon and modified late medieval devotional trends pertaining to Christ’s passion and death. Passion-centered devotions had become a centerpiece of late medieval religious life. The processions and passion plays enacted the sequence of events leading up to Christ’s death, as well as important scenes from the after-

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math, such as removing and burying the body. Popular devotional objects invoking the passion included the pietà (Christ’s dead body in the arms of his mourning mother) and the man of sorrows (Christ displaying his wounds). Franciscan piety had popularized an embodiment of Christ’s passion, most notably in depictions of St. Francis bearing the stigmata (the wounds of Christ). If the Jesuits were similar to the Franciscans in their imitation of Christ, it is significant that Jesuit imitatio offered a distinctive variation on this popular theme. In the Spiritual Exercises, the object of meditation is the life, death, and, importantly, the resurrection of Christ. Ignatius’s program of meditation closed with envisioning the resurrected Christ as king and ruler, calling upon others to take on an activist spirituality. In the Fourth Week of the Exercises, meditation on the joy of Christ’s resurrection emphasized that all humans were loved by God. These meditations, in turn, contributed to the conception of a joyful and sinless “self” active in the world, seeking God “in all things.” The passion of Christ was important for where it led: not just to his death but, more importantly, to the resurrection that propelled his apostles into the world. In effect, Ignatius unleashed Christian charity from the stable locale of monastery or parish church: the world was the Jesuit home. Recognition of the Jesuit brand as the more “worldly” among the religious orders can be found, to offer one example, in a Mexican Dominican’s sermon. He preached that the law of the Church could be found in the wisdom of Augustine who with his incomparable erudition made his writing canon to the Church and knife to heresy; in the extraordinary austerity of Teresa [of Avila], who with the Nail of the Cross worked her repose into torments of the Passion; in the admirable patience of a Nolasco [founder of the Mercedarians], who in the shackles of captivity bound the privileges of Redeemer; in the inflamed spirit of an Ignatius, who with his Company, enlightened with his light and conquered with his zeal worlds that needed him; in the religious asceticism of a John of God, whose charity the Lord magnified in worthiness, aggrandizing it, putting him at his side like a Son.

If the Jesuits developed a reputation as conquerors of worlds, it was in part due to the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius codified a form of interior piety that resolved the tension between contemplation and action precisely because the Exercises offered a method for ministering to both “self” and many “others.” “ T O AWA K E N I N T H E M A DE S I R E T O B E T H E M S E LV E S   H E L PE D ”

A Jesuit not only made the Exercises himself, but he was called to give them to others, both lay and religious. Let me restate this because it is important: they were sharing the essence of what it meant to be a Jesuit with laity from all walks

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of life. Surely the mendicants had made devotional practices available to the laity—the Dominican devotion to the rosary is a case in point; the Franciscan propagation of the Via Crucis provides another example. These devotions had par ticular origins associated with the aforementioned mendicants, but swift ly were absorbed into Catholic devotional practice writ large. Catholics can pray the rosary without ever thinking of its Dominican origins. This never happened with the Spiritual Exercises. Although its influences have percolated into various self-help modalities up to the present day (the twelve-step programs offer a case in point), the retreat experience, to this day, remains integrally “Ignatian.” This retreat was branded, as it were, forever associated with the Society of Jesus. Perhaps a counterfactual can drive the point home: imagine that the mendicant orders had made available to laity “of all modes of life” the fraternal experience of the singing of the Divine Office. This, I think, is the proper equivalent to bear in mind when understanding how the Society of Jesus adapted their core formative rituals and made them accessible to lay Catholics. Indeed, the Exercises had been crucial to the formation of the Society of Jesus (its practice bound its earliest members together) and to the Society’s continuing identity as a group because its individual members continued to renew their vocations by making the Exercises annually throughout their lives. But offering the Exercises to others swift ly became a ministry in its own right. The Official Directory of 1599 only established as a general guideline what had been an Ignatian instinct even prior to the formation of the Order. A chapter titled “How People Are to Be Induced to Make the Exercises” reads, in part, as follows: Our Constitutions say that when giving an explanation of the Exercises to people our aim ought to be not only to satisfy their inquiries but also to awaken in them a desire to be themselves helped thereby. Hence it is plain that it should be the purpose of our fathers gently to persuade as many as possible to make the Exercises. For inasmuch as charity and zeal for souls ought to move us to desire and labor for others’ salvation, they should also impel us to make use of this means which is so well fitted and so powerful to effect these ends.

There was never a mendicant injunction: how the people might be induced to pray the Divine Office. The early Jesuits were convinced that inner movement of the soul must find its worth in pastoral service—works of mercy and charity that, in the case of the Society of Jesus, included a laundry list of activities: preaching, giving lectures, conversing about and publishing the Word of God, teaching, missions to the countryside, giving the Spiritual Exercises in retreat, hearing confessions, giving communion, peacemaking, ministry to hospitals and prisons, ministry to the dying, and ministry to prostitutes, orphans, and daughters of prostitutes, among others. Practicing the Spiritual Exercises resulted in a highly developed sense of

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self and movement beyond self. Jerónimo Nadal characterized this as being a “contemplative in action.” For the Jesuit, there was no longer any inherent contradiction in terms: now fused, contemplation in action described the dynamism that propelled the Jesuit Order so rapidly around the globe. But who had access to the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises in Europe? The full program took thirty days to complete and included “the election,” a process of selfexamination undertaken by individuals (usually male) considering a vocation. Self-reform geared toward vocation was at the heart of the Exercises. Yet Ignatius intended the Spiritual Exercises to be accessible to the average person, to facilitate spiritual progress, and find consolation. “Para todo género y estado”—for every type and state—or “para todo género de persona”—for all types of people—these were common endings to Jesuit guides to meditation. Given the length of the full retreat, the experience of the complete Exercises proved cumbersome for the average person to make. The Jesuits quickly moved to make the Exercises palatable for a larger public by making available a shortened experience. This shortened retreat generally lasted eight to ten days and emphasized the First Week, which was the “purgative” week, in which one contemplated his sinful nature. But this truncated version also excerpted exercises from other weeks of the full retreat. In the modified version, less emphasis was placed on vocation. Instead, retreat participants were instructed in methods of prayer and contemplation that directed them toward ordered decision making according to God’s will. The Spiritual Exercises taught practitioners how to discipline mind and body to become attuned to God’s will. Mary Carruthers has alerted scholars to the fact that Christian meditation was a very inventive, creative process. The monastic techniques that were Ignatius’s inheritance were developed to make use of memory—not to store “facts” (a very modern notion of memory)—but to function as a machine that could “make mental webs and fabricate the patterns with which we think.” Marking one’s way through these inventive schemes enabled the exercitant to move from place to place, to collect and recollect moments of solace and consolation. Each daily exercise began with “preludes” that required contemplating a biblical narrative. During the Third Week, for example, one prepared to meditate on the last supper in this way: The Second Prelude. A composition, by imagining the place. Here it will be to see in imagination the road from Bethany to Jerusalem, whether it is broad, or narrow, or level and so on. In a similar manner, imagine the room of the supper, whether it is large, or small, or arranged in one way or another. The Third Prelude is to ask for what I desire. Here it will be to ask for heartfelt sorrow and confusion, because the Lord is going to his Passion for my sins. The First Point is to see the persons at the Supper; and then, by reflecting on myself, to endeavor to draw some profit from them.

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chapter one The Second Point is to listen to what they are saying, and similarly to draw profit from that. The Third Point is to see what they are doing, and to draw profit from it.

“Having inventory is a requirement for invention,” Mary Carruthers remarks. The Gospel stories fulfi lled this role, as the exercitant’s first task entailed fleshing out the details of each biblical scene, an imaginative exercise that Ignatius called “contemplation of place.” Note that the directives for composition of place were very spare, providing the bare outline for a personalized vantage point on Christ’s passion; the scenes would be filled with details that one had created and, importantly, scenes that one would revisit several times. The “inventory” with which the exercitants worked were fictive devices, details that provided pragmatic cognitive schemata as starting points for making memories that would aid in intending toward God. Intentio signaled an emotional attitude: the alert exercitant leaned toward an as yet unknown experience, ready to discern what solace or consolations might be gleaned from intense imaginative engagement with the biblical scenes, imaginative locales useful for gathering thoughts. Following each contemplation of place, the exercitant would then pray and state a desire. This is important: the exercitant was encouraged to make bold and “ask for what I want.” No matter that the First Week entailed contemplation of one’s wretchedly sinful state, the exercitant was nonetheless empowered (albeit with great humility) to make a claim. The goal, as Philip Endean explains in his succinct description of the Spiritual Exercises, was “to develop a conversation that might somehow lead closer to the goal desired.” The “aiming” of intentio cannot be underestimated; the ticket for passage was through sin and in no way in spite of it. This is clear in the second series of exercises of the First Week, in which the exercitant made the same preparatory prayer and repeated the same composition of place, and then reflected upon himself in comparison to all other humans, the angels, and the saints. Finally, he compared himself with God, to examine the “corruption and foulness of [his] body” as if it were an abscess, and to consider the earth, asking specifically, “how is it that it has not opened up and swallowed me, creating new hells for me to suffer in forever?” Through this exercise, the exercitant would come to the realization that angels protected, saints interceded, and nature supported him. These daily exercises were grouped into weeks and each segment had a par ticular tone and aim. The First Week was the purgative week, focused on creaturely sin (as is abundantly clear with the above example of meditation on sinfulness) but also, again quoting Endean, to encourage in the exercitant “an awed sense of how creaturely perversity fails to frustrate divine love.” The Second Week circled around “the election,” the choice one must make about vocation if a Jesuit, but this week could be adapted to be useful to laypersons as well because choos-

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ing a state of life could be conceived in terms of career, marriage, and so on. The exercises of this week emphasized Christ’s ministry, and the meditation on the Two Standards (discussed below) was a central component. The meditations from Week Three focused on the passion and death of Christ. Week Four celebrated his resurrection from the dead and emphasized the intense joy that one might experience in the days following Christ’s resurrection (I discuss the implications of the Jesuit emphasis on the resurrection in Chapters 2 and 6). As Endean notes, Ignatius’s language in the directives for these last two weeks becomes elliptical, leaving room for commentators “to fi ll in whatever is their preferred theology of the Cross.” Throughout the Spiritual Exercises, the exercitant was asked to attend to his reactions, to note the quality of each prayer, each meditation, and to repeat these experiences. Endean clarifies that the latter repetitions ought to be understood as “re-seekings” with the aim to clarify desire. Here we can see the importance of starting out by marking the way through the contemplation of place. Having set up the par ticular Gospel scene (the first exercise of the Prelude), he could revisit the imaginative locales and reevaluate each experience. Where had he experienced solace or consolations, when had he felt spiritual dryness or desolation? What I hope the reader will appreciate is that this outline is an abstraction, for, as we shall see in the course of this chapter and the remainder of the book, the published version of the Spiritual Exercises charts a bare outline of what was to be a highly individuated experience. Commentaries on Ignatius’s writing style have called the Exercises “terse,” but this is because the book was intended to be flexible and adaptable. More to the point, each person was to find her way, that she be compelled to think things through for herself. It can be helpful to conceive of the Spiritual Exercises as a basic recipe with which one was required to experiment, and so, in addition to the Four Weeks, the Exercises also included many suggestions for augmentation or experimentation (discussed below). The Exercises provided a starting point and a set of flexible guidelines to facilitate invention. The results (and even the timing) of the Exercises would differ for each person. For example, one Jesuit described giving the Exercises to a man who had heard about the reputation of this retreat to effect a rapid transformation. Yet the man passed twenty-one days working through the exercises from only the First Week. As the example of this First Week expanded into three actual weeks makes clear, the Spiritual Exercises provided a basic outline that was accommodated to individual needs. As the Jesuits themselves so often stated, understanding the nature of the Spiritual Exercises is impossible from merely reading the text. The Spiritual Exercises were an experience. Accordingly, apart from the directives to imagine oneself a sinner before God, or to imagine Mary’s joy at Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the Exercises did not guide one toward an

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ideal experience, but rather offered practical advice for getting through them. Note the Twelft h Annotation: “The one giving the Exercises should insist strongly with the person receiving them that he or she should remain for a full hour in each of the five exercises or contemplations which will be made each day; and further, that the recipient should make sure always to have the satisfaction of knowing that a full hour was spent on the exercises—indeed, more rather than less.”  Ignatius’s instructions were very pragmatic and quite similar to physical exercise: practice getting through the hour to build stamina for meditations that might be more trying—usually when the exercitant was harried by the enemy, who “usually exerts special efforts to get a person to shorten the hour of contemplation, meditation, or prayer.”  If I refuse the model of positing a single ideal, it is because it is more important to begin with the crucial point that Jesuits embraced a multiplicity of approaches, catering to each person (as we shall see in discussions about women, often in a condescending manner) because doing so facilitated each person’s discovery of God’s will. Consider trying to understand the feeling of riding a train, but the text you have in hand is the mechanical engineer’s blueprint for building a train. The train analogy can be pushed further, because to understand spiritual experience is to keep one’s eyes trained on a moving target. Like a train, meditation and prayer move people, transform their way of being in the world. As Ignatius wrote in the Annotations to the Exercises, “it is not the knowing of much that contents and satisfies the soul, but the feeling and relish for things from inside.” Rather than analysis of discursive categories of classification, my goal is to discern the transformative process of self-objectification. To appreciate the effect that the Spiritual Exercises had upon people, they are best understood not as a text to be processed cognitively so much as an experience. “ T O OV E RC O M E O N E S E L F, A N D T O O R DE R ONE’S LIFE”

Now we begin the task of locating practice in practice, of pairing texts with bodies. The Spiritual Exercises as a text are not much help in understanding their widespread appeal. The book was not intended as reading material, even though the Jesuit Roman College ran a printing press and its cheap copies succeeded in making the Exercises more widely available. The exercitant made the series of meditations to animate body and soul, mind and heart, toward a reconfiguration of being. For this reason, Everard Mercurian, SJ, (1514–80) explained, the book itself should not be given to people until after they had made the Exercises with the help of a teacher (the director), not the text. Mercurian compared the Exercises to scripture, arguing that, “merely read, the sacred Scriptures barely move anyone; but when meditated and pondered they are replete with mysteries. Simi-

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larly with the Exercises: when merely read, they obviously contain good precepts but move no one very much; when made, however, they are extraordinarily powerful and effective for the conversion of souls and spiritual fruit.”  In the next section, we examine discussions internal to the Society of Jesus about how a wide range of persons could make the Spiritual Exercises. Mercurian’s comments belong to an ongoing conversation among the early Jesuits about what was most effective in spiritual direction. Various “directories” or guides written by sixteenth-century Jesuits include both manuscript memos, as well as the formal Directory published in 1599. Jesuit General Claudio Acquaviva requested input from Jesuit retreat directors worldwide in order to compile a detailed guide that drew upon more than fift y years of Jesuits’ experiences of offering the Exercises to both religious and laypersons. The Directory demonstrates that this “science of the self” was built upon the careful observation and experimentation conducted by a transregional network of Jesuit missionaries. Explicitly, the directories tell us what Jesuits considered important about the Exercises and how a wide variety of people might benefit from them. Implicitly, given that the various directories resulted from the trials and errors of working with many different people, I read them for clues as to how the Exercises may have been experienced. The Spanish Jesuit Juan Alfonso de Vitoria, for example, advised directors of the Exercises not to bring the book with them when directing the retreat, but instead to use the text as a means of readying oneself to talk to the exercitant. The director, he advised, “should give the exercitant a starting point and a method for discovering things by himself, for this is ordinarily what is helpful.” As we explore in Chapter 3, the director was instructed to pay special attention to his own demeanor and behavior. Although accustomed to offering counsel outside of the retreat, as director of the Exercises he was advised to refrain from such advice giving. Instead, he was to create an environment conducive to the immediate experience of the Divine: Outside the Exercises it is lawful and meritorious for us to counsel those who are probably suitable for it to choose continence, virginity, religious life, and all forms of evangelical perfection. But 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, embracing it with love, inciting it to praise of himself and disposing it for the way which will most enable the soul to serve him in the future . . . to allow the Creator to deal immediately with the creature and the creature with its Creator and Lord.

In other words, the Spiritual Exercises paved the way for the practitioner to stand alone before God. And not only the director but the exercitant herself was likely to get in her own way. The earnest endeavor to know and overcome oneself, to

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determine God’s will in a rational manner (unencumbered by the passions) was to be undertaken alone, with assistance from the director, who would help the exercitant find her own path toward divine inspiration. Thus, the Exercises were to be made in isolation whenever possible. Although seclusion was essential to the retreat experience, the location and the amount of time spent alone in meditation could be adapted for an individual who was too busy to take the time to be away from the world for thirty days, or even a week. One series of instructions remarked: “Since not all those desiring to make the Exercises can have the same way of life, constitution, health, mental capacity, or leisure, the director must carefully adapt a special procedure for each individual, as regards not only content but also method and time-schedule.” Ignatius asserted that removing oneself from friends, acquaintances, and activities “that are not well ordered” would increase one’s spiritual progress and allow the exercitant to approach and “receive graces and gifts” from God. Here we see how the Exercises were built upon a theory of change that accounted for habitual behavior and, therefore, the initial pragmatic move was to isolate the practitioner from his habitus in order to make him more cognizant of it. In a one-page sheet distributed to those making the retreat in Mexico City, participants were advised that they could not write to or visit with family and friends. Exercitants were also advised not to write on the walls or doors of their rooms and common places. The practitioner should be secluded from all manner of intrusions—whether directly from outside persons or as mediated through scrawled-upon walls. While the goal of the Spiritual Exercises was to provide order to one’s life (according to each individual’s spiritual inclination and time schedule), the key to practicing the Exercises lay in ordering one’s time. “For, just as taking a walk, traveling on foot, and running are physical exercises, so is the name of the spiritual exercises given to any means of preparing and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections and then, after their removal, of seeking and fi nding God’s will in the ordering of our life for the salvation of our soul.” Th is parallel between mental and physical exercise stretches back to the Greeks, when memory exercises were deemed a “gymnastic of the soul.” What such phrases often neglect is that the development of memory, intellect, and will—what we perceive as disembodied aspects of thought—were formed in part through bodily practices; indeed, “gymnastic of the soul” relied much upon movement of the body. As we shall soon see, there is a rhythm to the Spiritual Exercises, a physicality to their practice designed to reorient and train the exercitant to have a heightened awareness of the embodied path toward spiritual consolation. The Spiritual Exercises shaped “consciousness” as the ability to take note of body. Directing attention to embodied practice offered a way to fine-tune spiritual experience. This was key to finding God’s will in one’s own life. The potentially

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overwhelming task (knowing God’s will) was attainable through a regular regime of prayer, meditation, and daily examinations of conscience that proceeded in a methodical, orderly fashion. To decipher embodied experience in a rational manner lay at the heart of the highly individuated process of what the Jesuits called “spiritual discernment.” Th is can be seen in the instructions for carry ing meditation through the hours of the entire day. Rather than a tortured meditation on one’s sinful nature, the Examination of Conscience entailed a precise accounting of spiritual progress, as the following instructions make clear: DAILY PARTICULAR EXAMINATION OF CONSCIENCE. It comprises three times in the day and two examinations of conscience. The First Time is in the morning. Upon arising the person should resolve to guard carefully against the par ticu lar sin or fault he or she wants to correct or amend. The Second Time is after the noon meal. One should ask God our Lord for what one desires, namely, grace to recall how often one has fallen into the par ticu lar sin or fault, in order to correct it in the future. Then one should make the first examination, exacting an account of oneself with regard to the par ticu lar matter one has decided to take for correction and improvement.

Here we see that Ignatius intends “taking account” in a very literal manner, providing a method for tallying one’s breaches of conscience: One should run through the time, hour by hour or period by period, from the moment of rising until the present examination. On the upper line of the G____ one should enter a dot for each time one fell into the par ticu lar sin or fault. Then one should renew one’s resolution to do better during the time until the second examination which will be made later. . . . The Third Time is after supper. The person should make the second examination, likewise hour by hour, starting from the previous examination down to the present one. For each time he or she fell into the par ticu lar sin or fault, a dot should be entered on the lower line of the g____.

The markings would allow one to chart and compare improvement throughout the day and week. Over time, long-term progress could be charted and made available for weekly self-scrutiny, carry ing meditative practice into everyday life. Prayer was also to be timed and measured, as outlined specifically in “Three Methods of Prayer.” For the First Method of Praying, a suitable procedure for the first commandment is to consider and think over in what I have kept it and in what I have failed, measuring this reflection by the time required to recite three Our Fathers and three Hail Mary’s. . . . Then I will follow the same procedure with each of the ten commandments.

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chapter one The Second Method of Praying is practiced as follows. One may sit or kneel accordingly as one feels better disposed or finds greater devotion, but should keep the eyes closed or intent on one place and not allow them to wander. Then the person should say the word Father, and continue to consider the words as long as meanings, comparisons, relish and consolations connected with it are found. The same procedure should be continued with each word of Our Father, or of any other prayer which one wishes to use in this manner. In this Third Method of Praying, with each breath taken in or expelled, one should pray mentally, by saying a word of Our Father, or of any other prayer which is recited. This is done in such a manner that one word of the prayer is said between one breath and another. In between these two breaths, one reflects especially on the meaning of that word, or on the person to whom the prayer is being recited, or on one’s own lowliness, or on the distance between that person’s dignity and our lack of it.

These directions gave an element of rhythm or meter to meditation. Note also the advice concerning posture in the Second Method of Praying. One may sit or kneel, Ignatius advises. Subsequent instructions from the various Jesuit directories had much more to say on this topic: 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, as indicated in the book of the Exercises. In general, however, the best posture is kneeling. If he cannot kneel for the whole time he should at least kneel for a short time at the beginning, and afterwards stand or sit. Praying prostrate, provided devotion urges him and it does no harm, or if he is otherwise used to the practice, may be done for a short period, but not often since it tends to perturb the memory and intelligence. Walking about is more appropriate while examining afterward how the exercise went. But the spirit should always be prostrate and humble with due reverence, etc. The eyes should be closed or else fi xed motionlessly upon some unvarying spot.

Advice regarding posture echoes monastic literature where, Mary Carruthers informs us, “lying prostrate and weeping ‘in silence’ (that is, in meditation) became a standard posture in the Middle Ages for all kinds of invention.”  Jesuit directives seem to be wary of this posture’s ability to “perturb memory and intelligence.”  Whether or not prostrate prayer continued to be current during the early modern period is less important than the fact that attention to posture itself endured, as clearly it did with the Exercises. Proper bodily comportment, a critical component of monastic practice, remained a vital preparation for meditation. A modest appearance and a composed sense of being became a marker of elite spirituality among all laity, and, as is explored in later chapters, spiritual composure (a “quiet” body) formed an important physical status marker for marginalized figures like women or elite indigenous in Latin America.

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In addition to these specific methods for invigorating prayer, Ignatius also wrote detailed instructions regarding the consumption of food. Abstinence was not the goal in his “Rules to Order Oneself Henceforth in the Taking of Food.”  After experimenting with long stints of fasting and, later, abstaining from meat, Ignatius eventually tempered his own extreme asceticism. According to the Autobiography, “At Manresa, too, where he stayed almost a year, after he began to be consoled by God and saw the fruit which he bore in dealing with souls, he gave up those extremes he had formerly practiced, and he now cut his nails and his hair.”  It is a curious passage: the consolation he experienced in God and in helping souls moved him to abandon his attempts to achieve the heroic asceticism that had inspired him in the early 1520s. Perhaps he found the act of consoling souls, as he says himself, much more gratifying than ascetic feats. Or he cleaned up his act, so to speak, because a moderate appearance made him more palatable to the souls he sought to console. But that is to fail to recognize that moderation itself had spiritual value for Ignatius. The Exercises demanded that one learn to regulate consumption, not in accordance with a universal ideal, but attuned to the exercitant’s own spiritual and physical needs. The selfexperimentation makes the Exercises a product of its times, as becomes apparent when studied alongside the suggestions of another early modern phi losopher, Francis Bacon. Examine thy customs of diet, sleep, exercise, apparel, and the like; and try, in any thing thou shalt judge hurtful, to discontinue it by little and little; but so, as if thou dost find inconvenience by the change, thou come back to it again; for it is hard to distinguish that which is generally held good and wholesome, from that which is good particularly, and fit for thine own body.

Moderation offered an experimental method for knowing, shaping, and reflecting upon self. For Ignatius, health and personal habits were to be taken into consideration as the exercitant carefully planned his meals for the following day. Further, Christ was the proper example for modeling one’s conduct: While one is eating, it is good to imagine Christ our Lord eating in company with his apostles, and to observe how he eats, how he drinks, how he looks about, and how he converses, and then to try to imitate him. In this way one’s mind will be occupied chiefly with the consideration of Our Lord and less with the sustenance of the body. Thus one gains a better method and order in regard to how one ought to conduct and govern oneself.

In this case, “imitation of Christ” does not involve sharing the suffering of the dying god-man, but rather, observing and following his table manners. Such a memory exercise served as a hook. During meditation, the image of Christ would become attached or hooked to an emotive state attained during meditation. Relying upon imaginative hooks such as an image of Christ eating at

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the table would provide the exercitant with a means of bringing Christ into her everyday life. Even when the retreat was over, each time the exercitant later sat down to the table, the recollection of the eating, drinking, and conversing Lord might inform her own bodily attitude toward table and food; the motion of sitting down to table itself operated as the hook that pulled her back to emotive states attained, thereby reinforcing any spiritual gains made during an intense retreat experience. I return to the importance of affective memory exercises in the next section. For now Ignatius calls us back to another accounting process, this one a method of bodily regulation following mealtimes: To rid oneself of disordered excess it is very profitable, after dinner or supper or at some other hour when the appetite to eat or drink is not strong, to settle with oneself how much food is to be taken at the next dinner or supper, and further, to do this every day. Then one should not exceed this amount either because of appetite or of temptation, but overcome every occurrence of disordered appetite and of temptation from the enemy, whether his temptation is to take more food or less.

Moderation required advance planning. The sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit Juan Alonso de Vitoria expanded Ignatius’s directives about how one ought to undertake a dispassionate accounting of consumption: Beginning with the day he starts the first exercise, the person who brings the exercitant his food should follow this procedure: when clearing the table after dinner in the forenoon he should ask the exercitant what he wants to be brought for supper, and after supper what he wants for dinner the following forenoon. He should then bring neither more nor less nor anything other than was requested; he should bring it at the exact time requested, neither earlier nor later. He should not be satisfied to let him say, “Just bring me what the brethren get.” He should apologize and tell the exercitant that this would be against the procedure of the Exercises and that he has to ask explicitly for what he wants; if all he requests is bread, or only an ounce of bread, that is what he is supposed to bring him, and nothing else. . . . He shall also let the director know at least once a day what and how much the exercitant has eaten, etc.

The exercitant would be compelled to make a decision that would have physical consequences (feelings of hunger, of gluttony) as a means of testing his own physical needs, of calibrating his body to attain the best possible spiritual benefit. Decisions like this could not be made for the practitioner. In a similar emphasis on self-sufficiency, the exercitant was expected to sweep and tidy his or her room daily—without regard for social status. One account remarked that even a local nobleman, “the Conde de Luna Don Antonio Pimentel,” was treated without ceremony when he made the exercises at the Jesuit college in Valladolid, where “this prince retired to his simple cell” just like any other exercitant. The Mexican Distribución mentioned earlier was explicit on this point: no one would be allowed to bring a servant to the retreat house, regardless of status.

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Observe that these instructions were par ticular and exact; they were not to be construed as side notes. In the directions written by Juan Alfonso de Polanco, he advised that even those making only the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises would benefit from giving careful consideration to “the Rules for Distributing Alms, Discerning Scruples, Thinking with the Catholic Church, or Regulating their Diet, so far as is deemed useful and time allows.” If, in Reformation Europe, suggestions regarding food consumption were listed alongside “thinking with the Church,” we can safely assume that regulating one’s consumption was considered important to the effectiveness of the meditation program and the continued regulation of one’s everyday life. What are we to make of these instructions regarding food and housekeeping? What of the attempts to infuse prayer with a rhythm or meter? With the Christianization of Hellenistic traditions, the body became a central problematic, a transformation that thereafter made ascending toward a transcendent wisdom intensely problematic. Habit-body weighed against reform. Yet body could also be incited as instrument and means of communication to others. The Spiritual Exercises were a ritualization of being through which the exercitant became an object to herself. In the Ignatian Exercises this process recognized body, mind, and soul as aspects of unified being even as its methods split mind from body. The brilliance of these varied approaches resides in Ignatius’s recognition (drawing upon centuries of monastic tradition) that speech acts alone would fail to propel one on the path to the sublime. More than prayer or supplication, the divine ought to be approached almost blindly, through the ritualization of banal actions. Recall that the exercitant was not reading the Exercises as he or she undertook them. The fact that the exercitant fumbled through as an unwitting participant contributed to the dramatic tension of making the Exercises. Here I draw upon Roland Barthes’s very astute observation that “the retreatant cannot (and must not) know in advance anything about the series of experiments which are gradually being recommended to him.” This is why, at least initially, the practitioner does not read the text of the Spiritual Exercises. “He is in the situation of a reader of a narrative who is kept in suspense, a suspense which vitally concerns him, since he is also an actor in the story whose elements are gradually being given him.” Accordingly, the focus on banal activity also functioned to “combat the vague and the empty,” organizing all the “insignificant details of his daily life” and contributing to the development of a rhythmic language internal to the Exercises. Thus the temporal needs from which he cannot escape, light, the weather outside, food, dress, which must be made “profitable” in order that they may be turned into image objects (“During meals, consider Christ our Lord as though one saw Him eating with His Disciples, His way of drinking, of looking, of speaking; and try to imitate Him”), following a kind of totalitarian economy in which everything, from

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We will have opportunity to consider how a suspense like this could be tormenting when we explore a nun’s anguished letter to Jesus (see Chapter 6); this blind approach to the divine could provoke intense anxiety. Given Jesuit insistence on making oneself entirely indifferent to what might occur, combined with Jesuit attention to how changing contexts could inform one’s spiritual life, even exercitants repeating the Spiritual Exercises would be instructed to adopt an attitude of blind anticipation, perhaps even more attuned to what might be discerned this time. I want to reemphasize that, when the mundane became infused with meaning, these unremarkable artifacts became the vehicles by which experiences during the Spiritual Exercises moved beyond the walls of the retreat house and became integrated into the exercitant’s everyday life. Th rough memory and imagination, heightened awareness of everyday bodily practices harnessed “forgotten history” so as to reconfigure habit-body—as we have seen in the way that practitioners of the Exercises were taught to be vigilant about posture, to breathe rhythmically during prayer, to measure time throughout the day, to diligently sweep their rooms, and to chew carefully at mealtime. The effectiveness of the Spiritual Exercises resided in the way the practice called attention to the sedimentary nature of embodied history. The layers of habit that had become “second nature” were to be brought forward and examined by the individual who would probe, collect and, as becomes more clear in Chapter 4, take command of these accretions by understanding and narrating the story of sin in her life. Finally, attention to the mundane was linked to a notion of vigilance over the soul. The detailed instructions about food, bodily comportment, and housekeeping call to mind the “care of the self” that had once belonged to Hellenistic and monastic cultures. Caring for the body was vitally connected to caring for the soul. Christian discipline of the flesh, in all its forms, ought not be considered a denial or renunciation of the body, but rather, a valorization of it: the body provided access to the divine. As Caroline Bynum reminds us, “Source of temptation and torment, body is also a beloved companion and helpmeet; delay and hindrance on earth, it is essential to the person herself and will be perfected and glorified in heaven.” Ignatius advocated moderation and careful evaluation of whether one required more or less physical mortification. There was no single recipe for orienting body and soul to discern God’s will. During the final week of the Exercises, the exercitant was asked to bring back into memory “all the gifts I have received—my creation, redemption, and other gifts particular to myself.” This program of individuated self-regulation of behavior in the daily lives of early modern Catholics was a means of reaching toward the divine that simultaneously forged a stronger sense of self.

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But how did early modern Catholics move from the mundane aspects of everyday life to develop a transcendent idea of self in an expanding world? I M AG I N AT IO N , R E DE M P T IO N , A N D G L OBA L   E X PA N S IO N

What do we know about how the individual act of seeking union with God could propel one into the world? This question has remained unexplored in the Catholic context. We are well acquainted with the contours of the story of Protestant asceticism: Calvinism forced one to prove faith through “worldly activity.” But we know very little about parallel developments in the Catholic world, how Catholic forms of interiority produced what might be glossed as a Catholic worldly asceticism. To be certain, Max Weber’s identification of a Protestant ethic has played a significant role in defining a conceptual terrain that excludes Catholicism. Weber conceded that aspects of Catholic asceticism were rational, but that they never became socially important. By contrast, the rules of Catholic monasticism emphasized an enclosed asceticism. Weber contended, “the more strongly it gripped an individual, [it] simply served to drive him farther from everyday life, because the holiest task was definitely to surpass all worldly morality.” This seems to accurately locate the experience of someone like Angela Foligno, discussed in the first part of this chapter. Exploration of God and self moved her more fully into retreat as she advocated remaining “continually in one’s cell . . . never leaving it.” Putting a Foucauldian spin on it, Weber was correct that monasticism had fine-tuned Catholic techniques of the self. Yet Weber was mistaken when he cast St. Ignatius in the role of a “monk.” The Jesuits were very explicit about their calling to be active in the world, and their Spiritual Exercises inspired men and women to aspire to conceive of themselves as contemplatives in action. Jesuit spiritual practices played a critical role in bringing monastic practices of selfscrutiny out of the monastery. In other words, the laity was not merely “Christianized.” The massive deployment of the Tridentine catechism emphasized internalizing and embodying the rules of Christianity, a dual goal that emphasized both conscious reflection and an unconscious deployment of an embodied virtue. Early modern Christians were monasticized when Christian technologies of the self that had hitherto remained the realm of a spiritual elite began to percolate more rapidly than ever before into lay society. Affective imagination was the key means by which individuals were summoned to be active in worldly ser vice to God. In the medieval monastic tradition, memory and imagination were crucial to preparing the mind for meditation. The main purpose for developing memory, Mary Carruthers argues persuasively, was not to contain “facts” to be reiterated exactly at a later time. Rather, memory

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provided the mind and soul with an apparatus—a machine—that would help lift, raise, and move it toward God. For Ignatius, monastic memory practices came via Ludolph the Carthusian, whose Life of Christ, written in the fourteenth century, ranks among the most important influences upon the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius wanted the practitioner of the Exercises to rely upon imaginative and affective contemplation to augment and intensify his or her spiritual life in the same manner that Ludolph’s readers were prompted to use the imagination to fi ll in components of the Gospel that had remained unspoken. The primary place given to the use of the imagination in the Spiritual Exercises had its possible pitfalls as it left the Gospels open to personal interpretation. But, importantly, it also meant that the average person could approach the Exercises—one did not have to be a scholar or an ecstatic. The Exercises contained concise directions aimed at allowing the exercitant to see and feel himself present in the scenes that made up the life of Christ. For example, one might envision the town of Bethlehem, imagine its streets, and perhaps even put the faces of friends or acquaintances among the shepherds who heralded Christ’s birth. In a similar way, Ignatius augmented the scene at Christ’s birth with the character of a maidservant. This was not without controversy; no such person was named in the New Testament, as some Jesuits protested in the 1570s. Such a dispute indicated changing attitudes toward “facts.” Medieval memory practices had been rhetorical—we might even say “functional.” Accordingly, imaginative descriptions by pagan authors were often used, not because they were considered theologically “correct” but because they were deemed useful. This particular debate about binding the Catholic imagination of Christ’s birth to a scriptural “reality” was abandoned and early Jesuit leaders deferred to the wisdom of the now-deceased Ignatius. The imaginary character should remain in the Exercises as a vehicle by which the exercitant might imagine himself present as a lowly maidservant to the child Christ. This example is one of many that demonstrate how accessibility to a personalized relationship with Christ was valorized and, indeed, might go far to explain the popularity of the Exercises among the laity. How was Christ made accessible? We have already seen a humanized Christ in the dining room. Further meditations on Christ’s life emphasized his humanity in order to move the participant to action. Consider, for example, a suggested conversation with Christ during the First Week: Imagine Christ our Lord suspended on the cross before you, and converse with him in a colloquy: how is it that he, although he is the Creator, has come to make himself a human being? How is it that he has passed from eternal life to death here in time, and to die in this way for my sins? In a similar way, reflect on yourself and ask: What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What ought I do for Christ?

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The intended effect of this exercise went beyond an awareness of oneself as a sinner before the Lord. The exercitant contemplated not past wrongs but actions— past, present, and future. This contemplation was designed to move him or her to ser vice: What am I doing? What ought I to do? The remainder of this suggested exercise continued to underscore Christ’s humanity as key to his accessibility, even as he hung bleeding on the cross: In this way, too, gazing on him in so pitiful a state as he hangs on the cross, speak out whatever comes to your mind. A colloquy is made, properly speaking, in the way one friend speaks to another, or a servant to one in authority—now begging a favor, now accusing oneself of some misdeed, now telling one’s concerns and asking counsel about them. Close with an Our Father.

Note the spare, terse instructions. These are not the floral passages of a lengthy, laudatory prayer, but rather a suggestion or outline with which the individual is given a few tools to evaluate her ser vice to Christ, past, present, and future. Notably, the colloquy did not suggest words or prayers but rather emphasized the demeanor or attitude that would be most fruitful. A demeanor, I should add, that entailed a bodily comportment proper to social status—in other words, the posture she adopted would accord differently with objectification of self as “servant” or as “friend.” This exercise was followed by another practice that entailed recalling sins committed over a lifetime. Once again drawing heavily upon imagination as an aid, Ignatius suggested a memory exercise: “I will call to memory all the sins of my life, looking over them year by year, or period by period. For this three things will be helpful: first, the locality or house where I lived; second, the associations which I had with others; third the occupation I was pursuing.” In a meditation built around the theme of sin, one was required to construct a personal history of his or her life that included home, family, friends, and occupation. Once again, Ignatius was sparse on detail. But the use of a house as an organizational aid was significant, as architectural iconography was, Mary Carruthers informs us, “associated with invention in the sense of ‘discovery,’ as well as in the sense of ‘inventory.’ ” What this means is that the built structure of the house in this case was not merely a way to “hold” memories. Rather, it keyed a creative process: the remapping of a life. This becomes even more apparent in a late sixteenth-century manuscript that offered discussion points for directors giving the First Week of the exercises: Consideration of oneself. TUESDAY. Points: consideration of self and of time and place: Where are you? Who are you? Also, reflection on each phase of your life: the time, the place, the state of life, circumstances in which he then lived as a sinner in each period; the things he happened to witness, and how swift ly and unmindfully everything passed by. His state of mind then and now.

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Note that this short, dense passage is completely without ornamental flourish. In Tuesday’s consideration of self, it was the intensity of the experience that mattered. Each phrase demanded a serious response from the exercitant, leading to a highly focused narrative account of one’s life, as the exercitant brought an “inner man” into being. This advanced literary exercise, as Brian Stock says, was a “reediting” of the self in which one narrative, a life to come, was traced over another, a life already lived. The notion of rereading a life as a text describes well the process undertaken in the Spiritual Exercises. However, what Stock describes in his book about Augustine is the way reading and writing about oneself activated a process of re-creating the self. What we have in the Spiritual Exercises is a textual practice minus the literal text; rather, the life is the text in formation, to be read and reread. These narrative practices were critical to one’s preparation for the general confession. Attaining the ability to evaluate one’s entire life within the telos of future transformation was an essential goal of the First Week. Furthermore, the mental exercise of tallying sins over a lifetime, as in the exercise discussed above, was intended to aid the exercitant in making a general confession at the end of the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises. In the general confession (see Chapter 4) the exercitant did not merely list sins committed since the last confession. Combined with the practice of daily examinations of conscience, he would gain the ability to recognize enduring patterns of sin and, when making a general confession, narrate the story of sin in his life. The primacy that Ignatius gave to apostolic ser vice becomes evident in the various meditations that summoned the exercitant to imagine the world: Here it will be to see the great extent of the circuit of the world, with peoples so many and so diverse. . . . I will see the various persons, some here, some there. First, those on the face of the earth, so diverse in dress and behavior, some white and others black, some in peace and others at war, some weeping and others laughing, some healthy and some sick, some being born and others dying, and so forth. . . . I will listen to what the persons on the face of the earth are saying; that is, how they speak with one another, swear and blaspheme, and so on. Likewise, I will hear what the Divine Persons are saying, that is, “Let us work the redemption of the human race.”

Perhaps most significant, the “Meditation on the Two Standards” called the practitioner to notice how under one banner, Satan “summons uncountable devils, disperses some to one city and others to another, and thus reaches into the whole world, without missing any provinces, places, states or individual persons.” In parallel, under the banner of Christ, one was called to “gaze in imagination” upon Jesus as he addresses “his servants and friends whom he is sending on this expedition.” Unlike Satan’s minions, one was to imagine the friends and ser-

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vants of Christ on the verge of an expedition. Imaginative space remained to place oneself in a position of departure, preparing to partake in a world mission to redeem the human race. No doubt the Exercises inspired many Jesuits to write letters requesting to serve as missionaries overseas. The Spiritual Exercises and the Society of Jesus were truly products of their time. Late medieval spiritual works generally did not espouse active labor throughout the world for the salvation of souls. The Jesuit Constitutions state their mission best: “to travel through the world and to live in any part of it whatsoever where there is hope of greater ser vice to God and of help of souls.” One can observe Ignatius living and experiencing the shift from a “crusader” mentality to something more akin to a civilizing project. Jerusalem had been at the center of Ignatius’s initial evangelical drive. Yet impeded by war from traveling to Jerusalem, and cognizant of the expanding role that Europeans were attempting to assume in the world, the first Jesuits quickly turned their attention not only to the far reaches of Asia and the Americas, but also to the places closest to them in Europe.

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Women’s Devotional Labor

While the key to self-mastery lay in ordering the minutiae of everyday life, the Spiritual Exercises promoted self-knowledge against the backdrop of a world that, at this time, was imagined, traversed, and mapped by European Christians. The Ignatian Exercises compelled the practitioner to develop a view of herself as active in a world whose contours were rapidly transforming, at a moment when the concept of “the world” adopted the shape of a globe. “Self” and “other” were vitally linked in this series of meditative techniques that fostered a dynamic, active spirituality that linked its practitioner to the spiritual and material conquest of non-Christians. Spiritual self-reform had bearing upon the mobility of early modern subjects on scales large and small, as Ignatian methods prompted exercitants to be concerned with neighbors both proximate and distant. Although all souls were perceived to be worthy objects of the Jesuit mission “to help souls,” the Jesuits nonetheless discussed their qualms about making the Spiritual Exercises available to certain souls. The Exercises situated a “generic” body in these meditative techniques, yet the Jesuits moved swift ly to mark out cultural boundaries. Women, as we will see in this chapter, had to be directed with caution. While Ignatius was open to giving the Exercises to women, he grew increasingly perplexed and eventually stubbornly opposed when women, after making the Spiritual Exercises, expressed strong desires to become Jesuits themselves. Th is tug-of-war between Ignatius and his female followers offers an excellent example of how the Ignatian path to transformation produced a desire to be mobile in the world (although, for many, even Jesuits themselves, this desire could be stymied). Women’s engagement with Ignatian spirituality provides a

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context in which to explore the meanings of “consolation,” “deeds,” and “God’s will,” especially pertaining to questions about which Catholics should be active in the world, and in what ways. Clearly, the early modern missionaries who embarked on those transoceanic journeys were men. Yet many Catholic women were very moved by Jesuit spirituality and sought ways to take up a worldly mission. The Society of Jesus made clear that women would be an encumbrance by seeking a papal injunction: no women allowed in the Order, ever. Yet women were inspired to transform their lives and become Jesuits. When the twentiethcentury Jesuit Hugo Rahner compiled Ignatius’s correspondence with women, he commented that these “poor women were already working themselves into a kind of pious frenzy. They saw and thought about nothing else but leaving the convent and occupying a house of their own as female Jesuits.” His condescending attitude toward the “poor women” notwithstanding, there is something accurate about the phrase “pious frenzy” that captures something of what Jesuit spirituality animated in Ignatius’s followers, both male and female. This chapter serves the dual purpose of providing some information about how women experienced the Spiritual Exercises as a desire to submit to a spiritual director, but also explores these gendered distinctions within a framework that demonstrates how, for men and women, self-reflection animated the desire to reform others (a topic that continues in Chapter 3). A quick glance at scholarship on early modern European women shows that activist women placed Ignatian spirituality at the center of their ministries. For example, the Ursulines’ founding constitution required the sisters to make the Spiritual Exercises every year, the retreat often directed by an Ursuline superior. Likewise, women from the Order of Our Lady wrote in their constitution that they were to make the Exercises whenever they faced decisive moments in their lives. Mary Ward’s Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, also known as the “English Ladies,” (founded in 1616) required members to make the full thirty-day retreat prior to joining the Institute, and then commit to renewing themselves by making the First Week every year. The French Marguerite-Marie de Alacoque led both novices and her sisters in the Exercises and wrote down her own advice for giving the Exercises to women in convents. Similarly, the Ursuline Marie de l’Incarnacion (1599–1672) wrote responses to the Spiritual Exercises she made under the direction of Father Dinet in Tours in 1633 and 1635. The Exercises fortified her resolve to travel to New France as a missionary. The Spaniard Luisa de Carvajal wrote that when she made the Exercises “life in England came to me” and she vowed to win a martyr’s death in the reconquista of London. The Italian teaching congregation, the Maestre Pie, were closely connected with the Jesuits, following their spiritual and pedagogical methods. These are not merely individual cases of women

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inspired to make and give the Spiritual Exercises to others. Rather, if reframed as devotional labor that transfigured an individual at the same time as it produced an excess that must be shared or passed on, then we can begin to see a more systematic pattern of Ignatian spirituality experienced as a call to action. S P I R I T UA L DAUG H T E R S , S P I R I T UA L MO T H E R S

If Ignatius developed a retreat that was malleable and transposable, this was due to his confidence in the universal applicability of the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius instructed spiritual directors to adapt the Exercises to the “age, education and ability” of the individual retreatant. Some discussion about intellectual capacity informed his recommendations that those who were entirely uneducated ought not make the Exercises at all. And yet they should be exposed to certain practices therein: It will be enough to give them the Par ticu lar Examen, the General Examen with its five points, and a method for receiving Communion, attending Mass, and praying, along with sufficient catechetical instruction on the main and more essential elements of the Christian religion, especially moral teaching. In lieu of an exercise, they will also spend a half hour a day on the first Method of Prayer [the meditation on the First Commandment].

Another category was those persons who were sufficiently intelligent and educated but “impeded by public or other affairs and concerns.” The author suggested that the busy businessman limit himself to “the First Week, the examinations of conscience, methods of prayer and for frequent confession and Communion, and the Contemplation for Obtaining Spiritual Love. They will, however, have only an hour of meditations each day (unless they wish and are able to do more) and two separate quarter-hour examinations of conscience.” Instructions pertaining to the spiritual life of young boys illustrate how Jesuits used aspects of the Spiritual Exercises in their education ministry: Boys (roughly seven to twelve), such as many of our pupils who go to monthly confession, can be given some exercises at least once or twice a week, depending upon their capacity. These would of course not be in the form of meditations since they would not know how to meditate. But they could be given a saying for them to call to mind frequently or to spend five minutes or so on in the morning, for that is as long as boys can keep their imagination from wandering.

Aspects of the Spiritual Exercises considered “most moving and helpful” for boys included death, judgment, hell, and paradise, although it was noted that “they are usually more moved and attracted by thoughts of death and paradise than of hell.” Similarly, the lives of the saints were highly recommended, “especially those who were holy from earliest childhood.”

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Tellingly, the author of this instruction writes: “The same method mentioned for use with boys can be employed with women, especially those who come to confession to our men; or else the method for uneducated persons.” Women on the whole were thought to be either uneducated or childlike. There were exceptions: “With women of high mental and spiritual quality one can use the procedure described for men who are intelligent or educated but occupied with business: they should be given an hour and a half or two hours.” Cloistered women who were intelligent and highly spiritual and had the leisure to spend the day in meditation “might be given the Exercises completely and seriously, though I  doubt this would be frequent.” Regardless of her “mental capacity,” these late sixteenth-century directives insisted that a woman required the consent of a  husband, parent, or guardian, or, in the case of nuns, the consent of their superior. Seclusion was a fraught issue when giving the Spiritual Exercises to women. Jesuits were advised to be cautious about giving women anything in writing lest “anyone could claim that our men are passing letters rather than giving the Exercises.” Many instructions are par ticular about the location where women might be given the Exercises. Jerónimo Nadal wrote specifically that women should be given the Exercises “only in the church; to nuns in the place designated by their superiors, so long as they are inside the cloister and our men outside, separated by an iron grille and curtain as is customary.” A different source agreed that women should be given the Exercises in church but only if it did not raise any eyebrows. “If it might cause talk it will suffice for them to come once, but make two hours of exercises.” All of these comments were in keeping with Ignatius’s ambiguous opinion of women. He deemed women “giddy and inconstant in the ser vice of God our Lord.” And yet he ministered to many women. The edited collection of Letters to Women compiled by Rahner is a testament to the important role women played as spiritual companions and support during the early years following his conversion. Was this early sense of cross-gender communitas lost as the Society of Jesus firmed up its institutional boundaries? It seems so, if judging from Ignatius’s fears that association with women might tarnish the reputation of the Society of Jesus: In all spiritual dealings I would strive to make a single step of safe progress rather than attempt to gain a hundred at risk of harm to myself or of conflict with the other in order to move him ahead (even though I might be very much in the right). A scandal, whether with foundation or not, does us much more harm than if we were to accomplish only half the good which God our Lord does through us, especially in times and places such as these.

Founded in 1540, the Society of Jesus was the single order in the early modern period that rejected any notion of maintaining an association with a “sister” order.

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Ignatius and his brethren felt that the Society ought to “remain free,” with its “breastplates buckled” and “ready to move at a moment’s notice.” Ignatius had specified in a private memorandum, “As far as we can judge in our Lord, what really matters is to keep the Society free to move unhampered in order to meet essential demands, and we must not tie ourselves to unessential things.” Phrases such as “run freely,” “be ready and girt,” and “we must not tie ourselves down” peppered the letters that the early Jesuits wrote to explain why they considered spiritual care of women too cumbersome, a hindrance to their worldly mission. The Jesuit founder nonetheless relied upon and courted female financial patronage, all the while strictly forbidding his patronesses from becoming Jesuits themselves. From the time of Ignatius’s conversion experience at Manresa in the 1520s, he and his early colleagues had women followers upon whom they depended for spiritual and material sustenance. Even prior to the founding of the Order in 1540, Ignatius expressed interest in women as objects of spiritual reform and remained interested in the growing movement to reform convents. Involvement in the spiritual lives of women and, more particularly, the use of the Spiritual Exercises in Jesuit efforts to reform convents resulted in a strong desire among many women to submit themselves to the rule of the Jesuit order. Yet as the Society’s Constitutions written in 1546 explicitly stated, “the men of the Society do not take any kind of women under their obedience.” These early instructions are ironic indeed, given that the Jesuits became known as key coconspirators in the seventeenth-century boom in spiritual auto/biographies written by or about devout women. Nonetheless, sixteenth-century Jesuits were adamant that interactions between individual Jesuits and individual women should be strictly limited: “Let them not be confessors in any convents or other houses of women living in retirement from the world, unless it be occasionally, as when passing through a town, or in the course of a general reform of such convents, at the most, and in either case only for exceptional reasons and with consent of both sides.” The Society obtained a formal recognition of their refusal to minister to women when the Vatican published an injunction to that effect. The injunction also relieved the Society of Jesus of its obligations to Isabel Roser, an early disciple of Ignatius who, in what he considered to be a failed “experiment,” had been allowed to take vows as a Jesuit. Recognizing that strict adherence to this rule might be difficult to follow, Ignatius counseled his fellow Jesuits to be pragmatic in their reliance upon the pope’s injunction. In a private letter, Ignatius wrote in 1556, “To hear nuns’ confessions once or twice is not against our constitutions, if we have as our object the reformation and renewal of their spiritual life. If Your Reverence feels unwell, or if you do not seem to be gaining much by this work, you can excuse yourselves by quoting the rules of the Society which forbid us to be regular confessors to nuns.”

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Again, fear of scandal affected Ignatius’s attitude toward women, as he reiterated his position once again that appearance of scandal could be a great disservice to the Society of Jesus: I would not enter upon spiritual conversations with women who are young or belong to the lower classes of people, except in church or in places which are visible to all. For such women are easily won, and through such conversations, rightly or wrongly, evil talk arises. Usually such women are rather superficial and do not persevere in the ser vice of the Lord our God. According to their degree of devotion, they are converted over and over again, when the flesh or when weariness demands, or even for the sake of money for their immediate necessities. . . . In all spiritual conversations, I would rather aim at one single degree of real progress that is beyond suspicion, than a hundred, if I should thereby expose myself to any danger. A scandal, whether true or false, injures us more than the loss of half of all the spiritual progress that God achieves through us.

Lower-class women were depicted as spiritually promiscuous—“easily won . . . over and over again . . . even for the sake of money.” Such associations were to be eschewed in favor of the woman “beyond suspicion.” The appearance of propriety was essential to the reputation of this new order of religious men. This concern remained with the Society of Jesus even after the death of Ignatius in 1556. Instructions on how to give the Spiritual Exercises published in 1599 cautioned Jesuits to be circumspect when giving the Exercises to women, insisting that they be made publicly in the church with “every caution” taken so that there be “no room for suspicion or scandal.” Further, “for the same reason it may be best to give the meditations orally and not in written form, so that no one will think they are letters. If they are given in writing, great discretion must be observed.” Spiritual “daughters” were single women who could present temptation. On the other hand, doting “mothers” served as caretakers, and Jesuits could be secure in their conceptualizations of women in the mold of the Virgin Mary as “mother to all.” Women adopted these “maternalistic” attitudes as readily as men. We can perhaps understand the social distinctions at work by looking at a similar dichotomy that existed for the Daughters of Charity in Paris in the early seventeenth century. The women who belonged to the congregation were deemed either “ladies” or “daughters.” The ladies were wealthy women who gave financial support to the congregation’s charitable endeavors, while the daughters were women from artisanal or rural backgrounds who did the actual labor. Only daughters would be able to physically walk through city streets and interact with the poor without further impugning their (already maligned) social status. A similar logic underwrote the advice that Ignatius gave to Isabel Roser, when he sent this experimental “Jesuitess” packing. She would be far more useful as mother than daughter:

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chapter Two It is not fitting for this little Society to have special charge of women bound to us by vows of obedience, as six months ago now I explained at length to His Holiness, it has seemed to me for God’s greater glory that I should withdraw and separate myself from this care of having you as a spiritual daughter under obedience, having you rather as a good and pious mother, as you have been to me for several years now for the greater glory of God our Lord.

Instead of a spiritual subordinate who required care, women could be counted upon to provide material sustenance to these single men, their “sons.” Jesuit writings often referred to women cooking for them, baking bread, sending food, mending clothing, caring for their ill, and washing their linens. For example, one Jesuit, writing in favor of admitting a woman to the Society, not only lauded her spiritual merits and works of charity, but also pointed out that women were “generous and attentive to the wants of the Fathers, not only in this place but everywhere.” Yet the Jesuits felt no obligation to bequeath formal title or allow vows of obedience to obtain the material aid, financial backing, or prayers of women. Isabel Roser eventually joined the Franciscan convent of Holy Jerusalem in Barcelona and maintained a lifelong correspondence with Ignatius. Her letters indicated her continued interest and support of Jesuit ministries and, further, demonstrate the manner in which women participated vicariously in the Jesuit world mission. “We often see letters telling us what the Lord is working in the Indies through the fathers of the Society, the Abbess has these letters read in the refectory and bids all pray God our Lord for the whole Society.” A premium was placed on circulation (of letters) that indicate a cultural commitment or investment in this global imaginary. Although they did not travel, “vicarious” is not an adequate description of nuns’ participation: Jesuits valued prayer as concrete involvement in the expansion of Christianity. PIOUS FR ENZ Y

Not all Jesuits agreed that women should be excluded from taking vows to become members of the Society of Jesus. Despite the caution against giving women the Exercises in full, a lay woman named Sebastiana Exarch from Valencia, Spain, persuaded the Jesuit Father Diego Mirón to instruct her in the Spiritual Exercises in their entirety. Most laypersons were limited to the First Week, which excluded, among other things, the “election.” But having made the full retreat, Exarch would have worked through the election to make a decision about the state of her life. Usually, the decision entailed whether one should marry or take vows. Although married, Doña Sebastiana Exarch made a vow of obedience to her confessor and thought of herself as belonging to the Society of Jesus. The desire to take communion frequently (in her case, weekly) was an important

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feature of her “conversion” to Ignatian spirituality. She praised her Jesuit spiritual director, Father Araoz: “Praised be the Lord, because when he came the desire of my soul increased more, through his teaching and example.” This relationship to Christ (through communion) and Father Araoz was amplified by making the Spiritual Exercises, which inspired in her “a longing to do something” despite being married. Yet her activism ought not be conceived as moving “forward” upon an emancipatory trajectory, as we will see in the following exchange. Sebastiana wrote to Ignatius in 1545, describing her path to the Jesuits. Sebastiana’s letter reflects great initiative in cultivating their relationship and belies the notion that confessional relationships resulted from patriarchal coercion. “Feeling the benefit [of frequent communion] and knowing the great need of my soul, I asked Father Mirón with great earnestness for the Exercises.” She declared her agency in the relationship: “Thus I have set him as intercessor between God and myself.” But she pushed even further: “My soul, however, feels deeply that this is not sufficient for God’s ser vice.” Ultimately, she asked Ignatius: “Receive me as your subject and daughter.” To humbly submit could also place the “master” in a position of obligation. If Ignatius’s goal was to exclude women from the Society, then his fears about allowing women to make the Spiritual Exercises were well-founded. Upon completion of the Spiritual Exercises, women like Isabel Roser and Sebastiana Exarch experienced a sense of entitlement. They had undertaken a rigorous spiritual journey, had elected religious life as Jesuits, and now merely requested formal recognition of a vocation they felt had already been recognized by God. They admonished Ignatius: they had achieved a personal understanding of God’s will; Ignatius need only recognize it. Similar phenomena can be seen in the relationship between the same Father Mirón and Juana de Cardona, another woman from Valencia. In 1546, she was quite indignant in her demands to take vows as a Jesuit and live in community. God had granted her “the desire to be guided” and she was willing to “conquer maternal love” if necessary to take up Christ’s cross. In the process of completing the Spiritual Exercises, Juana de Cardona had heard the Lord’s call, which gave her the authority to call upon Ignatius himself for recognition: “Neither during the Exercises nor apart from them, in temptation and lack of consolation, or in desolation and darkness, did I, or do I, feel in the Lord that he was calling me to anything else but to live beneath the standard and under the protection of the Society of the name of Jesus.” As we saw in Chapter 1, to live “beneath the banner” of Christ was to be poised to take action in a world plagued by the minions of Satan. Accordingly, Cardona’s request to live “in community” was not equivalent to joining a convent. These women’s strong sense of entitlement to live like Jesuits may have been

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drawn from the late medieval precedent of tertiary orders. Small groups of women, most often under the rule of Franciscans and Dominicans, undertook to live in private homes. In the first half of the sixteenth century, many women felt called to lead a “mixed life” of prayer and activism. For example, an Italian contemplative named Stefana Quinzani claimed that God called her specifically to a life that combined prayer and ministry: “My daughter,” God told her, “I would rather that you exert yourself and lead an active life, because the life that incorporates both activity and contemplation is more perfect.”  Following the reforms at Trent, these third order religious women were forced to either disband or form “legitimate”—meaning enclosed—convents. Note that Cardona also requested to live “under the protection” of the Society of Jesus, a request that was unattractive to an order of men who sought to keep their collective breastplates buckled. The particulars of the Jesuit soteriological script influenced many individuals’ imagined life trajectories, and not only the men who joined the Society of Jesus. Prayer and meditation took global Christianity as its object. Juana de Cardona’s desire to be active in the world suggests that she had internalized the entire meaning of the Spiritual Exercises. Not only had she worked through the meditations on election, subsequently making her own “vows” to be a Jesuit, but she also maintained a clear sense of the worldly nature of the Jesuit mission. She did not seek to retire to a private life of prayer and meditation; rather, she asked to participate in Jesuit missions at home and abroad: If you want me in Rome, I will set out today. If I am not worthy to be seen in your presence and receive your blessing, and you order me to go to the Indies or remain here or wherever Your Reverence may order me, I shall obey you even unto death. A woman who has gone more than a thousand leagues for the sake of disordered passion, seeking justice [she refers to legal suits against those who killed her husband], will not hesitate to go many thousands more, even for as long as life is left to her, on pilgrimage, seeking mercy, with love and for the love of him who is the Lord of my love and of all things.

She described herself as conquered, a self no longer subject to disordered passion. She would obey unto death, and this, her reconfigured self, was now oriented toward action in a concretely imagined world. Yet Ignatius refused to recognize her as a Jesuit. Transformation stymied? Perhaps; perhaps not. Cardona remained inspired to give up all her possessions and lead a life of ser vice to others. She lived at a hospital, where she ministered to the poor and sick. She died approximately one year after her exchange with Ignatius. Some Jesuits served as advocates of women like Sebastiana Exarch and Juana de Cardona, writing letters of support to Ignatius on behalf of individual women. Their letters, too, conveyed these women’s de facto obedience to the So-

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ciety of Jesus that now merely required formal recognition from Rome. Father Araoz wrote in favor of a woman named Guiomar Coutinho, who “proved” her Jesuit status by works of charity: “She is most lovingly devoted in our Lord to Your Reverence and to the whole Society, and she proves this by continual works of charity. She is as well disposed towards us as if she had so to speak already made her profession; she regards herself as belonging to the Society and would like to be recognized as a member.”  An Italian, Jacoba Pallovicino, also vehemently insisted upon being recognized as a Jesuit. She wrote to convince Ignatius that a house for female Jesuits would be of great value as a base for charitable works taken up by women for women, such as ministry to “fallen” women. Note that she did not advocate a convent, but a house from which women would remain active in ministry to other women, responding to the call to active ministry promoted by the Spiritual Exercises and demonstrating that leading a “mixed life” was still a possibility for women. Further, Jacoba Pallovicino reminded Ignatius of her entitlement to be a Jesuit and the responsibility of the Society of Jesus to recognize her as such, because it was via Jesuits and Jesuit practices that she claimed her vocation. Therefore, I entreat you on my bended knees that you deign to accept me and dispose of me as the father of family does with a prodigal son, remembering also that it was more than thirteen years since I was called by God through the voice of Master Peter [Faber, SJ] and Master James [Laynez, SJ] of your holy Society. True Shepherds gather up their sheep and do not let them wander away to strange shepherds.

Pallovicino’s pleasure was to be found in Ignatius’s willingness to accept and dispose of her, which she noted was his pastoral duty. She saw this as a fait accompli, best indicated by the signature on her letter to Ignatius: “Jacoba, of the Society of Jesus.” The Jesuit Faber reported that this pious woman attempted to prevent his departure from Parma, claiming that without him, she would be lost. “I ask your Reverend on my bended knees however to deign to listen to me if you do not want those who have good desires to be lost in body and soul.”  She deemed it an utmost necessity to have her spiritual director at hand to guide the fine tuning of the passions that would otherwise overpower the “good desires” within her body/soul. Jacoba Pallovicino sought to leverage her wealth in support of her cause, but to no avail. Ignatius negotiated the fine line between encouraging financial support from wealthy women patrons, limiting their demands upon the Jesuits for spiritual favors, and channeling their funds to foundations he deemed suitable. The Jesuits were receptive to Jacoba Pallovicino’s financial support for the foundation of a Jesuit college, but were adamantly opposed to her efforts to found homes or societies for female Jesuits.

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Teresa Rejedella had followed Ignatius from his early days in Barcelona. His teachings were key to her efforts to reform her own convent from its primary role as a home for unmarried daughters of nobility to what in the early sixteenth century came to be understood by reformers as “legitimate” convents, where women with spiritual vocations could live in an enclosed community. His spiritual counsels to Rejedella were energizing, admonishing her to be more assertive in her spirituality: Of this your words are clear evidence, for after you related certain weaknesses and fears which are true of you, you say, “I am a poor nun, desirous, it seems to me, of serving Christ our Lord”—but you still do not dare to say: “I am desirous of serving Christ our Lord” or: “the Lord gives me desires to serve him,” but you say: “I seem to be desirous.” 

The advice was complex: first, he asked her to remove the qualified language from her spiritual desires, to acknowledge and fully embrace her desire. He reminded her that love comes from God and that she should feel empowered to make this gift known because her “glory” was in God, not herself. In the same letter, he counseled her to focus on God’s love and be more lenient with her sinful self: “Once more I confirm that you should chiefly dwell on God’s love for you which is certain and think only of repaying him love for love. Do not worry about bad, obscene or sensual thoughts, nor about your wretchedness or lukewarmness, when it is against your will you experience such things. Saints Peter and Paul themselves did not wholly escape such things.”  In other words, touched by divine love, she would not be swayed unduly by fleeting passions. Ignatius continued to support the reform of convents throughout his life. Other Jesuits were more cynical. Nadal expressed real doubt about the merit of giving the Spiritual Exercises to nuns. He commented on a case in which three nuns were given the Exercises and they, in turn, gave them to their sisters in the convent. While some had expressed enthusiasm about this method of reform, he cynically mentioned his own method of inciting women to reform: he claimed to threaten “recalcitrant nuns that the janissaries [the Turkish fleet] would get them if they did not accept reform, and that was perhaps just as much use as the Spiritual Exercises.”  Ignatius remained adamant that women not enter the Society of Jesus, a contentious matter that entered into the relationship between Rejedella and Ignatius, as can be seen in subsequent letters they exchanged on the topic. Similar to other correspondents, after reflecting upon God’s will while making the Exercises, Teresa Rejedella urged Ignatius to follow not his own will, but God’s, reminding him that “our Lord not only gave us leave to seek, knock and ask, but in various ways urged us to do so.”  She clearly felt empowered—in what may seem ironic to the modern reader—to seek greater and more formal obedience.

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Ignatius, however, refused to be cowed by her reference to God’s will and claimed to have a better understanding of God’s ways. He chided Teresa Rejedella: “This I hold for certain that what you are now thinking of is not according to the mind of God.” After explaining again that the Society of Jesus would not take on the supervision of religious women, he closed this letter with the following: “May it please the Eternal Wisdom to grant us all ever to know his holy will, in it to find peace and contentment, and to fulfi ll it perfectly.” The exchange was fueled by struggle over who might better interpret God’s will. Echoing in these women’s letters were reverberations of the social and religious ferment that marked the sixteenth century. In this period, when church reformers were still hammering out the details at Trent, change seemed possible. Inspired by the model of the primitive church, the reforms of the early sixteenthcentury church were led by both “head” and “body.” Since the late medieval period, the laity had become increasingly interested in personal reform, which, by the early modern period, included a new focus on activism in the church. Women like Teresa Rejedella and Sebastiana Cardona wrote letters that reflected the dynamism of the period. They expressed exhilaration when they urgently demanded to make vows of obedience as Jesuits. Does this tell us that women’s avenues to spiritual excellence, as it were, followed along a path of obedience? Perhaps. Gabriella Zarri dubbed the first decades of the sixteenth century a “fleeting season” for women’s religious activism. She points to the promotion of strict monastic life in the second half of the century, alongside the elevation of the values of “virtue” and “contemplation.” Yet as we move into the seventeenth century and away from the founders of the Society of Jesus, what I wish to note (and describe in greater detail in Chapter 3) is that descriptions of devotional labor point to the effectiveness of the Spiritual Exercises as a means of both controlling and animating the passions, that there was a tension between action and passivity that belies a simple teleology, whether toward either greater emancipation or oppression. The bottom line is that making the Exercises reoriented many women and shifted their subsequent behavior in ways both subtle and dramatic, from dramatic vows of poverty to simple transformations in their relationships to personal space. The Jesuit Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli (1631–1707) described the effects of the Exercises in an Italian convent in terms similar to Rahner’s “pious frenzy.” After a few days of making the Exercises, “it was necessary to put on the brakes in order to detain these women who were in such a rush, especially in the use of penitences.” Rosignoli portrayed an Italian nun, Sor Maria Buonaventuri, as overcoming her ambivalence about making the Spiritual Exercises. There would be no more joking around with God, she declared in a note she wrote to Jesus. Placing it in the wound in his side, the nun entered into the retreat for ten days. The signs of her marvelous transformation, as Rosignoli described them, were the actions she took

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subsequently. Sor Buonaventuri rid herself of beautiful paintings, kept her saints and angels, “but only those figures that were dressed modestly. She broke her crystal bottles of precious waters and perfumes.” Buonaventuri replaced her books (histories and verses) with the writings of Gerson, Granada, and a copy of the Spiritual Exercises. She then changed her own appearance, dressing modestly: “nothing ornate, no curiosities adorned her clothing.” A similar pairing of simplicity and excess, it seems, resides at the heart of a seventeenth-century grassroots demand for the Spiritual Exercises in France. When Spanish Jesuits were still trying to maintain the Exercises as a marker of elite spiritual distinction, circumstances in France unleashed a groundswell of support for making the Exercises available to the general populace, and, much to the chagrin of the Roman leadership, the retreat was made available for women as well as men. A key player in this effort was a French woman named Catherine de Francheville. After making the Exercises, she made some decisive changes in her life. First, she rearranged her furniture. She gave away much of it, along with her jewels and silks, and created a small study or prayer closet that had only a desk and small bookshelf. She took a vow of poverty, but retained control over her assets—a critical move—because these funds provided financial backing for the first official Jesuit retreat houses for the laity. Her move to simplify her own life was paired with an intention to expand the reach of the Spiritual Exercises. Catherine de Francheville worked with the Jesuit Vincent Huby (1608–93) to found a retreat house in Vannes that accommodated up to 300 exercitants for eight-day retreat experiences. She was a key player in perceiving the potential demand for retreat houses. The missionary accounts of a Jesuit priest named Father Adrian who lived in “the wilds” of Canada had motivated Francheville to sell her worldly possessions and dedicate herself to assisting the poor. In the Jesuit context, we see the role played by a long-distance network of Jesuit missionaries who were in contact with “natives” and exotic others perceived to be in need of Christian spiritual redemption. Imagined neighbors pushed Francheville to attend to her concrete neighbors. In both realms, compassion for strangers near and far played a role in making the Jesuit ministries widely available to a broader swath of the laity. These biographical details from her life hint at the dynamic between “self” and “other” as a mobilizing force. The Francheville case thus provides an excellent vantage point from which to explore the drive to make the intensity of one’s spiritual experience available to others. One of the first things she did was to subsidize the cost of attending the Exercises for impoverished men. Her next goal was to make the retreat available to women. She financed a retreat for elite women from Vannes and arranged for them to stay in the larger part of the house where the now “impoverished” but still wealthy de Francheville lived in a small attic space. For an eight-day period, the women first were given directions

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about the meditations in the local church before returning to the private space of the rooms of de Francheville’s house to make the Exercises. This house, however, was too far from the Jesuit college for de Francheville, so she bought another house more proximate to the Jesuit college. With the added space, more women could attend. In this manner, retreats were held for women for over four years until, finally, local ecclesiastical powers complained about these single women who congregated outside of the protection of convent walls, and, more distressing, convened in a house alone with a priest. In Vannes, the bishop decreed that the retreats would only be allowed to continue under the direction of nuns and within a cloister. An Ursuline convent was selected. This has a certain irony, for the Ursulines had originally sought to be active in the world but, after Catholic reforms were spelled out at Trent, they were forced to establish traditional cloistered convents. These religious women would now serve as “guardians” of cultural orthodoxy for the next generation of uncloistered women. Meanwhile, Catherine de Francheville forged on: she continued to orga nize retreats for women but now outside of Vannes, distancing herself from the naysaying bishop’s reach. She also lived in community with other women and, like the early Ursulines before her, ministered to the poor and took in orphans, while continuing her vocation to promote the Spiritual Exercises. Notably, her community of women did not escape the fate of the Ursulines: the group house eventually became a convent. Historian Ignacio Iparraguirre has argued that Catholic renewal in France can be attributed first and foremost to the rural missions. Further, the birth of the retreat house was closely linked to the Jesuit itinerant missions (also known as popular missions). “Thanks to the mercy of God,” wrote the wealthy patron who hired Vincent de Paul (1580–1660) to preach to the peasants on the family estate, “the cities are provided with good ministers and religious zealots, but the poor countryfolk are seemingly deprived of all spiritual succor.”  As we will see in Chapter 4, preachers made itinerant missions from urban bases with the goal of reforming rural Christians. Vincent de Paul founded the Lazarists, also called the Order of the Missions, in 1625 to dedicate themselves to this practice. The push to give the Spiritual Exercises more widely came, surprisingly, from this non-Jesuit. Vincent de Paul recognized in the Exercises an excellent method for the widespread training and reform of secular clergy. He formulated retreats that included time for instruction of the parish priests alongside time for prayer and meditation. Leadership in Rome, under Jesuit General Oliva, frowned upon expenditure of funds for retreat houses for women; such money was better spent on other Jesuit works and foundations. Oliva threatened that Jesuits would not be permitted to direct the retreats at the houses that de Francheville (and others like her in France) were building. But as the historian Iparraguirre quipped, “Catherine de Francheville was by no means bound to obedience to General

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Oliva.” In less than a year after the house was built, 400 women had made the retreat. It was not until 1694, well after the death of Catherine de Francheville and Vincent Huby, that the new Jesuit General Father Tirso González, officially recognized the houses for “those most pious matrons.”  The Society’s oft-repeated refusal to give permission for women to make the Exercises offers evidence of the intensification of demand to make them. In particular, Jesuits wrote letters to Roman headquarters to consult with Jesuit leaders about giving the Exercises to religious women in convents. In 1603, Jesuit General Acquaviva’s formal response reiterated the Ignatian mantra: Jesuit ministries did not include giving Exercises to nuns. Further, he added, if a Jesuit were to do so, he ought first to obtain permission from the regional Provincial and consider the “circumstances of the location and of the nuns who attend that nothing contrary to expectations occurs.”  Following Acquaviva’s death in 1615, the Society of Jesus held the seventh General Congregation. Here the Society reaffirmed their original opposition to formal ministry to women. The new general, Vitelleschi, gave the most rigid interpretation of the prohibition. In 1629 he moved to prohibit Jesuits from even setting foot in a convent, declaring that they were “neither to confess, preach, or say mass [in convents],” to say nothing of offering the Spiritual Exercises. Modifying Acquavīva’s directive, he now compelled Jesuits to obtain official permission from the Father General himself before giving the Exercises to women. On the occasions when this request was made of him, Vitelleschi granted permission, with the caveat that it would be “just this once.”  The year 1703 marked a sea change, with Pope Clement XI’s recommendation that all religious women in convents make the Spiritual Exercises. In 1732 Clement XII extended the obligation to all priests in Spain. The decree stipulated that it would be especially important for those who would serve as confessors to make a ten-day retreat annually at a Jesuit college or retreat house. Iparraguirre traces the roots of this turn of events to 1685, when the life story of the Italian nun Maria Buonaventuri was published. Her vida described how she had been converted and transformed by the Spiritual Exercises. An abridged version of her story was included in the Notizie Memorabili written by the Jesuit Rosignoli, who skipped over the story of her life and simply published the details of the role that the Spiritual Exercises played in her conversion. “On the first day she had been marvelously transformed into another person and in only one instant, she arrived at the pinnacle of a heroic virtue, where many fail to arrive over the space of many years.” The “instant transformation” inspired even greater demands among laity and religious to make the Spiritual Exercises. But the popularity of the Exercises probably preceded the publication of Rosignoli’s Notizie (even though, as we shall see in Chapter 3, he wrote with the goal to make the Exercises even more popular). In 1679, the Dominicans determined that all of their order,

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both men and women, were obligated to make the Exercises before taking the habit. Women in convents without access to Jesuits made the retreat on their own by consulting books that were written by and for men. In 1695, ten years after the publication of the Buonaventuri biography, two books were written specifically to aid women in convents in making the exercises. The first was written by the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti (1632–1703) and titled The Religious Woman in Solitude. The second, Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Accommodated to the State and Profession of Religious Women, was written by the Jesuit Antonio Nuñez de Miranda and was published in Mexico City. T H E G E N DE R O F OB E DI E N C E ?

The details about Catherine de Francheville’s life are interesting on their own, but also represent the tip of an iceberg indicative of a discernible pattern of female piety. New spiritual devotion propelled women into the world only to be reined in once again by predominant social norms. In the process, women were experiencing greater spiritual autonomy as they experimented with new spiritual forms. As we have seen in the exchanges between women and Ignatius, the meaning of “obedience” could be ambiguous. What did it mean to women like Sebastiana Exarch to aspire to the position of “subject” and “daughter”? On one hand, she advocated compliance with Jesuit authority. On the other hand, she requested access to a certain kind of skill, to become a formal student of Ignatius and to learn the tenets of what came to be called “Ignatian spirituality,” similar to the way one with musical talent might solicit the tutelage of a master musician. Does this tell us that obedience was gendered female? Not so fast. Scholarship on early modern European history has been quick to see obedience (and enclosure) as a problem for women, as well as an analytical predicament to be overcome by the intrepid scholar who skillfully reads between the lines for evidence of women’s efforts to overcome patriarchy. I want to step outside of this framework that would evaluate Juana de Cardona or Teresa Rejedella’s experiences only within the fits and starts of an emancipatory trajectory. An important first step in dismantling this framework is to explore obedience and freedom as a fundamentally Christian juggernaut. In other words, the gendered dynamics of obedience for early modern Catholics followed from the very basic theological problem that I look at in Chapter 3: how could one know God’s will? For men, and for Jesuit spirituality in par ticular, the converse is the case: Jesuits are often quickly characterized as militaristic adventurers due to the terminology sometimes used by the order (the General, the Company, soldiers of Christ) and their emphasis on hierarchical obedience. Yet probing at these terms does not offer the best means to crack the nut of “obedience” as spiritual practice, nor to unpack the particularity of men’s spiritual experiences. As Caroline Bynum

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put it, “The study of gender . . . is a study of one-hundred percent, not of only fift y-one percent, of the human race.” I would push this further: the point is not just that we need to know more about male forms of spirituality (as we surely do). Rather, we need to conduct our investigations in such a way that we do not fall prey to predefined dichotomies. If I were to begin this inquiry based on the premise that that world is parsed neatly into masculine and feminine approaches to spiritual experience, I will have answered the question before asking it properly. I have used women’s desires to be active after making the Spiritual Exercises as an example of the kind of activism that the various exercises therein elicited, as well as the reach of Ignatian spirituality beyond the Society of Jesus, significant because this order of men explicitly excluded women—and yet also profoundly moved so many of them. I have been less interested in recovering women’s voices or locating lost histories of heroic actresses. Agency in this case was not an effort to resist, but rather a seeking for a sense of freedom through submission and obedience. Moreover, a woman tapped into an affective energy, sought the reproduction of her own experience in another person as her own path to perfection, and, in so doing, demonstrated how affect circulates. She was moved; she was a mover. We use the term “move” colloquially to describe emotional shifts, but here I want to signal a prepersonal intensity aligned with embodied experience that animated the embodied experiences of more than one person. From this vantage point, we evaluate early modern Catholic “activism”—the par ticular connections between devotion and motion—by situating the Spiritual Exercises in relation to seventeenth-century explorations of the nature of “passions” and “action,” to which we turn in Chapter 3.

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Consolation Philosophy Or, How Prayer Moved People in an Age of Global Expansion The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough, Is having the blind persistence To upset an existence Just for your own sake. What cheek it must take. —Phillip Larkin, “Love” 1962.

In his anguished search for God, Augustine of Hippo found that his desire to ascend toward the divine was thwarted by the weight of his own sin. Worse yet, God rebuked the sinner. Fearing total abandonment, Augustine called out, like Christ on the cross, to a God who had potentially forsaken him. The sole position available to him—and the only attainable earthly reward to be had in the continuous search for God—was humility, the profound humility attained when confronted with the impossibility of the task that nonetheless must be undertaken. For Augustine, the Christian was, by nature, a troubled spirit, and this alone was what could be confessed or “offered” to God. As such, there was no need to travel distances to buy aromatic incense, wrote Augustine, no need to slaughter a calf or a ram. Within me is the sacrifice with which I may propitiate my God: a sacrifice to God is a troubled spirit (Ps 50:19 (51:17)). Listen to what this inner sacrifice is like, this offering from a troubled spirit: I will say to God, You are my protector; why have you forgotten me? I am struggling here as though you were no longer mindful of me. But you are training me, and I know that you are only delaying what you promised, not disavowing it. All the same, why have you forgotten me? Just as our head cried out in our voice, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Ps 21:2 (22:1); Mt 27:46), so too I will say to God, You are my protector, why have you forgotten me? 67

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It may not be much of a stretch to suggest that, after Augustine, Christians were theologically structured, in a manner of speaking, to seek some form of consolation. But what shape would such consolation take? Augustine had understood human existence as an embodied plight: anchored in this world, one could lean toward an unattainable unity with God, a unity that could only take place in the next life. Augustine had said, no need to travel distances. Yet an experience with the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises moved people in all kinds of ways, indeed, sometimes to travel far distances. The practitioner of the Spiritual Exercises sought consoling moments of unity with God. But as we will see in this chapter, consolation was not located in a place, not found through pilgrimage to a holy site. Rather, consolation was to be found in persons, both in plumbing the depths of one’s own experiences, and also in fomenting the transformation of an Other. “The Indies” was a trope that indicated how productive an encounter with an Other could be, whether with those who lived in “our Indies” of rural France, Italy, and Spain, or further afield in eastern and southern Asia, or the northern deserts of New Spain. In this chapter we will ask why consolation required some distance between self and Other, a gap that was both forged and traversed in a selfish search for God. For Augustine, the operative distance was between self and God. Andrea Nightingale has characterized Augustine’s sense of human experience as dispersed. She describes his temporality as dual, his being as scattered, distended, always “at the wrong place at the wrong time.” She draws from a passage in his Confessions in which Augustine laments that God cannot be found in any specific location: “You were not in my memory before I learned of You. Where then did I find You so that I could learn of You if not in the fact that You transcend me [nisi in te supra me]? There is no place, where we go backward or forward; there can be no question of place (10.26.37).”  But one of the unintended consequences of the life of a troubled spirit for many early modern Catholics was that “place” became a very compelling question. In Jesuit hands, the quest for consolation became increasingly worldly. In this era of European exploration and evangelization, “the Indies” emerged as both a place and a metaphor that promised consolation in the face of the anxiety-producing pursuit of salvation. Historians have depicted early modern Europeans as belonging to a culture of anxiety, a people who doubted their ability to know God or to ascertain salvation. If we were to rely solely on Ignatius of Loyola’s autobiography, this description would hold true. Loyola’s conversion narrative constructs his angst about God’s presence as a problem of perception: some thoughts, experiences, and emotions offered temptation, others consolation. Discerning between the two was an anxiety-provoking practice. Moreover, Loyola suffered scruples pertaining to his confessions, leading him to shout out, “Help me Lord, for I find no remedy in men nor in any creature; yet if I thought I could find it, no labor would be hard

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for me. Yourself, Lord, show me where I may find it; even though I should have to chase after a puppy that it may give me the remedy, I will do it!” As he dictated the story, he continued to be vexed by his sinful nature. “And that day and the next he felt free from scruples. But on the third day, which was Tuesday, while at prayer he began to remember his sins; and so, as in a process of threading, he went on and thinking of sin after sin from his past and felt he was obliged to confess them again. But after these thoughts, disgust for the life he led came over him, with impulses to give it up.” These “biographical” details, Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle contends, are not to be taken literally. Rather, Ignatius’s autobiography is epideictic, a moral text, written about God with rhetoric invented from the self. In the autobiography, the self is not the object of Loyola’s storytelling. The details of Loyola’s conversion experience provide the foundational rhetoric of Jesuit corporate understanding, and Loyola’s rhetoric could be used to populate the minds of Jesuits with “memories” (in Carruthers’s sense of the term) to be deployed in the inventive labor of discovering God’s will. We begin to see that rhetoric about sin, rather than being an end point, was in fact the operational starting point on a path that included selfdiscovery. Fear about sin did not merely lead to guilt as an end point but rather to compunction, a word that indicates how stinging sin could provide a starting point for self-discovery. This becomes more clear when Loyola’s discourse of inescapable sin (the professed anxiety in the autobiography) is contrasted with the practices (the methods found in his Exercises) intended to “shatter all troubles and darkness.” The purpose of undertaking the Spiritual Exercises was to find and to know self and God—particularly, to know God’s will in one’s own life. The imaginative search for unknown objects—a self, a God—formed a path upon which one could be attuned to glimmers of God’s presence. But vexingly, God could not be permanently had. This self, this path, was a road that rolled out behind, yet could not be fully left behind. One leaned toward transcendence while remaining bound inextricably to a self that could be only lightly held, continually re/formed through embodied memory arts and narrative techniques. In writing the Spiritual Exercises and in forming a new religious order with the express purpose of consoling souls, Ignatius attempted to meet the challenges of sin and salvation head on. As described by the seventeenth-century Italian Jesuit Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli (1631–1707), Ignatius had suffered scruples that “robbed the sweet calm of the heart . . . and left him in an obscure night fog of confusion.” Born of these struggles, Ignatius had perfected “the art of recognizing in others the same scruples [but] he now had the remedies to cure them.” Characterizing Ignatius’s talents, Rosignoli exclaimed, “One cannot find a Doctor or a science more certain, nor a hand so light for the cure of what ailed him.” Ultimately, Ignatius forged a practice that sought to qualify (if not reject) the sin

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and fear that so occupied the narrative rhetoric of his own life story. We find evidence of this in the spiritual advice he gave to troubled souls. Listen to the tone of this message in a letter to one of his spiritual daughters, Teresa Rejedella, whom we encountered in Chapter 2. Here Ignatius railed against the notion that God could ever be absent: Coming to the second point, as the enemy has placed in us a certain fear under the cloak of a humility which is false, and so suggests that we should not speak even of good, holy and profitable things, so he brings in its train another, much worse fear, namely whether we may not be separated and cut off from our Lord as outcasts—in great measure on account of our past lives.

He assured Teresa that God offered “interior consolation, which casts out all trouble and brings one to the full love of our Lord.” Optimistically, he claimed that love would carry her through, even in moments of spiritual desolation. To such souls as he enlightens with this consolation, he reveals many secrets, both at the time and later. In short, with this divine consolation, all trials are a pleasure and all weariness rest. In the case of him who walks in this fervor, warmth and interior consolation, there is no burden so great that it does not seem light to him, no penance or other trial so severe that it does not seem sweet. . . . If temptation, darkness or sadness comes, we must withstand it without any irritation and wait with patience for the Lord’s consolation, which will shatter all troubles and darkness coming from without.

As we have begun to see, in the face of the need to console and be consoled, the Jesuit way of proceeding focused on God’s presence. But what, precisely, was consolation? The Jesuit Jerónimo Nadal’s (1507–80) description of the consolation found in prayer and mediation formed the basis of the Jesuit mission to “console souls”: “There is also in prayer another thing that is from God and He purely gives it; that is a consolation, an interior happiness, a quiet moment of understanding, a pleasure, a light, a better step forward, a better understanding of things: all of this is the par ticular grace of prayer and that which encourages one to go forward and offers relics to help on the way.” We might call this “the consolation prize,” the silver lining of Augustine’s life of the troubled spirit. These reliquias—translated both as “relics” and “heirlooms,” words which imply a materiality or tangibility—provided small tokens or gifts that would ease one’s path toward spiritual advancement and, like stepping stones, paved a way into the world. “A better step forward” was construed figuratively and literally. Consolation could be sought not solely in retreat, penance, or quiet. For the Jesuits, consolation was moving because these moments of “light,” “pleasure,” and “interior happiness” were to be found in the action of bringing spiritual consolation to others, all the while living a life of obedience to God. The Jesuits wrote about finding stillness in movement, locating moments

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of quiet and inner peace in mobility. This was the tension that animated the way of being Jesuits described as “contemplatives in action.” This discussion of consolation sheds some light on the problem that initiated Chapter 1. Interior movement of the soul described as consolation compelled the practitioner of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises to move into the world—but how? Luke Clossey has puzzled over the fact that the decision to become a Jesuit was “an intense, almost selfish concern for the salvation of the soul.” This selfish salvation required an “other”—why? The seventeenth-century Italian Jesuit Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli provides a way of thinking about this relationship between self and movement toward an often (but not always) distant other. When he wrote Notizie Memorabili (1685) to give “notice” of the wonderful transformations wrought by the Spiritual Exercises, he described the merits of self-reflection as such “grand treasure, [that] one ought to seek it, even if to the Indies.” It is an odd statement if we consider “self” as locatable in the here and now of a par ticular body. Why does interior movement of the soul so neatly conflate with a transoceanic journey? Here “the Indies” seems to operate as a metaphor for an intense seeking, an intriguing indication that something in the experience of the Spiritual Exercises forged self as an entity to be sought both inside and outside of the body. Now we can begin to answer with a bit more precision the question of how spiritual experience mobilized people. This chapter explores the mobilizing force of “consolation,” positioning consolation as an affective experience that drove one to seek its renewal. In order to reexperience moments of consolation, Jesuits and their followers sought to bring these methods of self-reflection to others. I begin with Rosignoli’s Notizie, a text that proclaimed the transformative impact of the Spiritual Exercises upon individual lives. From there, I move to a guide to spiritual direction written by Jesuit General Claudio Acquaviva. Pairing these texts allows me to unravel the connection among self-reflection, affect, action, and this elusive experience Jesuits glossed as “consolation.” But because one might characterize my question as “causal” in nature—how did spiritual experience mobilize Catholic bodies—I will take a brief interlude to address another set of seventeenth-century writings, Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics. Spinoza facilitates a conversation about the affective forms of action that can shape selves prior to any conscious formation of an idea of self. Emboldened by their shared exploration of “the passions” in human experience, I link Ignatius, Rosignoli, and Acquaviva to Spinoza. The link, I hope, will turn out to be more revealing than a shared language about the human passions—in other words, the significance resides not merely in a shared vocabulary, but rather, in that Ignatian devotional practices demonstrate aspects of Spinozistic bodies in action, as simultaneously affected and affecting. What these words indicate is that, with Spinoza’s par ticu lar take on passion and action, “self” can never be a solitary

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affair. Spinoza situates the body in relation to itself but also to other bodies and ideas, and reading his Ethics has been helpful to my thinking through the intersubjectivity of spiritual experience without merely reiterating Christian theological explanations. “When a body ‘encounters’ another body or an idea another idea, it happens that the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole, and sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts.” This Deleuzean restatement of Spinoza enables my effort to link Jesuit spiritual direction to the missionary desire that appears in the historical record; namely, with Spinoza we situate devotional bodies in motion, and employ a vocabulary that might better describe the affective nature of Jesuit devotional intersubjectivity. PA S S IO N S , V I R T U E , AC T IO N

The Jesuits understood the potential impact of the Spiritual Exercises as providing a sure way to understand and direct the passions. We have already heard Ignatius comment on this topic when he opposed reason to passion, writing that the method and purpose of the Exercises was “To overcome oneself, and to order one’s life, without reaching a decision through some disordered affection.” Here, reasoned discernment appears to be opposed to the passions. In this chapter, we situate the problem of affect and action on a terrain recognizable to early modern philosophers by asking, how did the kind of devotional labor undertaken to control the passions simultaneously activate movement? This was a problem that pertained to both metaphysics and physics, in the early modern sense of those fields: As Fernando Vidal makes clear in his study of the various early modern approaches to the study of the human soul: “The ‘science of the soul’ was classified under both physics and metaphysics. It could lead not only to theology but also to moral philosophy (since the soul was the ultimate source of human actions), to rhetoric (through knowledge of the passions and their mechanisms), and to medicine (due to the union of the body with the soul).” The materials discussed in this chapter move fluidly between all three notions of the soul, but here I will foreground my question as one about passion and action: what was the relationship between human reason and the passions, between the passions and action, and, in this case, the connection between controlling the passions in order to ignite global evangelical action? My focus on affect in this chapter takes us to the heart of epistemological shifts that mark the early modern period. As Susan James demonstrates, early modern natural and moral philosophers put the human “passions” at the center of debates about the relationship among natural reason, emotion, and action. “A grasp of the passions as natural phenomena contributes to the ability to control and direct them, and this is in turn a prerequisite of fruitful reflection on moral

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and political questions.” If we define the passions as the self-contained emotions of individual humans, this elides the embodied, contextual, and intersubjective nature of the human passions. As James notes, the passions were understood to have “intrinsic physical manifestations which bridge emotion and action and are written on the body in facial expressions, blushings, trembling, and postures.” In this chapter, we will examine the role of these embodied states of being and how the effort to control the passions was key to animating evangelical action. Rosignoli approached this issue in the Notizie Memorabili, a book that described the spiritual transformations wrought in persons who had made the Ignatian Exercises. The aim of his book (and others like it) was to circulate narratives that would foment a desire to be similarly transformed. The first edition appeared in 1685 and was 120 pages long. The second, in 1694, was 265 pages long, and the 1713 edition was 848 pages. Clearly the “exemplary” cases had multiplied. As implied in Rosignoli, the instantaneous transformation of self was the seduction of the Spiritual Exercises, even if its practice entailed something much more complex. It is interesting to read Rosignoli as an antidote to the emphasis on “heroic virtue,” which was prominently featured in Catholic Reformation hagiography. Early modern hagiography, Gabriella Zarri has suggested, was a means of monument building designed to memorialize the deeds of virtuous heroes, not in marble but “in the form of literary monuments that were permanent and reproducible.” Following Richard Kieckhefer’s astute observation, “But if the small corps of saints and beati formed the widely visible apex for a pyramid of sanctity, the broad base of that pyramid was composed of devout religious and laity,” we can see that Rosignoli’s book was directed at this “broad base” but offered considerably less heroic models to follow. The Exercises developed a reputation for the rapid conversion of devotional labor into an elevated spiritual status as a member of what was perhaps an ever-expanding (or diluted) cadre of spiritual elites. Remember, the Jesuits were firmly committed to teaching “ordinary prayer,” which they described as the type of prayer that best conformed to human nature, and this ease of access to spiritual perfection could bring negative attention to the Jesuits, as we will see in Chapter 5, when we discuss certain Jesuits who were accused of reducing the rigors of spiritual life. With Rosignoli’s “Reader’s Digest” descriptions of “marvelous conversions” and a chapter titled “The Easiest Method for Practicing the Exercises,” one can see how such critical views might have developed. My main point is that increasing numbers of Catholics described as “swift ly transformed” by the Spiritual Exercises appear to have responded to a desire for more economical means of investing in spiritual life. Yet what interests me most is the movement of religious bodies in the early modern world. As we have begun to explore in Chapter 2, after making the Exercises, a woman might proclaim, “Send me to the Indies!” What form of “yes” is

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this? What, precisely, is she affirming? The Notizie is helpful. The text offers an opportunity to see that what was “produced” within this individualized experience of the Spiritual Exercises was a desire for movement and how this affective momentum overflowed the boundaries of the individual person. Motion—a certain embodied momentum—emerged as a desire to communicate that something had “happened.” Energy from an individualized experience was poured into the frame of a salvation narrative, a plotline that began with, but was larger than, any single person. We can begin to see this momentum in the way that Rosignoli imagined that reading his text would serve as provocation and guide: Tell me now, my beloved Reader, this life that I have proposed in digest [en compendio], has it inflamed in your heart a desire to experiment with these admirable effects and utilities wrought by these Exercises? Oh! I beg you, as much for love of your own well being, that you do not allow the sweet ardor of the Holy Spirit to freeze up [resfriar] without executing your desire, because this venture will be uniquely fundamental to your health.

There is much to comment upon in this paragraph. Rosignoli hoped that reading about another’s affective experience would activate the Christian’s desire to improve herself. Experience foments experience, and thus, in reading testimonies of the admirable effects or the utility of the Exercises (as described by Rosignoli), the “beloved” reader could pick up the frame and take on the structure of another’s spiritual improvement. He described, for example, “the great miracle” of one man’s transformation and how his wife was amazed to see him so transformed. He was “so modest, so generous with the poor, and so close to God that he set his clock every hour to remind him to lift his eyes to God and speak to God about some high concept or moment of sweetness” that he had experienced in making the Spiritual Exercises. Watching and listening to her spouse, “excited her desire to experience these herself.” Attuned to her husband’s embodied transformation, she sought to understand the experience by replicating it: she was moved to transform herself. More than an imaginative setting, Rosignoli’s descriptions provided emotive models that moved one toward the self-improvement advocated by the Jesuits. In his call to the “beloved Reader,” desire was fi red by God’s love, and it would be wrong—defi ned here as “against one’s own well-being”—to allow one’s own inflamed heart to become cold. In the Notizie, Rosignoli explained that making the Spiritual Exercises “cleanses the soul of its faults and passions, that are like smoky exhalations that obscure the light of reason.” Describing how students at Jesuit colleges had benefited, Rosignoli contended that the Exercises “uproot at their source all of the earthly passions and insert the first seed of celestial virtues.” At first glance, this language posits “passion” and “virtue” as opposed to one another, but this will

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not prove to be the case. On closer inspection, his descriptions of the value of making the Spiritual Exercises utilize a two-pronged discourse. The first speaks to the “utility” of reasoned discernment to conquer and control the passions, leading to a modest and quiet body, while the second is its opposite: an affective excess moves these same bodies to take up virtuous action in the world. In other words, the Jesuits and their followers were not urged to attain a virtue devoid of passion. Rather, for practitioners of Ignatian spirituality, the relationship between passion and action remained vital and moved along a continuum from lesser to greater alignment with reason. Passion and virtue were not opposed in any precise way. In fact, the passions, properly tuned, could mobilize: virtue was understood as well-directed passion, derived from a detached self-knowledge that would orient one toward charitable action. Intriguingly, for Ignatius, the precise role of the will appeared to be less important than the goal of arriving at embodied understanding. “When the soul is thus submitted to God, it causes the body, willingly or unwillingly, to act according to God’s will.” As Ignatius noted, “To bring this about is our greatest difficulty” precisely because cessation of bodily striving was not enabled by the mind. Understanding, for Ignatius, seems best indicated by attaining a certain fleeting state of embodied being and replicates Augustine’s sense of self as distended and scattered. In making the Spiritual Exercises, the exercitant would effect the critical transformation of desire and reconfiguration of the passions to enable a fleeting unity with God that could be discerned through embodied perception. The passions—when properly distilled by an inflamed heart—formed the basis of one’s physico-spiritual health. Rosignoli announced that “the first part of the Exercises has the force of a purgative to cleanse the soul of disordered passions.” It is true, he goes on to say, that getting the exercitant to take these first steps can be challenging. With patience and diligence, the spiritual director must get him to accept “the necessary medicine” willingly. The First Week of the Exercises was known as “the purgative week,” purported to bring order to the passions and cleanse the soul of sin. But note that he did not invoke “sin.” We need to appreciate some of the slipperiness of the term “passion,” which could refer to emotion or perturbation of the soul, or could function as a stand-in for the term “sin.” Disordered passions are both cause and result of sin, but the Exercises cleared the haze that obscured reason. Alternatively described as a moment of “consolation” or “serenity,” Rosignoli described how the exercitant “conquered” or “quelled disordered passions.” According to Rosignoli, efforts to conquer oneself using techniques found in the Spiritual Exercises “trained one’s understanding” and caused all “dryness” or “agitation” to disappear: “Not only is one’s interior transformed—the interior of the soul—but the exterior, the body [becomes] so modest, one feels humility of

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action in the senses, their speech becomes spiritual, so great was their transformation that it is visible in their composure.” Some Jesuits, on just such a quest for consolation, felt moved to seek it, “even if to the Indies.” In the mini-biography of Cosme de Torres, SJ (1510–70), included in Notizie Memorabili, Rosignoli did not invoke “the Indies” metaphorically. Rather, this Spaniard (and soon-to-be Jesuit) traveled to the East Indies because, living in Seville, he felt that his search for spiritual solace had thus far been in vain. He wished to find “a true art of wisdom that would settle his spirit, yet he was unable to go about it resolutely because his thoughts vacillated.” A disconsolate Torres crossed the seas to India, “as tormented by his passions as the ship was pummeled by furious winds.” Rosignoli’s text neglected to describe his interim stay in New Spain, but it was from the Americas that he and his brother, Miguel, had set off for the East Indies in 1538, where Cosme de Torres signed on as chaplain of an exploratory venture in the Pacific under Ruy López de Villalobos. On the Mollucan Islands, he first met Francis Xavier, a meeting that gave him an inclination toward the Jesuit Order. When he arrived in Goa, he “revealed his inquietude” in the confessional with Father Nicolao Lanciloto (d. 1558) at the Jesuit college. And “to dispose him to receive some light from Heaven,” Lanciloto suggested that Cosme de Torres enter into the Spiritual Exercises. Here is Rosignoli, again with his emphasis on the efficaciousness of the Exercises: “As soon as the second day, as if in front of his eyes, he saw Paradise. The shadows that had obscured reason now dissipated and full of a heavenly consolation unlike any he had ever experienced, the storm of his inquietude was calmed, to his own astonishment, he seemed to be in heaven.” Father Lanciloto had the final word: he was quoted as declaring what was a Jesuit commonplace about the Spiritual Exercises: no matter how many thousands of times one has read the Exercises, “one cannot understand the simple truths therein until one has felt the movements of the heart so subtle, not until one feels himself inflamed, to be seared so sweetly and effectively to God.” Rosignoli described Torres as driven by desire for embodied affirmation that could only be attained by covering a certain distance in both time and space. What I find fascinating about this description is that what could simply have been a metaphor for the soul’s journey toward God was now connected with an arduous physical journey to the Indies. Torres arrived at a moment of clarity and unity of self with God that he described as a paradise in the here and now of the Indies. These moments of consoled being were paramount in and of themselves, not only so Catholics like Torres could gain assurances that they might be saved in the hereafter, but also because they exemplified salvation: captured as it was in Rosignoli’s text, Torres’s still, quiet, and humbled body was offered up to be imitated by others. The cycle between action and mimetic repetition is critical. There are two tightly related features that made the devotional practice of the Ignatian Exer-

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cises so moving: the “event” and its retelling as reenactment. A person made the Spiritual Exercises. The labor to reflect upon and transform herself was to be met and amplified by the desire to see her own experience replicated in another’s body. Why? Why must my transformation become yours? There was pleasure in self-understanding. The desire to convert others is, I argue, the endeavor to replicate an experience. Consolation was mysterious, elusive, but seemed to appear at the interstices between self and other, moving selves to move others. In the next section, I look at how the Jesuits ministered to themselves. The passions were useful: they must be allowed to present themselves, but only to be subsequently fine-tuned and directed through understanding the causal order of one’s own personal history of sin. I have suggested in this section and continue to demonstrate in the next that, rather than complete annihilation of the passions, they were quelled, balanced, tuned, and reconfigured. Passion and virtue were not opposed to one another but functioned to create or shape one another. Jesuit spiritual direction taught one to discern a plan of action that was in line with one’s own nature and therefore rational because it conformed to God’s plan. The material that follows offers another way to view the intersubjective tuning and recalibration process operative within the spiritual director-directee dyad. E X PE R I M E N T S I N C O N S OL AT IO N P H I L O S O P H Y And then the unselfish side How can you be satisified, Putting someone else first So that you come off worst? Although the Director of the Exercises has to have perfect indifference, not insinuating one or the other state, the Exercises by themselves offer a sure North and a faithful guide and an efficient means of being advised and persuaded, each according to his own state, and following what is appropriate to the salvation of each person. . . . In the end, the mode of guiding another must follow the course of nature and of grace, and [the Director] works with prudence, according to [the subject’s] dispositions and circumstances.

Discursively, consolation flowed from knowing God’s will or having experienced some glimpse of God’s presence. Yet as a spiritual practice, the actions taken to attain consolation necessitated studied obedience to a more knowledgeable person, the spiritual director. In learning to console “Ours” (according to individual needs) the Jesuits also learned how to console others. The director’s ability to guide the Jesuit subject toward adequate knowledge of self depended upon his ability to classify spiritual “types.” As we shall see in this section, for the

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Jesuit subject, tinkering with the body offered a path to knowledge about self and universe. As Emily Michael has pointed out, the soul was understood, in Aristotelean terms, as an enlivening agent, but the soul also was intertwined with corporeal being, and one could turn to natural philosophy to understand the activity of the soul in the world. One could learn more about the soul through the study of the body, but one could also treat the soul by understanding the somatic signs of sin. Broadly construed, this kind of moral therapeutics—what David Lederer glosses as “spiritual physic”—was a participatory affair. The soul was not independent from the body, nor was its treatment to be accomplished on one’s own. Therapy for the illness of souls was an intensely intersubjective process. We shall see how the Society of Jesus forged a corporate identity that accounted for the individual constitutions of its members, in essence practicing “accommodation” on “Ours,” each according to his own nature, before utilizing this approach in their famous missionary endeavors in China and India. Rosignoli’s Notizie Memorabili included a discussion of how directors of the Spiritual Exercises played a key role in augmenting any “fruit” that might accrue to exercitants: Primarily, the prudence of an experienced Director, who knows how to accommodate himself to the conditions of the persons, place and time, recognizing one’s profession in life, natural inclinations, and the emotions that predominate in those who enter into the Exercises; because to proceed well, and with precision [regladamente], one is not able to use the same style with everyone, or not even with the same person, but must take into consideration different times, for there is great diversity in dispositions, as in the variety of causes.

Now, Rosignoli wrote those words about the “experienced Director” at the end of the seventeenth century, but for the Jesuits, this had been a path well worn for almost a century. This ethos had already received a specifically Jesuit codification in 1601, when the Jesuit General Claudio Acquaviva wrote Industriae pro Superioribus Societatis Jesu ad curandos animae morbos. When he wrote this book, Acquaviva considered such industriae—labor, in this case, to cure sick souls—a method for good governance. Even in the opening pages of the Spiritual Exercises, immediately after Ignatius wrote that the purpose of the Spiritual Exercises was “to overcome oneself,” he continued to spell out this principle: “Presupposition: That both the giver and the receiver of the Spiritual Exercises may be of greater help and benefit to each other, it should be presupposed that every good Christian ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor’s statement than condemn it.”  Like the Exercises, Acquaviva’s Industriae outlined a theory of practice wherein he described in detail the methods to be deployed to console the souls of their Jesuit brethren. In the Industriae, as we shall see, the director or superior’s ability to mete out spiritual counsel was

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authorized by a discourse of care that moved, sometimes seamlessly, between “father-son” and “doctor-patient” tropes. The front page of the Industriae reads “Ad usum privatum.” Originally the guide was not intended for general distribution, but only to relieve Jesuit leadership from apprehensions provoked “by the burden of governing.”  The text was considered a great success, attached to subsequent versions of the Jesuit Institutes (important foundational documents) of the Society of Jesus and distributed throughout the Jesuit order. His purpose was to provide a tool for “those souls little versed in governing and directing the spiritual life of subjects.”  In other words, the Jesuit superior himself required consolation in the face of anxieties inherent in bringing his subjects to the required state of individuated obedience. It is important to note that the founding Jesuits had written a very stark notion of obedience into their Constitutions. We ought to be firmly convinced that everyone of those who live under obedience ought to allow himself to be carried and directed by Divine Providence through the agency of the superior as if he were a lifeless body which allows itself to be carried to any place and to be treated in any manner desired, or as if he were an old man’s staff which serves in any place and in any manner whatsoever in which the holder wishes to use it.

Submission was a spiritual practice that, ideally, grew out of the dynamic relationship with one’s spiritual superior. The “lifeless body” was the aim, but to attain that state the Jesuit required the compassionate assistance of his superior. Obedience was critical to successful Jesuit therapeutics but, rather than a militarystyle obedience, the Industriae demonstrates how obedience took shape on a spiritual register that accounted for each individual’s temperament and his constitutional requirements. What were the Jesuit superior’s spiritual problems of governing? The first hindrance was the Jesuit subject himself. “A difficulty arises,” Acquaviva wrote. “The disease must be admitted,” he insisted. He refers here to the Jesuit subject who disavowed the depths of his spiritual difficulties. The patient, he observed, when physically ill desires nothing more than to be cured. “He sends for his physician and refuses no medicine however bitter and unpleasant. In spiritual disorders quite the contrary occurs. Here, the sufferer is the last person to become aware of his complaint; he avoids his doctor and reluctantly yields to any curative.”  How to get the patient to submit to taking Jesuit spiritual medicine? The Jesuit superior ought to “make the patient cognizant of his disorder” and to do so, he was to “begin with milder remedies [administered with] paternal moderation.” The Jesuit director ought not be cruel, yet neither should he be too lax and thus was advised “not to avoid a necessary, if painful, cure.”  An “adroit” superior could “make the subject desire his own cure, for once this difficulty is removed or

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reduced, the Superior will note with great relief a daily increase of health and strength in the subject.”  Countering the Augustinian anxiety that God could be loved only as an absence, the director stepped in as a presence. Ideally, the director guided a spiritual awakening, wherein one could catch glimmers of God and came to discern his will in those small moments of understanding, pleasure, light. The trust established between the superior and his charge was key to attaining these moments of consolation. “Let the subject therefore trust his Superior, especially since pride and self-love seriously hinder us from recognizing our faults.” Purgation, or stripping down the sinning self, required placing trust in this mediator, who pointed out the areas that called for self-sculpting. “Then let him be spurred on to a more diligent self-examination while there will be pointed out to him certain undeniable indications of his trouble not previously recognized or perceived.” Knowledge of self was possible only through submission to the superior. The goal was to become actively passive because obedience entailed taking an external demand and transforming it into a voluntary act of detached will. This was an encounter between two bodies. The stronger director decomposed the Jesuit subject so that the two could “join forces.” For example, in Acquaviva’s section on combating problems pertaining to virtue, the Jesuit subject was admonished to solicit his superior to impose penance. “He will make a pact with his Superior to drive him unsparingly, to be urged and pressured regardless of his own unwillingness or complaints.” Similarly, when combating a problem with obedience, the Jesuit was admonished to “see God in his Superior and not listen to human reasoning and arguing, for when these glide imperceptibly into the soul it is astounding how they drain up all simplicity of obedience, alacrity, promptitude, and finally, all perfection.” To combat “love of honor and excelling” one ought to “join forces with the Superior against his own self and do himself violence. The superior was an ally to assist in vanquishing self through various mortifications and humiliations.” Bear in mind that the text does not address the Jesuit who labors to submit, but was in fact a guide for the director. He was being shown how, with subtle skill, he could exert a positive force. A “guiding force,” according to colloquial language, but I prefer to stage this force as one directed toward decomposition and recomposition (Deleuze’s terms) because these metaphors better enable our grasp of the nature of spiritual intersubjectivity in which two or more bodies can become one. Using these sedimentary metaphors (compose/decompose) allows us to imagine the boundaries of religious subjectivity as akin to the permeable boundaries of the geological. In fact, spiritual direction relied upon a kind of human tectonics in which combination of influences formed a momentarily stable but shifting and shared present. Director and subject could combine into a more

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powerful whole, an active process by which two things, two persons, merge and cohere in a single effort. If, as was intended, the superior embodied “reason” for the Jesuit subject, the content of said reason was tailored, or in other words, unique to each individual. While supplying spiritual instructions, the director guided the Jesuit subject toward accepting “these remedies not as a burden imposed by the Superior, but as a voluntary undertaking of his own.” Intentionality was shared and, as such, disappeared. Instead, the director’s presence was experienced as a conduit, channeling God’s presence that, in turn, made possible the director’s own skillful self-transformation. Again, the following advice was addressed to the director: “When he perceives that the subject is averse to him [and] cannot be cured . . . the spiritual shepherd [should] make his love a sort of path along which he conduces the hearts of his listeners to love the Savior (Pastor, 2, c. 8). It is difficult indeed for an unloved preacher to reach his hearers no matter how equitable his pronouncements.” As this passage indicates, the director was to transform himself into a conduit of love, especially in cases of “aversion and distrust” that resulted in “temptations against the Superior” himself. He ought to be aware if “the assignee [was] lacking that physical or mental potential needed to fulfi ll the injunction.” At the same time, he would be “remiss” in governing if “on the pretext of humility and kindness, the Superior allows himself to be condemned and his injunction neglected.” The implication was that the superior should avoid having his own faults rise to the surface. A “harsh manner of commanding,” advised Acquaviva, was especially troubling “if the subject suspects that it all arises from some excessive passion in the Superior.” The director’s own passions must be carefully weighed, balanced, evaluated, negated. Returning to the famous Jesuit dictum on obedience, we are compelled to ask, whose is the lifeless body now? Obedience entailed a complex negotiation aimed at the felicitous convergence of two processes of self-negation. A clear sense of hierarchy was maintained, but humility and selfregulation were primary goals for both Jesuit subject and superior who shared the aim of reasoned discernment. Prior to this, Acquaviva quotes Gregory: “We are to be mindful that we are still humans striving to correct personal faults—at least we used to—although we are now, by the grace of God, free from them. Thus with a humble heart we shall more moderately correct others, seeing a reflection of ourselves in those we correct (lib 23, Moral c.8).” The emphasis here on knowledge and control of self enabled taking leave of self. But love also played a role in the Jesuit superior/subject relationship. The superior helped to make the subject agreeable to God and ensured that two wills—that of the subject and God—became one. At this point the director receded gracefully into the background. His careful consideration of the character and constitution of the Jesuit subject was vital to understanding which

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counterbalances to apply for the spiritual healing that would make the subject more amenable to God. The reminder is constant: the superior must also know and control himself, assuring that “there appear nothing savoring of harshness, anger, or any other passion” in his directives. “Before all else let the Superior examine himself, both for humility’s sake so that he fulfi ll his duty in all fatherliness and mildness and so as to thereby become a more worthy and apt instrument of the Lord in restoring his child to health.”  For the moment, we must appreciate the contortions necessary for the spiritual director to continually adapt and conform himself to the shape of “the most worthy and apt instrument” for each of his subjects. This sheds some light on the anxieties provoked by the burden of governing. To become a conduit of love required a certain purity of heart that was understood as “fatherliness.” Paternal love would bring the spiritual subject back to a state of health. To be a flexible, compassionate father figure, the superior should pray to ensure that he would speak from the heart. This was a process of selfnegation on the part of the superior that Acquaviva conveyed by quoting St. Gregory: The director “should be so aflame with charity that he ought not appear as a petitioner, but as the very petition itself.”  Acquaviva described a paternalistic diagnostic process that emphasized “fatherliness” and “mildness” to bring one back to a state of health. On a few occasions, paternal gravity ought to give way to maternal charity, when “our subject . . . will come to us as a child to his mother, to lay bare his temptations before us and, despite all natural repugnance to his feelings, let the troubled son receive without resentment those reprimands we make as arising from our genuine love.”  This was one of the few comments about maternal love in Acquaviva’s text, which makes his language strikingly different from the monastic metaphors of Christ as “mother.” Bernard of Clairvaux had chastised Cistercian spiritual leaders who were “devoid of maternal instinct.”  Acquaviva did not speak of a hen gathering chicks under her protective wing; there was no nursing at the breasts of consolation, no retreat into the breast/heart/side wound of Christ-as-Mother. Instead of maternal tropes, Acquaviva’s were predominantly paternal-medical. “The Superior is the spiritual physician” and “the spiritually sick are called patients.”  It is worthwhile to pause to gather up the medical tropes that indicate the embodied nature of spiritual healing. Like medicine, spiritual healing drew upon high culture—theology, as well as moral and natural philosophy—but also included techniques that engaged living people from all walks of life. Analogous to medicine, spiritual healing was both a form of knowledge and an activity. And, similar still to medicine, the cure of souls was concerned with the dispositions of the human body. The individual’s temperament, the complexion (made up of hot, cold, wet, and dry elements) made one subject to internal and external influences, circumstances, conditions of life, even temperature (climate) that

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comprised the psychological, social, and physical factors that, then, must be balanced through the application of contraries. As historian of medicine Nancy Siraisi summarizes, “The task of therapy was to restore [individuals] to their proper equipoise” generally by applying an additive therapy (a “hot” or “cold” food) or a purgative therapy (through phlebotomy or cautery, both of which purged ill humors, as did laxatives and emetics). As Siraisi describes medical practices, diagnosis began with observation, including examination of feces, but blood more often, and urine more often still. Usually the diagnostic examination proceeded through some form of touch: “The act of taking the pulse put the physician in a profound and literal sense in touch with the ebb and flow of vitality in his patient.” Taking the pulse was a baseline, a form of touch integral to knowing and healing. Similarly, the spiritual doctor was required to be intimate with the ebb or flow of his patient’s spiritual vitality. To assist the subject in arriving at a more precise knowledge of self, the director should strive to gain penetrating knowledge of the subject. In the spiritual diagnostics recommended by Acquaviva, the director was prompted to consider “how long the malady had existed, what remedies had been employed and which proved to be helpful or harmful; which members of the household were apt to help or hinder herein, so that from all these sources the subject may be appropriately assisted.”  Acquaviva considered “harsh government” any indication that the director had failed to properly diagnose the readiness of his spiritual subject. He had to probe the depths of the subject’s potential. The history of spiritual healing runs parallel to and in fact is in many places fully intertwined with the history of medicine. Yet in the field of spiritual direction, how did one probe in the absence of touch? What do we make of the fact that spiritual healing required a profound sense of one’s total spiritual being— body and soul—yet diverged from medicine in relation to the requirement to touch the body of the spiritual subject? Given the discursive overlap in medicine and spiritual direction, the absence of touch in the latter is striking. Yet in examining the embodied aspects of the director-directee relationship, I have noticed that tactility remained an important aspect of spiritual healing, in the sense that the subject could be “touched” by the words of the spiritual director. Here it helps to be attentive to aspects of the language Acquaviva used to guide directors. Recall he said that love constructs a path; the director touches hearts via the ears but not by means of pronouncements. We can see this in Jesuit discourse, where words are tactile. When fired by love and virtue, they touch the heart. We will have ample opportunity to situate “talk-as-touch” in Chapter 4. For now, I want to remain with the work that the Jesuit subject must do to participate in his own spiritual healing. This decomposition/recomposition (or “guided interiority”) entailed a complex dynamic between self-God-superior. Acquaviva

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(quoting St. Basil on Proverbs 18:9) recommended that the patient participate in his own diagnosis: “He who brings no remedies to his own illness is brother to him that wasteth his own works.” This should come as no surprise: Jesuits came to their vocations after undergoing the exacting self-scrutiny and discernment advocated in the Spiritual Exercises. A Jesuit subject may have been “unaware of his secret malady,” yet he was nonetheless required to actively assist with his own diagnosis. At the urging of his superior, he should pray and read scripture to develop “enlightenment and self-awareness”—the lack of which had led him into the current disorder. Prayer was recommended as medicine, to be taken in short, strong doses. Then, Acquaviva advised: “Let him tell himself: ‘that precisely is my malady’ so that like a man consulting with his doctor, and seeing a shelf laden with various medications, he will consider which are suitable for himself.” For example, in cases of “apathy” and “debility of spirit,” the director must compel the suffering Jesuit to work assiduously to take stock of himself: He must examine if his state of apathy and debility—as in physical ills—derives from excess biliousness, so that if he is acting through self-interest and self-seeking he must purge himself of these disorders, otherwise he toils in vain. Should it arise from want of nourishment, let him take stock of how he receives the sacraments, makes his meditations and prayers and performs all his spiritual exercises.

Moreover, he ought to experiment by questioning himself: “Let him ask himself why he is undernourished and resort to every means to find the cause for this. . . . [This] indicates that something else is lacking which needs careful investigation and thorough remedying.” This language indicates that consoling souls, like early modern medicine, relied upon a principle of opposition and engaged in a craft that was necessarily experimental. The director discerned spiritual afflictions by examining and observing these “particulars” of natural phenomena. The parallels between spiritual consolation and contemporary experimental natural philosophy can be discerned in Acquaviva’s writing, most notably set out in the preface: “Therefore I deem it no futile task to set down briefly and orderly what I have discovered through careful observation during the course of many years, together with medical prescriptions, and also whatever else was found helpful or detrimental.” Acquaviva’s text reflects a living diagnostic process, because his practical experience as spiritual healer shaped his reading of monastic advice and vice versa. These “are matters wherein I have noticed myself and others to have erred, and furthermore, wherein some procedures were apt and others unsuitable.” Jesuit spiritual therapeutics was a form of experimental natural philosophy in which truth seekers were required to experiment upon themselves. The Jesuit spiritual director took human being as the object of his therapeutic endeavors. The medical discourse utilized by Acquaviva and others was not

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merely an analogy. Rather, this language signaled an ethics modeled after medicine because consolation (both spiritual and medical) was an expression of commitment to “human flourishing” via the treatment of what were considered diseases of belief and judgment. Here I am drawing upon Martha Nussbaum’s observations, yet how does her perhaps too universal (and too cerebral) notion of “flourishing” connect to an early modern sense of how the passions plagued the flesh? Nussbaum only takes us so far, for the philosophers she has studied were far less concerned with flesh than Christians who grappled with the notion of imitating a god-made-man. Acquaviva’s subjects paid far greater attention to the confines of human bodily existence. Drawing upon a long history of pastoral care that was in dialogue with neo-Stoicism and neo-Galenism, Acquaviva’s Industriae explored the spiritual-medical parameters of how one might be consoled. The discourse of consolation employed images of love, knowledge, and obedience that moved fluidly between the paternal and the medical, with an occasional smattering of maternal love. The Spiritual Exercises have been characterized as a “scissors and paste” composition that pieced together a variety of Christian techniques. Similarly, Acquaviva’s ethics of care and self-experiment were plucked from a multiplicity of monastic advisors. He quoted Origen, Gregory the Great, and Cassian frequently, along with a number of references to Bernard of Clairvaux. The ancient philosopher’s function as a doctor of souls carried through to Gregory’s notion of pastoral care. Yet Acquaviva’s awareness of the emergence of something new or different in Jesuit spirituality was explicit when he advised spiritual directors that although authors such as Gregory and Cassian would provide words of wisdom, they were nonetheless problematic. He cautioned, “these authors treat of certain matters more suited to contemplatives and hermits, prudence and discretion do not allow the Superior to propose the use of such among our brethren.” Nonetheless, the persistence of the “old” is intriguing: continuity and transformation converge in the presence of the long thread that connects a Hellenistic philosophy transmogrified by its protracted turn through monastic Christian practices to this active, globally oriented Jesuit technique of the self. Acquaviva was entangled in this ancient philosophical-medieval monastic thread, but his text also signaled Jesuit participation in a humanist culture. Jesuit colleges incorporated the study of ancient philosophy into their curriculum and shared the humanist concern to rediscover “authentic” classicism, especially the writings of “St. Cicero,” as he was fondly called by the Jesuits. Whether Acquaviva’s oblique reference to Cicero’s advice (that healing the soul presented a much more arduous task than healing the body, or that each man ought to be a doctor to himself) was derived from his reading of Gregory or Cicero himself is less important than the fact that no doubt Acquaviva was familiar with both. Here it is important to heed William Bouwsma’s caution against “isolating a pure body of thought from

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a tangle of Hellenistic ideas” that animated humanistic endeavors. To this, Acquaviva’s Industriae bundled elite monastic spiritual practices and neo-Galenic understandings of bodily/spiritual health. But Jesuit worldly spirituality gave all of these traditions a new twist. My emphasis here has been on the labor undertaken to attain glimmers of consolation. This attention to therapeutic culture takes us to the heart of Jesuit spirituality, as well as to humanistic psychology at the turn of the seventeenth century. Practitioners of the Spiritual Exercises, especially Jesuits who were guided by and labored according to the premises in the Industriae, saw that discerning God’s will in their lives offered ephemeral moments of consolation. Understanding this tension between controlling the passions and the fact that consolation was sought in action allows us to take a second look at what Bouwsma has dubbed the “two faces” of humanism, which he characterized as encompassing “antithetical visions of human existence.” One face looked toward a neoStoic self-formation that aimed toward transcendence through wisdom, while the second gazed in the direction of Augustine’s pessimistic insistence upon the impossibility of transcendence in this world. The fallen sinner does not have the capacity to know God but only to love God through knowledge of self and love of neighbor. Guy Stroumsa tackles the issue in a way that avoids getting bogged down with parsing the Stoic v. Augustine distinction (so problematic given the heavy influence of Hellenistic philosophy on Augustine’s thought). Indeed, the radical reflexivity bequeathed by Augustine to the Western tradition was, even more than a new anthropology, a new attitude—grounded in the recognition of the inescapable paradox of the human subject. “When it gave birth to the reflexive self, it also delivered its twin brother: the person in search of his life, that is, intersubjectivity. Both attitudes, rendered possible simultaneously through the presence of God’s love, were to become the two sides of the Western humanist tradition.” Self-reflexivity and intersubjectivity were intimately linked, as the reforming self must extend himself to the neighbor. In the next section, I want to pay closer attention to the movement from “self” to “other.” To do so, we must note that Bouwsma’s “two faces” of humanism are perhaps too placid. Bouwsma sought to explain an incoherence, but in framing this as a conceptual problem, he elides the embodiment of historical actors, the way in which early moderns would have experienced themselves as inhabiting bodies that demonstrated neo-Galenic naturalistic physiological understandings of “selves.” This rich, vibrant concept of “flesh” encompassed body, soul, and mind. Shift ing from a Janus-faced metaphor to an arm-wrestling metaphor might be more productive. The tension between neo-Platonic ascent toward wisdom and Augustinian love was a productive opposition because therapeutic methods aimed at balancing contrary passions to achieve a “harmony of oppo-

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sites.” This was not so much a contradiction in logical terms, but rather illuminates the principles of opposition that undergirded notions of health—the spiritual informed by the physical and vice versa—that were operative for the Jesuits and other Christian early moderns. What did it mean to become a Jesuit? Jesuits formed a corporate identity through highly individuated spiritual practices. Unbound from the monastic custom of daily recitation of the liturgical office, a Jesuit was instead required to carve out time and space to pray and meditate on his own. His process of spiritual “becoming” was individuated and context oriented. Recall the questions “Where are you? Who are you? What am I doing? What ought I do?” in the colloquy with Christ in the Spiritual Exercise. The answers to these questions could change—were expected to change—based upon age and experience, and, for the mobile Jesuit missionary, based upon his locale. This exercise was intended to gather up the scattered and distended aspects of human mind (memory of the past and anticipation of the future) while also taking into account the way the body changed through time. The skills to discern answers to such questions of “where/who/what?” had been honed through obedient submission to the spiritual director and now the Jesuit was to apply these skills wherever his mission took him. Jesuits were parts of a larger whole, individuated only through spiritual exercises that, ironically, entailed intense interconnectedness. The distinctive role occupied by “self ” in relation to “others”—the Jesuit in relation to his spiritual director, the Jesuit in relation to his selves, the Jesuit in relation to his own subjects—this dynamic activated a sense of belonging to the “group.” Jesuit corporate identity was grounded on the shift ing terrain of adaptation to the changing requirements of many different individuals. Becoming was the Jesuit way of proceeding; his mode was permanently inchoate. S P I N OZ I S T I N T E R LU DE

Prayer/meditation/devotion is often understood as a mental state from which movement or action might follow. We might think about Christian discourse on how prayerful consideration informed a subsequent action: mind (prayer) informs body (action). This juxtaposition replays a long-standing mind-body dualism in the Western intellectual tradition. Can we talk about prayer and meditation without falling back into dualistic language? This is a challenging task, and here you can see that I have wanted to have my cake and eat it, too. I am writing a history of the emergence of mind-body dualism as a component of modern selfunderstanding, but I have not wanted those same terms to determine my interpretation. Instead of saying “prayer causes action,” what I have been attempting in this chapter is to reframe our understanding of prayer/meditation/devotion as action. To accomplish this, I began this chapter by describing consolation as an

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action and a pleasure that sought its own replication. Instead of positing spiritual discernment as a mental activity, I have framed the forging of spiritual selves as the relationship of moving bodies to each other. Armed now with a stronger sense of the Spiritual Exercises as described by many who had made them, we are poised to take a short Spinozist interlude. His writings on the nature of human emotions have been helpful for thinking through the embodied nature of the Spiritual Exercises; especially useful is Spinoza’s care to establish that radical reflexivity is experienced as pleasure. Note that Spinoza does not offer a universal definition of pleasure. Rather, pleasure is found in the increase of power, each according to her own nature. But note— pleasure and pain are not states of being. Rather, pleasure or pain is found in the transition from one state to the other. A transition to greater power? Pleasure. To less power? Pain. The Jesuit quest for consolation demonstrates some of Spinoza’s ideas about experiencing an adequate idea of God or Nature. We have seen that a Jesuitstyled self-knowledge arose from a sense of bodily awareness. Consolation, as we have seen, was an embodied sensorial experience that was fleeting, and thus motivated one to find new means of attaining it. Parallel to natural philosophical explorations of bodies in motion and at rest, the Spiritual Exercises experimented with balancing motion and rest in shaping the vocations of contemplatives in action. In other words, that simple phrase “contemplatives in action” helps us see contemplation as action. In fact, Jesuit “worldly” spirituality demonstrates Spinoza’s notion of conatus—the endeavor to persist in one’s own being—as we see Jesuits who endeavored to persist in a state where glimmers of consolation might be possible. We are now inching closer to an answer to our opening questions, namely, why labor to change others? What promotes such desire? We can answer that question, in part, by shifting our working definition of “desire” into Spinozist terms as “awareness of mind-body striving.” According to Spinoza, our desire to transform others derives from the fact that two beings can coexist only under the guidance of reason (which he notes is rare). “The more the essence of the mind involves knowledge of God, the greater the desire with which he who pursues virtue desires for another the good which he seeks for himself” (Prop. 37, IV, Proof). Jesuits themselves might say as much, but Spinoza’s Proposition 37 has greater explanatory value if we refer back to his Book III, Prop. 27: “From the fact that we imagine a thing like ourselves, towards which we have felt no emotion, to be affected by an emotion, we are thereby affected by a similar emotion.”

In other words, bodies similar to one’s own body will elicit similar emotions:

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“Consequently, if we imagine someone like ourselves to be affected by an emotion, this thought will express an affection of our own body similar to that emotion. So from the fact that we imagine a thing like ourselves to be affected by an emotion, we are affected by a similar emotion along with it.”

The Jesuit needs to convert others because, in part, conversion is reexperience. Here I am drawing upon Spinoza’s sense that “self” required other bodies and was either strengthened or impeded through others. “Someone like ourselves” is also a key phrase. This would present the Jesuits a problem in the context of the cultural differences they encountered in many of their overseas missions. I will deal with that shortly. But remaining for a moment on the European continent, how did expanding knowledge about the globe animate missionary desire? Clearly, a world peopled with pagans in need of conversion must have provided an accompanying sense that those consoling glimmers of heaven might now be found on earth in greater abundance. As one German Jesuit wrote: “Souls, souls I must have!” What, again, did it mean to be a contemplative in the face of so much potential for worldly action?

T H E F OU R T H W E E K

We return to the question of what it meant for Jesuits to be contemplatives in action, each according to his own nature, by revisiting the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. An activist Christianity was in many ways an extension of practices of the Fourth Week. As we have seen, the Spiritual Exercises as a whole entailed a carefully controlled distilling process that culminated in a meditation on love, designed to ignite affect in its purest form, the inflamed heart a symbol of this active love (Figure 2). The objective of this dynamic love was dual: reason could control the passions; but love would inflame and direct them. Hence the Fourth Week closed with “The Contemplation to Attain Love,” intended to imbue the practitioner with love and passion for God, self, and neighbor. Recall that the affective exercises from the First Week generated anxiety about redemption that, ideally, produced a bitter sorrow to wound and then purge the heart of sin. Yet the exercises of the Fourth Week were not intended to be anxiety provoking; in fact, quite the opposite is true. Sin and fear do not appear in the Fourth Week of the Spiritual Exercises. Rather than dwelling upon sin, the exercitant was instructed to “dwell reflectively” on the aspects of meditation and contemplation that had been fruitful, “the principal places where he or she has experienced greater interior motions and spiritual relish.” In Chapter 1, I emphasized that one of the key differences between the Jesuits and the mendicants was that the latter focused their devotional lives primarily on

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Figure 2. In this image of the “Contemplation to Attain Love,” the inflamed heart is free from sin, as indicated by the discarded yoke or stock, the broken wheel upon which no one is being tortured, the knife in its sheath. Cupid, representing profane love is blind, asleep, the quiver at a distance and no bow to be seen: the passions no longer stand between the exercitant and God. As the inscription states rhetorically: “Who shall separate us?” “Contemplation to Attain Love” from Exercitia spiritualia S.P. Ignatij Loyolae. Antuerpiae : Apud Joannem Meursium, 1676. Courtesy of the Cudahy Rare Book Library at Loyola University, Chicago.

the passion and death of Christ. In the Fourth Week of the Exercises, we see even more clearly how central was the Jesuit emphasis on the resurrection of Christ as the final formative experience that would send joyful Christians on worldly missions. Here, affective contemplation on Mary’s human experience of loving her son, Jesus, brought the exercitant to reflect joyfully on the risen Christ. In a composition of place titled “How Christ Our Lord Appeared to Our Lady,” love of Christ begins with Mary. As Rachel Fulton’s history of the imitation of Christ has shown us, it was Mary’s pain that provided the emotive model for experiencing Christ’s passion and death. “Her pain,” Fulton tells us, “taught Christians what it was like to have seen Christ die on the Cross.” The Spiritual Exercises similarly construct Mary as an affective model. But in the Fourth Week of the Spiritual Exercises, Mary provides the medium for experiencing the joy of Christ’s presence.

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The Second Prelude. A composition, by imagining the place. Here it will be to see the arrangement of the holy sepulcher; also the place or house where Our Lady was, including its various parts, such as a room, an oratory, and the like.

Note that these directives say nothing about proper emotive state. This follows soon after. But one began in Mary’s house—the architectural space key to discovery, inventory, and mimesis—as the exercitant anticipated the announcement that Christ was no longer in the tomb and awaited the appearance of the son to his mother. Anyone utilizing Nadal’s illustrated guide to making the Exercises would have been prompted to see the resurrected Christ, holding a banner (the standard of Christ, implying world mission) and showing his wounds to his amazed and joyous mother, the empty sepulcher visible in the distance through an open window. Fallen humans could attain a more perfect love of God by imitating Mary’s love of Christ. In this case, Mary’s house and home provided the meditative hook to sustain the state of joy and love attained during the Fourth Week. The radical shift away from sin was most evident in the tenth point of the Fourth Week: “In place of penance, I will attend to temperance and moderation in all things.” The practitioner was instructed not only to distance herself from sin, but more critically, she should adopt joy as the appropriate emotion with which to conclude the Exercises. “Here it will be to ask for the grace to be glad and to rejoice intensely because of the great glory and joy of Christ our Lord.” As several of the instructions make clear, the practitioner was admonished to think positively: The Fourth Note. Upon awakening, I will think of the contemplation I am about to make, and endeavor to feel joyful and happy over the great joy and happiness of Christ our Lord. The Sixth. I will call into my memory and think about things which bring pleasure, happiness, and spiritual joy, such as those about heavenly glory. The Seventh. I will avail myself of light and pleasant features of the seasons, such as the refreshing coolness in summer or the sun or heat in winter, as far as I think or conjecture that this will help me to rejoice in Christ my Creator and Redeemer.

Next, the closing meditation on love reiterated that interior knowledge ought to lead to ser vice. But there is an important step prior to extending self to the neighbor. As Philip Endean points out: “For its part, the prayer of desire governing the Fourth Week is more than simple joy that Christ has risen; Ignatius seems to be hinting at sharing in Christ’s own joy at the experience of having risen, ‘to ask for what I want, and it will be here to ask for grace to rejoice and be glad intensely at so great glory and joy of Christ our Lord.’ ” Resurrection, for Augustine, was a moment out of nature. Yet with the Jesuits, the emphasis on Christ’s resurrection produced intensely consoling action in this world. Rather than a rejection of time and nature, the Company of Jesus walked with Christ on this earth.

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Love of Christ made one a better observer of nature, as explained in the Fourth Week of the Spiritual Exercises. “CONTEMPLATION TO ATTAIN LOVE. First. Love ought to manifest itself more by deeds than by words.” Exercising spiritual agency, the petitioner makes a request: “Here it will be to ask for interior knowledge of all the great good I have received, in order that, stirred to profound gratitude, I may become able to love and serve his divine Majesty in all things.” The next step was to contemplate gifts received and to express gratitude, which in turn moved one to ser vice. “The Second Point” places the exercitant in a specific state of mind, that is, thinking about himself as loved by God. Meditating on the phrase “I am created . . .” the practitioner positioned a loved self in relation to a God who was active in the world. This theme continued in “The Third Point” of meditation, where one sees creaturely (created) self in relation to all other creatures. The “Contemplation on Love” served as a counterpoint to the “Meditation on the Two Standards,” where the exercitant had imagined a world inhabited by Satan’s minions. “I will consider how God labors and works for me in all creatures on the face of the earth; that is, he acts in the manner of one who is laboring. For example, he is working in the heavens, elements, plants, fruits, cattle, and all the rest—giving them their existence, conserving them, concurring with their vegetative and sensitive activities, and so forth. Then I will reflect on myself.” Note the movement: God, nature, self. As Ganss has commented, one moves from loving Christ more to loving God “in all things” in keeping with Ignatius’s insistence that God could be found everyday life. Nature itself was a book to be read and studied as God’s word. But reflection upon “God in all things” also implied action in the world, fi rst God’s action, and then one’s own. The best summary of the Fourth Week can be found in the Society’s official guide to giving the Exercises (1599). The instructions for the Contemplation on Love read as follows: When the exercitant embarks upon this meditation [the exercise on the Love of God] it is important to point out and explain to him what is said there about love depending more on deeds than on words, and consisting in a mutual sharing of resources and all other things. Thus the exercitant should realize that experiencing a mere tender affection is not enough and that he should not rest satisfied with this. What St. Gregory says is true: “The proof of love is the performance of deeds,” and “where love is present it works great deeds, and where it does no deeds it is not present.” Nothing more needs to be said about the Fourth Week.

Officially, no more need be said. But perhaps we ought not give the early modern Jesuits the final word on the purpose of the Fourth Week. The impact of the Fourth Week might be best exemplified by reconsidering the sixteenth-century Spaniard Juana Cardona, for whom the mediations in the Spiritual Exercises

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moved her to action. Recall her demand to be sent to Rome or to the Indies. The mediations on love from the Fourth Week informed the sentiments she expressed: “A woman who has gone more than a thousand leagues for the sake of disordered passion, seeking justice will not hesitate to go many thousands more, even for as long as life is left to her, on pilgrimage, seeking mercy, with love and for the love of him who is the Lord of my love and of all things.” Self-knowledge produced a kind of power derived from spiritual clarity—or having an adequate idea, in this case, of God and self. As practitioners of the Exercises, women like Cardona could derive pleasure in reordering her life narrative and understanding the causal order of her life as a sinner. In the Exercises, an adequate idea of self-history provided access to God, and thus, reasoned understanding contributed to her sense of power and pleasure. This affective labor is active, no longer obscured by partial, clouded, and inadequate ideas—“the passions.” Devotional labor resulted in the capacity to act with understanding, and this unity of body/soul/mind in reasoned action was a form of perfection that was increasingly tied to valorization of the natural world, a topic discussed in Chapter 7. We have begun to see that to aim toward consolation might best be thought of as desire in the Spinozist sense of “mind-body striving.” Now I explore consolation in the context of Jesuit missionary mobilization, paying attention to the labor to maintain this mind-body striving outside of the retreat or monastic setting. Here I emphasize that fi ne-tuning one’s desire in locales remote from Europe seemed a laborious undertaking to many Jesuits. How did Jesuits fan the flames of love necessary to put bodies in motion, and yet remain in control of the passions? What happened to monastic obedience in extra-European settings? C O N S OL AT IO N I N/A S AC T IO N I N T H E I N DI E S , EAST A ND W EST

In the book Missionary Tropics, Ines Županov has characterized sixteenthcentury Jesuit spirituality as “erratic, itinerant, charismatic.” Županov pinpoints the religious fervor that both moved the Jesuits toward new horizons yet threatened to overwhelm the newly formed Society. “In the long run,” she posits, “this led the founder and the first general of the Order to develop in detail and with force the theory and practice of obedience as the hallmark of the Jesuit vocation.” We can push Županov’s cogent observations even further: Acquaviva’s advice on spiritual direction locates “obedience” as a long-standing Christian problem, and one that, in par ticular, had been the hallmark of the enclosed monastic life. Ignatius and the early Jesuits were challenged to adapt monastic obedience to a decidedly worldly calling. For our “contemplatives in action,” many of the components remained the same as in monasticism: a Jesuit’s desire to

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replicate his experience of spiritual consolation relied upon his relationship with his body—the struggle to maintain mind, soul, and body in the same temporality— and with his brethren. A useful example can be located in the experiences of twelft h-century Cistercians for whom, as Martha Newman points out, “the contemplative state was at best a fleeting experience; a lasting experience required not only the perfection of the will but the perfection of the body and neighbors as well.” For the Cistercians, this “neighbor” was one’s fellow monk and, as Newman points out, care of self and care of the other (contemplation and fraternal aid) constituted conflicting impulses: “Bernard [of Clairvaux] considered affective charity a mental and emotional love best fulfilled by contemplation; its order was rational, for the greater the nature of the object, the more love it inspired. But affective charity could not be fully achieved by anyone while alive. Active charity, on the other hand, was love shown through action.” A helpful example is the monk in a state of contemplation, who may yet be moved to preach but would be compelled to take leave of contemplation to do so. The choice was between one, or the other. Yet for the Jesuits, active labor and consolation were explicitly linked. Consider Francis Xavier’s letter to Antonio Gomes, in which he instructs him, “Write to me in great detail about all the brothers in India, in Portugal, and in Rome, and about the fruit which they are producing, since we shall be greatly consoled by your letters; and, just as I am writing a long letter to you, repay me in the same coin.” “Fruit” and “labor”—staple monastic metaphors for improving the soul—indicated that a productive beauty could be found in the process of cultivating nature and enjoying its products. For Xavier, the labor had two parts: first, preaching and converting and, second, writing and describing spiritual experience. The currency of exchange was a spiritual discourse describing “fruits” produced by devotional labor. The imaginative labor of reading about “workers in the vineyards” could provide those glimmers of consolation. The powerful metaphor alludes to the labor of collecting the distended aspects of human being (memory, body, anticipation of future), and we can see that the act of letter writing was a demonstration of humility and obedience that simultaneously served as an important part of this collecting process. The Jesuit gathered himself together, only to conquer self through obedience to the superior. But we cannot forget that words had a tactile capacity, as they were intended to prick the hearts of others. Accordingly, writing was also a key component of the “how” of keeping global missionary desire alive because, experientially, the missionary’s pen had the power to animate in others the desire to preach, convert, or otherwise support Jesuit missionary endeavors. To reiterate, love and desire animated a tension between contemplation and action long before the Jesuits began to traverse the globe. Understanding themes of humility and obedience in monastic discourse allows us to better grasp pre-

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cisely what was transformed when Jesuits took monastic practices beyond the walls of the monastery. These two components, humility and compunction, as Jean Leclerq’s study of monastic culture described so beautifully, were key to the formation of the spiritual life of the monk: Compunction becomes pain of the spirit, a suffering resulting simultaneously from two causes: the existence of sin and our own tendency toward sin—compunctio paenitentiae, timoris, formidinis—and the existence of our desire for God and even our very possession of God. St. Gregory, more than others, accentuated this last aspect: an obscure possession, awareness of which does not last and consequently gives rise to regret at seeing it disappear and to a desire to find it again. The “compunction of the heart,” “of the soul”—compunctio cordis, animi—always tends to become a “compunction of love,” “of delectation” and “of contemplation”— compunctio amoris, dilectionis, contemplationis. Compunction is an act of God in us, an act by which God awakens us, a shock, a blow, a “sting,” a sort of burn. God goads us as if with a spear; he “presses” us with insistence (cum-pungere), as if to pierce us. The love of the world lulls us; but, as if by a thunder-stroke, the attention of the soul is recalled to God.

The monk should work upon himself, not to repress human desire (this would be impossible) but rather to obtain the proper object of desire. To break the habits of the body was the unattainable task, a goal never to be achieved while living, but this labor would nonetheless shape the life lived. Here “humility” entailed recognizing self as sinner, which made desire for God all the more potent. The monastic rode the tension between social action and withdrawal but, Leclercq comments, the monk “will always have a nostalgia for the latter.” The opposite held true for early modern Jesuits for whom the “doing”—the labor itself—held out the promise of even greater consolation. Now we are in a position to understand the ardently painful yet consoling desire for God that drove Xavier’s cry: “More, more, more!” Francis Xavier’s writings had emphasized mobility and distance. In Asia, to garner “more” consolation, Xavier was constantly on the road, preaching and confessing. For Xavier, stability promised stagnation. He wrote to some of his Jesuit brethren that if they proved themselves in Goa, then one day they, too, might be able to live with “greater consolation and produce more fruit.” In this case, the consolatory journey that beckoned was to the not-so-distant Japan, a place where “more, more, more!” spiritual fruit could be gathered than in Goa. East Asians were considered “white”—or in the exact words of the Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, a visitor to India and Japan whom we will meet shortly, “as if they were white and well-formed.” This perceived cultural commensurability meant that the Jesuits sensed greater opportunity for actual conversions. We are no longer in the presence of an Augustinian sense of being in the wrong time and the wrong place. No, for Xavier there was a right time and a right

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place, and it was palpably close, its distance marked and measured with the word “Japan.” But which Jesuits would be privileged to garner such a bounty of consolation? The path to proving oneself capable of an itinerant lifestyle entailed knowing oneself “interiorly” and attaining great humility, “which you will need everywhere,” Xavier wrote, “but here more than you think.” How much of this desire for mobility was par ticu lar to Xavier, and how much is generalizable to the Jesuit way of life? The fact that Xavier was the model for missionary life throughout the early modern Catholic world meant that many of the young Jesuits who entered the Society of Jesus considered mobility as the exemplary mode and, in fact, the pinnacle of missionary experience. Xavier’s mobility permeated the ethos of the Jesuit order. Th is presentation of Xavier proved to be a vexing role model for those who wished for the mobile life yet instead were called (commanded) to the stability of an urban setting. The Jesuit Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld (1591–1635) wrote hymns about St. Francis Xavier and sighed about “those distant lands [that] had wounded my heart.” Yet the Jesuit could not be mobile willy-nilly. Jesuit spiritual norms were quite precise about what constituted virtuous mobility. In his Industriae, Acquaviva had named the problems of guarding against “eff usion of external commitments,” which one could counter by “doing violence to oneself.” This “eff usion” was linked to individual constitutional type: “We must examine whether this comes from a certain restless and mobile nature, for even though such a nature be restrained and confined, the person will hardly rise to becoming an interior and recollected religious.” The “violence” recommended is enforced retreat “to come to a halt from time to time in time-consuming work . . . and at least remain quietly in his room, do some pious reading. . . . Finally let him understand that unless he do himself violence, enchain his will, as it were and resist the clamors of nature and the impulse of habit, he can do nothing whatever in the line of virtue.” The ideal Jesuit was not an adventurer. To “be ready,” Xavier advised his Jesuits to strive for humility and “do violence to one self.” The first entailed knowing oneself “interiorly for what you are” and then purging those aspects of self that produced a feeling of repugnance (or at least ought to have produced said disgust, Xavier admonished). Xavier also instructed Jesuits to tend to their own spiritual well-being and to “live in control of yourself.” He wrote: “Take care not to omit making the par ticular examination twice, or at least once, a day; above all, pay more attention to your own conscience than to those of others; for if one is not good to oneself, how will he be good to others?” One must know one’s self intimately in order to understand that this same self was false and not to be trusted. The key value was a humility that entailed relying entirely upon God:

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[Do] not to trust your own abilities, knowledge, or reputation; and in this way I shall know that you are ready for all the great trials, spiritual as well as temporal, which can afflict you, for God raises up and supports the humble, especially those who in small and lowly matters have seen, as in a polished mirror, their own weaknesses and have conquered them. . . . Each one of you should therefore diligently labor where you are, first for your own advancement, and then for that of others, being convinced with regard to yourself that nowhere can you serve God so well as where you have been placed by obedience, being confident that God our Lord will let your superior feel when it is time to send you through obedience to regions where he will be served the more; and in this way you will gain profit within your souls, enjoying consolations and making good use of your time—something that is very precious, even though it is not recognized as such by man—since you know the strict accounting that you must give of it to God our Lord.

We can see that Xavier’s advice encapsulates some of the key aspects of devotional labor that I touched upon in this and the previous chapter. He finds “profit” in both consolation and the good use of time, because an accounting must one day be given, of course to God, but also in this life to one’s Jesuit superior. During his generalship, Acquaviva reorganized several Jesuit ministries. He collected and organized Jesuits’ individual experiences of offering the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and published these observations in a single collection called the Directory (1599). Similarly, the Ratio Studiorum standardized educational practices and procedures. A similar attempt to routinize overseas missionary activity had been launched by his predecessor, Mercurian, who in 1574 assigned the Italian Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) to be the Jesuit visitor and ultimately provincial of the Society of Jesus’s Goa Province, a jurisdiction that included all of South and East Asia (minus the Philippines) until Valignano himself separated Japan from Goan administration. Valignano’s greatest efforts were directed to securing the Japanese mission, but we will pay attention to his first impressions of the Goan Province. As visitor, Valignano came to essentially the same conclusion as Xavier, that humility and obedience are required “everywhere, but here more than you think.” Many Jesuits perceived the task of achieving some self-understanding and self-control in this colonial setting as physically and spiritually challenging. What were the problems of governing the Society of Jesus in India? Heat and humidity. In early modern physiological understandings of personhood, temperature and temperament were related. Neo- Galenic notions of body and personality relied upon stabilizing the conflicting forces of choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine temperaments. Accordingly, Valignano’s stated task was the renewal of the “interior spirit” of the Goa Province because it was difficult to find those glimmers of consolation in conditions that many missionaries

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found challenging. Heat and humidity were considered aspects typical of the female constitution; thus the humidity of the tropics was emasculating. Further, as the body contained the spirit (with the blood vessels serving as a particularly important conduit of spirit), humid environs were thought to affect spiritual ability and muddle one’s capacity for reason. In sum, Valignano spoke of the “danger of spiritual exhaustion,” for the Jesuits believed the tropical environs diminished powers for reasoned discernment and therefore negatively impacted the possibility to effectively control the passions. Rephrasing Spinoza, the Jesuits in India were confronted with what the body could not do. Valignano addressed the difficulty of attaining spiritual consolation in South Asia by emphasizing, perhaps even more than Xavier, that the better developed a missionary’s interior life, the better the outcome in the mission field. “In this Province, forming subjects for the Order is no small difficulty.” Like Xavier, he blamed the geography of India, the climate in par ticular, for having an “enfeebling” effect on spiritual life. The heat made daily meditation difficult, he described, in a section of his report titled “The Difficulty There Is in Forming Subjects in the Spirit as in Letters.” “The reason,” he explained, “is the poor natural quality of the land, with its heat. . . . Bodies and spirits are very debilitated and thin, of such a manner that the smallest labor leaves the spirit flagging.” He went on to describe how, when the exterior life is attended by such difficulties, one’s interior spirituality languishes and “movement of the spirit is very rare.” As Županov noted, Jesuits in India wrote to Rome requesting strong bodies. Those with a penchant for intellectual pursuits were not as useful as vigorous men capable of manual labor. Painters, architects, masons were prized by these overseas Jesuits. But spiritually, as well, the body played a critical role in meditation and thus must be properly cared for. As Ignatius himself had written, “There can be no meditation where the understanding is used without bodily fatigue.” He added that a sickly body made any kind of accomplishments difficult. One could not struggle to attain the body of the saints (especially in the tropics) but ought to reside in the body of this moment. “Much can be achieved with a healthy body,” was the hallmark of Jesuit moderation, signaling a valorization of an active body in the now. And, if we turn back to the Industriae, we can see what a serious problem the lack of “movements of the spirit” could be. “Debility of Spirit” could lead to problems with virtue. Recall that, according to Acquaviva, debility of spirit was to be met with greater self-scrutiny. Drawing upon St. Bernard’s words, Acquaviva warned: When this cold—the fruit of negligence and somnolence—invades the soul and in encountering no obstacle (which God forbid!), has penetrated into the deepest recesses of the heart and the very seat of reason; when it deranges the affections, obstructs access to wise counsels, troubles the light of judgment, takes away freedom

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of spirit, then, as in the case of fever patients, the following will soon be evident: the soul is rigid, vigor is weakened, the faculties are blunted, austerity is held in increasing horror, poverty causes fear, the heart constricts, grace withdraws, one tires of living so long, reason slumbers, faith dies out, former Novitiate fervor crumbles, the burden of tepidity increases, fraternal charity congeals, pleasures flatter, security deceives, old habits are revoked.

These dire words bring us to the irony that the heat and humidity of tropical environments could lead to a “freezing” of the heart. A hardened heart was a dangerous condition because it could not be reached, was not able to feel the touch of the spiritual guide’s words. The rigors of colonial life were seen as a spiritual problem and, accordingly, they had a spiritual solution. Good governance was linked to the proper placement of men. First, Valignano asked that only missionaries who excelled in self-government be sent to the remote colonies. Second, he sought to invigorate the Jesuit colleges in the Goa Province in order to provide a place for renewal and retreat for Jesuit missionaries. Spiritual and intellectual training were linked. Moreover, these colleges were to function as staging points. From the colleges, the well-trained (the colleges would also function as language centers) would go further afield. These men must be reliable, sensible, and zealous about learning and speaking indigenous languages. As conceived by Valignano, colleges were important nodal points from which “religious life could flower and from which Jesuit activity could radiate.” Those who “lacked in the interior life” would be given work in the colleges, not sent to lonely and distant mission stations. Further, “losses could be more easily made good” in Goa. In other words, the men who turned out to be poor investments would remain under closer supervision in Goa. Overall, Valignano’s reports were highly critical of the “vanity” of Jesuits who wished only to minister to Portuguese. Valignano’s appraisal reflects his excitement about the possibilities for conversion, but also a sense of overwhelming burden. Valignano seems to be assessing “distance” in different terms. He had arrived in the Indies, yet despite the fact that he was in the “right” place, the “now” of consolatory conversion would have to be deferred. He lamented that native contact with Christianity remained so superficial. What was more bewildering, Valignano wrote, was that the Almighty does not come to our aid with miracles, the gift of tongues, or other proofs of his favor. Indeed . . . it seems as though he is overthrowing on purpose what we are building up, seemingly a sure sign that he does not wish the further spread of Christianity here. Though he permitted persecutions of much greater violence to rage against the early Church, they invariably resulted in her great profit; the Church and the number of Christians grew considerably; virtue and zeal increased with increasing numbers. But here we experience quite the reverse.

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The lament, in so many words, reintroduces the question of whether the missionary in India had been abandoned by God. If no great miracles could be had, then at least a spiritual life must be forged that would foster those glimmers of consolation. General Acquaviva was a close friend to Valignano and gave his full backing to Valignano’s efforts to regulate and reform the Goa Province. In closing this chapter, let us situate Acquaviva as a nodal point and, with him, pivot from the East Indies to the West Indies where we can consider early seventeenth-century issues of consolation, governance, and spiritual acumen in New Spain. Acquaviva had written common instructions about the formation of Jesuits in 1592 and these were subsequently incorporated into the Jesuit Institutes. In his letters to Ildefonso de Castro, the provincial of the Mexican Province from 1602 to 1608, Acquaviva continued to reiterate that careful attention be paid to the Third Probation, the final step of the Jesuit’s incorporation into the Company of Jesus. He now insisted that these instructions be followed with exactitude in every Jesuit novitiate. He wrote to the Jesuit master of novices in Mexico City, Martín Fernandez, that he ought to exercise “singular caution” with all novices. Yet he added that one ought to pause when considering los naturales of New Spain. Note that he was not speaking of “Indians”—the new legal nomenclature that encompassed all pre-Colombian ethnic and language groups in the Americans. Local Jesuits often referred to Indians as los naturales. But for Acquaviva there was also the problem of the “natural” sons of the land of New Spain, the children of Spaniards born in the Americas (criollos). These naturales, according to Acquaviva, were bien diferente—quite different—from the potential Jesuits who hailed from Europe. He did not elaborate further; his letters were short. But these three problems were all of a piece: (1) the viability of criollos as potential members of the Society of Jesus, (2) the demands for “useful” men, and, most critically, (3) their spiritual formation. In these letters, Acquaviva’s concerns appear quite different from the voice we heard in his Industriae. As one letter states, the Society of Jesus required “useful workers,” those able to “take advantage” of the situation so as to be “profitable.” Rather than consolation, a discourse of profit and utility pepper Acquaviva’s letters. He is, of course, writing not as a spiritual director but in his capacity as general of the Society of Jesus. Yet the two aims were linked because, ultimately, the “practicality and utility” of Jesuit procedures would be determined by the number of souls consoled. Indeed, this takes us directly back to the concerns about governance that prompted Acquaviva to write the Industriae. Now the question was, how would the Society of Jesus best expand and replicate itself overseas? The answer: by attending to the individual embodied spiritual health of its members, the Society would reconstitute itself as corpus, as a corporate entity. “Utility” entailed creating space to accommodate these contemplatives in action, a locale that (as in the

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Goa Province) allowed for the convergence of spiritual retreat as well as language training and missionary action. There had been a novitiate in Mexico City, but a new novitiate was founded in Puebla de Los Angeles (1591) before being relocated once again to Mexico City. This unstable situation proved untenable. Thus, Acquaviva and Jesuit leadership in the Mexican Province secured a stable locale for the formation of novices and, in the early 1600s, the Jesuits organized efforts to establish a novitiate that was further afield from the hubbub of the cosmopolitan capital city of Mexico, in the town of Tepotzotlán. One of the early Mexican Jesuits was the seventeenth-century chronicler Andrés Pérez de Ribas (1575–1655). He arrived in New Spain in 1602 in the company of twenty-one other Jesuits and completed his studies at the novitiate when it was housed in Puebla de los Ángeles before he was assigned to the northern Jesuit missions, where he worked for fifteen years. He returned to serve as rector and master of novices at the recently founded novitiate in Tepotzotlán in 1620. When he wrote his chronicles, he described the college at Tepotzotlán as “one of the principle and most necessary” in the Mexican Province. As a center for language training in Nahuatl and Otomí, he singled out the college for both its “zealous ministry to the natives of those parts” and for being the site of the seminary, which he described as a plantel—a word that refers both to an educational establishment, but also to a nursery or breeding ground—where the “beautiful flowers and plants of the novices are created.” Everywhere these Jesuits went, they were “imbued with the lovely odor and fragrance of the virtues that they learned there.” Recall the proclamation: “We are not monks! . . . The world is our house.” Yet if we are to continue to attend to the question of how techniques of meditation were actually practiced outside the highly structured routines that governed life within monastery walls, we ought to at least glance at the kinds of “walls” that framed the Jesuit novitiate experience. The art and architecture at Tepotzotlán functioned to provide a sensorial foundation to evoke affective experiences that would continually inspire the Jesuit’s vocation. We see once again that Jesuits utilized monastic practice to sustain a worldly spirituality. Consolation shaped the space of the Jesuit novitiate in Tepotzotlán, Mexico. Pérez de Ribas reconstructs some of the “way-markers” of the novitiates, the “way” that Jesuits moved around the space of the college. He remarked upon the importance of the garden space for the novices, but never offered any particulars. The novitiate chapel is located on the second floor, right next to the library, and, if a young Jesuit took the stairs between the library and the chapel, he would have immediate access to the patio and garden. One could also look down upon the garden, suggesting the interconnection of study-contemplation-prayer that maps out a narrative of personal reform/conversion. The garden is surely a multivalent site: paradise (Garden of Eden) and pain (Garden of Gethsemane) but also conversion: its

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location so close to the library brings to mind Augustine’s narrative of his conversion in the garden, where he takes a book, reads, and then runs to the garden to cry over his sins and hands his life over to God. Pérez de Ribas described the inner chapel as a place of quiet and retreat. The novitiates used the space for prayer and “other devout exercises,” which included spiritual talks (pláticas) and reciting the rosary. The novices could visit the holy sacrament often in a chapel he described as “the most lovely” in the Mexican Province, designed “with devotion and reverence” in mind. An image of Mary occupied the principal wall of the retablo—a faithful copy of Santa María Maggiore from Rome that, reputedly, “St. Luke painted with his own hand.” This painting was held in “tender affection” by the novices, who not only were inspired by the painting, “but many of whom received favors, were liberated from the horrible temptations that they combating, especially pertaining to their vocations, appealing to this pious Señora for a remedy. . . . Even after they leave and are occupied at other colleges in our ministries, they hope those occasions might arise in which they can return to visit and enjoy the lovely presence of this Señora . . . taking pleasure in [her] celestial consolation.” The walls of the novitiate were porous. Novices practiced not only their preaching but also their language skills (Otomí and Nahuatl) in the surrounding areas. Not only were Jesuits trained there, but seasoned Jesuits returned for the annual retreat. While Pérez de Ribas does not wax poetic on this topic, the colleges were also disciplinary sites where the Spiritual Exercises could be administered as a correction for poor behavior, when those Jesuit flowers and plants had lost some of their lovely fragrance. “Let everyone know that whoever is seriously delinquent in this matter has to go to one of the colleges and make the Exercises for eight days together with the other penances which the Visitor deems suitable.” The Spiritual Exercises were central to the “rules and precepts” for the Jesuit missions because the missionary himself was in constant need of reform and self-regulation. These regulations called for Jesuits to make the Spiritual Exercises twice annually without fail, and were of such importance that even Jesuits in remote areas were required to leave their missionary stations and travel to convene with neighboring Jesuits for a retreat of eight days. These dispersed missionaries would come together annually to make the Spiritual Exercises and renew their vows “and recover the strength anew to go out on new conquests.” If salvation in the next life was the ultimate goal, the penultimate earthly aim was consolation—the ephemeral result of this therapeutics of mind-body-soul. In this chapter we have explored consolation as a mobilizing experience that drove one to seek its renewal by bringing this experience to (and thus reexperiencing with) others. Spiritual direction was itself not only an affective experience that straddled mind and body but an experience that was forged in correspondence with another body, that of the spiritual director. We have seen that Acqua-

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viva’s Industriae offered an early modern technique to vibrate and tune the embodied spirit according to each Jesuit’s humoral-spiritual constitution, but in doing so, the director had to attune himself and “join forces” with the varied constitutions of his spiritual subjects. To find consolation, Jesuit spirituality insisted upon obedience (the Jesuit subject) and self-negation (both director and subject), but the practitioner of the Spiritual Exercises was also instructed to contemplate and take action in the world in a state of joy attained in contemplating, imitating, becoming one with the resurrected Christ. These were all key aspects of Jesuit mobility. Moreover, when the Exercises required the Jesuit to imagine himself in the world, “the Indies” emerged as a place of significance. Many a Jesuit wended his way into the world on this metaphor. The “Indies” was the best means to garner more, more, more spiritual consolation. Yet finding consolation once one had arrived in “the Indies” could be exhausting. This brings us to a key point about the role of the college in the Jesuit vision of global Christianity. As important as its role in educating laity and young Jesuits, the colleges, professed houses, and novitiates were places of spiritual renewal. Steven Harris has given us a marvelous image of the Jesuit colleges as nodal points of knowledge exchange, but they were also nodal points of spiritual consolation, places where the unruly or spiritually exhausted Jesuit could garner (so as to better disperse) consolation. The conquest of others demanded the continual conquest of self.

4

Evangelization and Consolation Or, Philosophy in the Mission Field The analysis of concepts, I have argued, need not be fatal, if we learn to return our concepts to our human practices, the practices from which they emerged and which sustain them. —Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality, 2001.

Knowledge does not stand outside of practical activity: it is made and sustained through situated practical activity. —Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 1995.

In this chapter, we situate ourselves on the Mexican side of the Atlantic to resume this story about the embodied formation of self, but this time I focus on the role that Jesuit evangelical methods played in the transformation of bodies, souls, and selves. I continue to probe “consolation,” both as a concept and as a fleeting sensory experience. Although I move my analysis closer to the ground, so to speak, my aim is to answer the following questions: How do epistemological shifts happen? How are concepts transformed? For conceptual changes to become meaningful—for paradigmatic shifts in ways of seeing and being in the world to take effect—“philosophy” must be taken up by community. That concepts are enacted, reinscribed, and made meaningful through ritual actions that form collective representations roughly summarizes a basic Durkheimian effort to link social life to what he called “logical life.” “Self” is both a concept and a practice that can be plugged into this equation. Logical life, Durkheim wrote, is “common to all because it is the work of community.” Thus, following Durkheim, any explanation of widespread transformations of ideas about “the self” must be linked to situated practical activity (alluded to in the epigraphs above). In this chapter, I explore the practical labors of missionaries in early modern New Spain to argue that Jesuit communal evangelical revivals introduced new ways of conceiving of sin, which in turn opened the door to a novel means of conceptualizing selves. I do not merely wish to state that “a theory of ‘the self’ traveled on Jesuit networks” although this rings true. Rather, I aim to demon104

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strate how, from the very close encounter that was an engagement with Jesuit confessional practices, the perception that one could narrate an “interior” self emerged. This chapter describes epistemological transformations as lived by New Spaniards during one of Catholicism’s most intensely charismatic and evangelical moments in history, when, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, successive waves of missionaries labored to restructure and reanimate faith among all Christian peoples. Emerging concepts about the self were activated among Catholic laity through communal ritual action that beckoned to the body in order to claim the soul. My analytical emphasis is on processes of “becoming”—a history of becoming—enacted via ritual practice. Here I point to ways in which structured ritual action (not discourse alone) elicited embodied responses that were subsequently/simultaneously harnessed to a discursive regime centered upon salvation. To do this, I locate accounts of self and sin that took shape during rites of penitence that encouraged a par ticular form of narrativizing sin that invoked the body to establish distance from it. The last chapters have demonstrated how the Spiritual Exercises and Jesuit spiritual direction more generally relied upon memory and imagination to reconfigure everyday habits and ways of being in the world. We looked briefly at the problems pertaining to spiritual discipline in the New World contexts of India and New Spain to explore the implications of self-knowledge in a colonial context, and we saw that culture was a stumbling block. If memory was a “machine,” this particular spiritual instrument was fine-tuned to lift European minds and hearts toward God. The Jesuit method could not function on minds that were not primed with European-style memories and imaginations or, worse, minds the Jesuits considered to be steeped in superstition and idolatry. However, the Jesuits did not abandon their Spiritual Exercises at the shore, or offer them only to the educated European populations, but rather broke them into more usable pieces. Before offering a brief history of the birth of the retreat house in Chapter 5, I evaluate the Jesuit ministry of itinerant missions to show how the Exercises were broken down into their component parts to reach a broader audience. The Jesuits themselves simply referred to them as “missions” or sometimes missiones de la doctrina. Scholars have dubbed this ministry “popular missions” to indicate that this was an effort to change popular culture. While the title serves to differentiate the missions to the European countryside from the permanent mission stations found overseas (both types of missions were operative in the Latin American setting), the term does mistakenly position “popular culture” in opposition to “elite culture.” Entire towns and villages were targets of Jesuit reform efforts. “Missions” were staged in urban centers as well. Although the Jesuits paid careful attention to social standing, for example, when arranging seating for group rituals, overall the itinerant mission reports in New Spain made no distinction between elites and plebeians: each sinner required individual reformation.

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Recall that from their inception the Spiritual Exercises were meant to be adapted to individuals in different situations. These itinerant evangelical-style missions utilized aspects of the Spiritual Exercises in their substance. However, the form of this ministry was dramatically—literally speaking—different. In the itinerant mission, the Jesuits taught, exhorted, and persuaded the laity to make a meaningful act of contrition and a general confession. Both of these were key components of the Exercises. Yet unlike the quiet, secluded experience of making the Exercises under the guidance of a spiritual director in a retreat setting, the itinerant mission offered a more raucous spiritual education that included awe-inspiring preaching, ritualistic public self-flaggelation, and solemn processions through towns and to neighboring villages. Certainly Jesuit evangelization was critical to forging the multiple tributaries along which reforms at Trent percolated into the daily lives of Catholics. Yet we ought to be cautious about assigning “catechizing” as the primary Jesuit goal when they went on itinerant missions. John O’Malley puts the brakes on singleminded “normalizing” or disciplinary interpretations of post-Trent Jesuit missionary activity. The Jesuits had limited connection to early modern demands to reform the formal or institutional church represented by the papacy, episcopacy, and parish. As we have seen in the previous chapters, the Jesuits were concerned with “the help of souls,”  and this comes across clearly in the writings of the missionaries under study in this chapter. Jesuits worked to inculcate a deeper appreciation of the Catholic sacraments and, while that required knowledge of catechism, Jesuit spiritual outreach also emphasized a deepened self-knowledge. Certainly Jesuit leadership was careful to ensure that “spiritual renewal” remain in line with formal Catholic doctrine. Yet not only is it misleading to characterize Jesuit ministries as an “arm” of the reforming church (or, as it has been put more crudely, the “shock troops” of the pope), but historical analyses emphasizing “dogmatism” are often followed by equally heavy-handed interpretations that posit “resistance” as the only possible reaction. Such views prematurely close off possibilities for exploring the nature of intimate interactions that reshaped the grounds of self-understanding, in both colonial and metropolitan contexts. In both Europe and the Americas, the format of the itinerant mission was akin to evangelical revival. The Jesuit missionaries sought to prepare Christians to receive the Holy Sacrament. A pair of Jesuit priests would travel to a portion of a city like Naples, or Mexico City, or to more distant towns and villages. Often, a parish priest had sent a request that some Jesuits be sent to visit their town. In many Catholic communities, the popular mission was a community event and the missions were well attended. All who made a confession and were absolved by the priest during the mission were granted a papal plenary indulgence, which did not negate the necessity of penance, but rather (and more importantly) granted “the remission of the entire temporal punishment due to sin so that no

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further expiation is required in Purgatory”—a potent incentive to attend the sacrament of penance. Some people slept in the church cemetery so as to rise early and confess with the visiting priests. The Jesuits accommodated work schedules, holding evening ser vices and allowing family members to earn the papal dispensation for relatives who had valid excuses for not attending the mission activities. On a typical mission in New Spain, the priests would have one presentation in the morning and another in the evening. They would also visit local haciendas to reach workers who were not able to come to the village. Mission reports mention that community leaders should chastise those who had failed to attend the missions. Blatant coercion notwithstanding, I want to suggest that the ritual structure of the itinerant mission was in itself powerfully attractive. This explains, in part, the popularity of the Jesuit preachers who forged links between dramatic communal performance and private acts of self-formation. The Jesuits strove to elicit emotions as well as to channel them. The interactive nature of missionary rituals drew people to the Jesuits, encouraged them to overcome what the Jesuits deemed the “shame” that had silenced them in the confessional, and, at least for some community members, prompted them to undertake a path toward personal transformation. Here I draw on the field reports of the Italian Father Juan Bautista Zappa, SJ (Giovanni Battista Zappa) as he traveled through the cities, towns, villages, and haciendas of New Spain, but read his reports with the aid of a guide written by Pedro Calatayud, SJ. This Spanish Jesuit’s guide consolidated and summarized the aims and best practices of what Jesuit missionaries like Zappa were attempting to do around the globe. Accordingly, I do more to develop Father Zappa as a full-fledged character (see also Chapter 6), reading his actions in the New Spanish context, while I draw upon Calatayud’s text to amplify or explain Zappa’s actions as they might have been understood by Jesuits in other Catholic settings. My final note of caution: The setting is New Spain, yet this is not a sixteenthcentury story of “contact” and “conquest.” Those histories of clashing cognitive systems or language difficulties that resulted in failed communication were more likely in the first decades of the Spanish conquest of New Spain. Late arrivals to the New World, the Jesuits touched down in New Spain in 1572. Note that Father Zappa wrote his accounts in the 1680s, more than 150 years after the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán. The Society of Jesus had been in New Spain for over 100 years by the time Father Zappa disembarked at the port at Vera Cruz and traveled to his urban mission in a very cosmopolitan Mexico City. Thus the “encounters” between visiting Jesuits and local penitents ought to be viewed as discernibly different from existing models of colonial penitence that scholars have developed to explain early modern contact and conquest. Father Zappa visited towns, villages, and haciendas in the central valley of Mexico that had been established for well over a century. Although the Jesuits sometimes relied upon a discourse of “first encounter,” this was a rhetorical flourish that quickly disintegrated

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to reveal that the Jesuits were treading on territory already established—even if sometimes less firmly established—by Franciscans and Augustinians. These seventeenth-century popular missions represented Jesuit efforts to introduce new modes of confessional behavior. They comprised a distinct layer of reform directed toward all members of colonial society that was simultaneous with and virtually the same in method as reform efforts in Europe. In New Spain the Jesuits were evangelizing Christians—flawed, no doubt, perhaps even fallen—but individuals and communities who charted their destinies in the very Christian terms of sin and salvation. FAT H E R J UA N BAU T I S TA Z A PPA , S J

Some of the richest descriptions of popular missions in Mexico came from the pen of an Italian Jesuit, Father Juan Bautista Zappa, who arrived in New Spain in 1675. Born in Milan in 1651, Zappa was educated at the Jesuit Collegio di Brera in his hometown, and he was sent to the novitiate in Genoa at the age of fifteen. During the second half of his novitiate, he studied at the Collegio di Quieri in Piedmont, where he gained experience as a missionary. According to his biographer, he would spend Sundays and holidays teaching the doctrine “to his poor Aldean neighbors, exhorting them to follow a virtuous path and to despise sin.” He was described as fortunate to have participated in a Jesuit mission made by “the venerable Padre Poggi, a fervent Jesuit missionary from Italy.” Zappa observed the missionary’s methods and was given good advice. During the evenings, when Father Poggi was too tired to read the sermons for the next day, he had Zappa read aloud to him. Later Zappa returned to Genoa to continue his studies. His biographer noted that he also continued his ministry by visiting jails and hospitals. On Sundays he also visited the Galeras de España y de la Republica, where he was entertained and edified by the fiery sermons such that “even the most obstinate galeotes [galley slaves] were converted to a better life, making a tearful confession.” Finally, he was sent to Nice (Collegio di Nizza) to finish his “curso di Artes” or what is better described as instruction in philosophy. Miguel Venegas, his biographer, was a Jesuit from New Spain, and he claimed that a desire to be sent to the Americas lay at the heart of Zappa’s missionary zeal. He was purportedly recruited by Padre Francisco Florencia, SJ, who, while traveling through Europe as procurator of supplies and religious art to bring back to New Spain, told the young Zappa about the miraculous image of the Virgin of Guadalupe that demonstrated “her special protection of those nations.” Venegas also wrote that Zappa had studied Spanish and practiced speaking with Spaniards he met at the hospital because of this wish to be a missionary in the Americas. Venegas was correct that Zappa was keen on missionary life, but it would have been more accurate to describe him with his sights initially set on Asia. While

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still living in Genoa, Father Zappa corresponded with his father, describing his eagerness for evangelical work and his admiration for Jesuits who labored in Asia. In a letter dated September 1672, Father Zappa was delighted to include a copy of an account “of the state of our Missions in China, newly printed in Rome.” He also passed on a novelty item: a copy of “the mysteries of our Holy Faith” printed in Chinese characters. He had met one Jesuit (unnamed in Zappa’s letter) who had written an account of the Jesuit mission to China when the latter stopped through Genoa on his journey to China. “And, oh, if God is willing,” Zappa wrote with passion to his father, “I, too, will be able to follow him.” God had called Zappa, he felt, not to be an ordinary priest but rather “a true Apostle destined for the conversion of souls.” When he finally received notice that he would be sent to New Spain, he wrote to his father expressing his pleasure and clarifying that, indeed, he had been called to ministry in the Indies, yet felt compelled to explain that his destination was the West Indies. According to Venegas, the transition to life in New Spain was an easy one for Zappa because, apart from some “accidental differences in style,” Jesuit colleges were similar around the world. Soon after his arrival in Mexico City, Zappa was described as having been instantly captivated by the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. In a move that probably demonstrated his biographer’s sentiments more than Zappa’s, an entire chapter was devoted to describing this visit and Zappa’s vow to serve the Virgin until death. Yet Zappa’s captivation by the Mexican Mary is evident in the fact that he hired a painter named Luis de Texeda to make a faithful copy of the painting, which Zappa sent back to Milan. In exchange, he was sent a painting of the Virgin of Modesty, known to have been helpful for the conversion of the Moors. We have to remember that the posthumous biography had two purposes. The first was to mark past Jesuit glories, while the second goal was to recruit future missionaries. Thus the description of the “ease” of the Jesuit lifestyle advertised that mobile Jesuit bodies would fi nd recognizable landing spots. The colonial difference described in Venegas’s descriptions promised novel Marian devotions—a new spin on the same old—with which any Jesuit might augment his own Marian devotion, a new image of Mary to be added to a collection, cards and paintings to be compared and exchanged. Zappa’s own labor to produce missionary accounts during his lifetime contributed to the person-to-person circulation of information about evangelical labors in an increasingly globalized world. He was conscious of this. Zappa addressed the letters to his father, but he expected, and sometimes requested, that the letters circulate among family, friends, and those living in the household. He also sent a copy of a missionary relación from the “newly discovered Island of California” and asked his father to arrange for its translation into Italian because he was far too busy to see to it himself. Later during his own lifetime, one of Zappa’s missionary accounts, along with the letters to his father, were published in Milan,

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demonstrating that Jesuit information networks should be understood to include transoceanic transmissions between kin. In 1678, while studying theology in Mexico City, he wrote a letter to his father reporting that he had only one year of studies remaining, and said, “then I will, God willing, go forward on the long-yearned-for Mission.” The letters to his father bear ample evidence that Zappa wished to be a missionary long after he actually became one. He was conscious of the irony. Given that his daily labors included hearing confessions at San Gregorio, the Jesuit college for the sons of indigenous elites, ministering to the sick and dying, preaching and teaching the doctrine in the prisons and in the city plazas, and other ministries “for the good of souls,” he felt compelled to acknowledge: “There is so much in this city of Mexico that I am not lacking a good mission.” But in the succeeding letter he reluctantly admitted that he was “only like a parish priest.” Here we see the difference between a “mission” conceived as vocation, and the more heroic notion of “Mission” characterized by mobility and remoteness. I take up the topic of missionary desire for distance in Chapter 6. But now we will see how, once a year, when Zappa left his “parish” to minister to a wider community, he had the salvation of souls on his agenda, and tools for forging selves in his traveling bag. R I T UA L S O F R E F O R M

Catechesis has always been at the heart of the Christian religion and, in par ticular, instruction has been central to the practice of penance. A view of penitence as a learning-by-doing process informs this chapter. But an important question about confession and social reform in any time period or circumstance is, instruction and learning toward what end? The structural shifts following the Reformation and the Council of Trent explained both the necessity and popularity of a catechetical institution like the itinerant mission, for Christians were now obliged to know their religion more intimately. Itinerant missions to Catholic communities in both early modern Europe and New Spain were directed toward shaping the worldview of Christians in a distinct way: the purpose of the postTrent catechism was not merely that Christians be instructed in the rules, but that the individual “be able to draw conclusions from it in everyday life.” The Jesuit missions in par ticular were action-oriented in execution and expected tangible results. Jesuits encouraged an intensification of spiritual life among Catholic laity by advocating devotion to and frequent reception of the Holy Eucharist. Both implicitly and explicitly, the body of Christ bridged the Atlantic, or, more accurately, the rituals pertaining to the reception of Christ’s body as sacrament served as a foundation for embodied self-understanding in a transatlantic Catholic world.

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Jesuits urged the habitual reception of communion, not simply as one among many ways to achieve spiritual perfection, but as the most important way. This is easy to overlook because, as will soon be quite apparent, the preachers’ energies were directed toward assisting individuals to make a good confession, yet the purpose of confession was preparedness to receive the Eucharist. For the Jesuits, frequent communion and the general confession went hand in hand. Penitence was an important technology of the self aimed at controlling the passions. Given the physiological effects that imbalanced passions could have on one’s physical as well as spiritual health, we can see how penance brought equilibrium to the humoral body even as it cleansed the soul. This spiritual-physical health was then amplified—consummated even—in the consumption of Christ incarnate. The more frequently one approached the altar, the more often penitents were required to place their fully embodied selves into a drama of sin and salvation that, ironically, as I outline below, taught them to experience and narrate self as “split.” Jesuit itinerant missions operated with a well-planned strategy that aimed to take an immediate upper hand by staging a spectacular entry. Thus, a Jesuit would travel ahead to announce the imminent arrival of the mission. Father Zappa’s 1689 account depicts the following dramatic scene, which he claimed was typical of what might occur in the first days of the mission: “Why, my faithful ones, has God called us to this town? For you, who are in a bad state, and for so many years. And for you, because you keep silent about your sins in the confessional.” And this he would say, with his hands pointing to different sections of the audience. The next day a man would come to confess and would ask the priest, “Father don’t you know me? Weren’t you signaling to me in the sermon with your discovery, saying that the Mission came for me because I have been silent so long about my sins in the Confession?”

Pause for a moment here to consider that the missionary’s words and his hands worked in tandem. The missionary launched his fingers; the man in the audience leaned toward them, effectively closing down the space between himself and the preacher’s actions that now landed as a notion that he must change his life. Speech moved on the arc of an embodied trajectory and materialized as this man’s capability to “admit to his disease.” The Jesuit spiritual healer touched the man’s heart and inaugurated a discovery, a process of uncovering what had been beneath the surface, perhaps even unknown. But as we shall see, even though these words speak of an “interior,” the sense of inner self comes into being through intersubjective communal ritual action dependent upon embodied perception. And more touching words twitched the hearts and heels of the inhabitants of the town or village. To understand this moment, the words of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra can be brought to bear. “My heels twitched, then my toes hearkened to

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understand you and rose, for the dancer has his ear in his toes.” The sermons called attention to feet quite specifically, as in this Jesuit sermon that began with this question: where is Hell? “It is not, as you imagine, so very far away: Hell does not reside outside of this world. It is in the center of this earth: we hover above Hell today; above Hell is where you eat; above Hell where you sleep; and where do you sin? Above Hell. . . . Hell is right underneath you, beneath your feet, why don’t you tremble?” The itinerant missions typically began with a procession and a public recitation of the Act of Contrition. Then the group was split up into men and women, and then further, into language groups. After hearing a sermon about “the integrity of the confession,” they began to say the Act of Contrition. This was referred to as a “holy exercise” whose words touched and softened hearts, dilated the heart, and thus allowed God to enter and reform their lives. An unknown author who wrote about a series of itinerant missions that took place in the years 1661 and 1662 shared an anecdote that accurately conveys the Jesuit understanding of how the Act of Contrition served to motivate confession and reform. One man confessed to having attempted to gain the attentions of a woman over a long period of time, the priest recorded, but his aims proved “impossible by human means,” so the man made a pact with the dev il, which he signed with his own blood. “His soul was entangled with the consequences of his intentions. He arrived, very repentant, to confess himself of his faults, but he did not have the spirit to confess until he heard the Act of Contrition. He was moved by our Lord through these words and confessed himself entirely of all his sins.”  Lest the words “Procession” and “Act of Contrition” sound mundane, consider this instead: the villager did not merely mumble the Act of Contrition under his breath in a church; rather, he recited the words while walking with the crowds through town, and formed a moving part of a dramatic ritual procession. And the missionary hoped that hearts would shudder to the tempo of moving feet, souls resonate with the angst expressed by the discordant voices. According to accounts that are explored more fully in the second half of this chapter, a great many people were attracted to the Jesuits’ preaching and, if we can rely upon the missionary accounts, seemed to have taken the Act of Contrition to heart. Not only were many inspired to make a general confession; some also took what they had learned back home. The mission with its structure of plenary indulgences motivated them to do so. Many people were motivated by the obligation that they hurry to teach the doctrine to those in their families [who could not attend]; they wished to gain the indulgences for those who apply themselves to teach others the mysteries of Our Holy Faith; since the Mission began, they started this Holy Exercise in homes, gathering all the people for part of the night to a quiet place where they instructed them in the Christian doctrine, after which they prayed the Rosary aloud and finished with the Act of Contrition.

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The Act of Contrition was intended as a tool that could be integrated into one’s daily routine and employed long after the Jesuits had departed. Approaching the confessional required a certain amount of preparation. First, there were the communal acts of contrition, best exemplified by the penitential marches through the city. The people in the procession carried different images of Christ: God Made Man (Santo Ecce Homo), Jesus of Nazareth, Christ Crucified, and of his mother, our Lady of Sorrows. For the more rigorously inclined penitent, the “discipline” (self-inflicted corporal punishment) was available. The sermons were literally bone rattling: preaching in the cemetery, the Jesuit missionary stirred up the crowd with a powerful sermon made more dramatic by the skeleton that he waved about in his hands. The fathers generally reported that they were pleased with the response their sermons received, but sometimes were alarmed when the discipline was excessively vigorous. Some fathers were concerned when both men and women threw their bodies to the ground or knocked their heads against the walls. Amid tears, sighs, and shouts, people literally beat themselves up over past sins. In one case, in the Minas de Sultepeque, the Jesuits teamed up with the Brothers of San Diego, who had a monastery in the region. As the Jesuits preached from the pulpit, the Dieguinos began to chant the Miserere from the choir at the back of the church and, soon after, “took a very vigorous discipline, whose example moved the people very much.” The crowd was moved by their beautiful singing “to ponder the most grave sorrows that had been inflicted upon Christ and his most holy Mother with their faults.”  The brothers then gave the signal that the men who wished to undertake corporal punishment would be welcome, of course only after the women had exited from the church. But the women were not totally excluded, for Zappa portrayed them as the audience outside the church walls: “They heard the sounds of the beating mixed with the cries and sighs that resonated outside the church.” After waiting outside, the crowd then moved on to various places in the town until they congregated in a large space at the feet of a statue of Christ crucified. We have to appreciate the itinerant mission as a full sensory experience, the rigors of discipline—a form of self-touch, we might say, precisely placed to produce not only the cathartic pain of a single body, but was also a touching display of the sonorous rhythms that were both call and response of the communal body. The sensory experience extended to the less dramatic but certainly tactile forms of material culture that accompanied devotional life. As part of their ministry, the fathers wished to put a markedly Jesuit (and Italian) stamp on these new traditions as a reminder of the missions by encouraging devotion to Our Lady of Loreto. The Jesuits distributed souvenirs shipped from Italy, including little biscuits, bells, and ribbons, as well as paper that had been rubbed on the dirt of the walls of the Holy House of Loreto. Prints of the Loreto Virgin were ubiquitous

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among the items distributed. The latter, Zappa remarked, came in quite handy on a mission to San Juan Teotihuacan. A man was choking on a bone and his servant, uncertain what to do, swift ly applied her image of Our Lady of Loreto to his throat (perhaps with some force) and cleared the bone. “This enforced the fervor for Our Lady in this region,” Zappa insisted. The popular mission accounts were triumphal in nature, and although the Jesuits were confronted with recalcitrant penitents, it is not surprising that the accounts usually described successful conversions. We can safely imagine that there were others who remained along the sidelines for the duration of the popular mission. Nonetheless, we are not left with the impression of a passive laity sleeping through a litany of new standards preached from the pulpit. Community members came to the popular mission, some in search of solace, some prodded by local political and religious powers, and some captivated by the spectacle of the Jesuits themselves, who had a reputation as showmen. Whatever drew them in, the scene they encountered was quite animated and lively. Not merely instructions governing behavior, this dynamic environment was designed to engage the emotions of observers, disarmed even unwilling participants, and helps us understand how a wide range of people internalized new values through action. I have only noted in passing some of the material culture—the devices—that elicited new forms of being: Lady of Loreto pamphlets. Novenas to St. Xavier. Displays of the body of Christ. Paintings of the trials of the afterlife. The cords used to discipline one’s body. And the words with which the priest evoked an embodied response, which I look at more closely in the next section. But note: these examples of public penitence and group processions should not, I insist, characterize the itinerant mission as attentive only to communal forms of religious practice. In what follows, I show how the communal drama of the itinerant missions evoked individual anxieties and melancholies that the Jesuits arrived well equipped to console.

TA L K A S T OUC H How must we think the call that makes us speak? How must we think the speech that responds and hears only by responding? How must we think the voice in which, and through which, alone both call and response become incarnate? How must we think this fleshly voice without which the spirit would stand bereft of heirs? If the voice listens the body must listen, through every sense: how are we to think this possibility?

St. Xavier was credited with helping to tackle some of Padre Zappa’s more difficult cases. Consider the following case in which a man came to listen to the sermons of the mission:

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More out of human respect than to improve himself, but the mercy of God, that has no limits, entered into the soul of this miserable person. Every word that the Fathers spoke knocked at his heart, and every action and every conversation which he found himself in with the rest of the town; so great was this effect that he was determined to make the novena to the Sainted Apostle and beg him to remedy his soul, and be his patron. One day he entered the church, totally without any resolution about whether or not he would confess, but he heard an interior voice that said, “go confess yourself.” He went up to the Father Confessors and it seemed impossible to turn around. In the end the same Sainted Apostle who moved him to enter the church despite the crowd gathered, now moved him to confess. He arrived at the feet of the confessor asking if he had a remedy for him, to which the confessor responded, yes, here there are remedies for everyone and that for this reason God sent it [the confession/mission], for the salvation of the most desperate sinners. He began to cry bitterly and to describe his most ugly life, the confessor assisting him with great gentleness until he gave a general confession of his entire life and received absolution. He left completely consoled in his soul and so much improved in customs that he did not cease giving thanks to God, and the Sainted Apostle who, as he said, pulled him out of the hell of his sins, his obstinacy, his desperation where he had been miserable and desperate.

Examples like these require the phenomenologist’s analytical lens to see an embodied actor stumbling toward what will be only subsequently objectified, informed by literary tropes of conversion but only narrativized concretely as a conversion in the wake of embodied experience. The call, the sense of being drawn toward an unknown or a partially realized conclusion, reiterates Barthes’s sense of participation in a drama not of his own making. Zappa portrays this man as powerless to resist a force that he cannot explain, his toes twitching, as it were, his feet hearkened to understand, his body in the moment pushing with and against his habit-body. We can imagine that the words and music of the ritual spoke to the habituated body—linked as habit-body is to the cultural cues that comprise the Jesuits’ performance, the call and response that was culturally embedded. The second layer of body in the moment was the action/reaction/movement, the motility of the body unfolding in time, the twitching foot that stumbled toward the re/forming of self. Or, as one can only speculate (given Zappa’s silence on the matter of “failed” cases), bodies turned away from the scene, the feet that took flight. Intending to propel individuals to deeper levels of self-reflection, the missionaries provoked anguish by suggesting to townspeople that their prior confessions had been inadequate. Missionaries reported that audience members were appalled when they realized that they had never made a complete confession in all their lives. For example, a penitent might have come to the priest to make a sorrowful—if perfunctory—listing of wrongs committed since the last confession.

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To his horror, as the missionaries described it, he was turned away from the confessional without absolution, told to give his sins greater consideration overnight in order to render a more complete examination of conscience, and to return the next day. Following a night of serious thought and contemplation— panic? anxiety?—most penitents were described as impatient to adopt this new manner of confession, which promised a complete confession of sins and total absolution. Withholding of absolution was an important technique, self-consciously adopted by Jesuit spiritual healers to train the penitent to make a proper confession. The process had some interesting practical ramifications for the way Jesuits would conduct a mission. First, hearing general confessions consumed time, so priests were instructed to wake up and get to the confessional at dawn. Next, it was important that each confessor occupy only the confessional or space allotted to him for hearing confessions, because otherwise how would the penitent dismissed without absolution find his confessor again? Here, too, it was commented that the penitents, eager for “new faces,” would find these confessors previously unknown to them an appealing luxury. But practically speaking, the visiting confessors might be difficult to recognize, hence the importance of each priest keeping to his own space. Here the guides written by Calatayud emphasized the importance of choice: each penitent should feel that he had chosen his confessor. As we saw in Acquaviva’s guide to spiritual direction, the director should pay careful attention to fine-tuning his own emotional state of being. The same held true for the itinerant missionary. Since his goal was to leave penitents “satisfied and consoled,” it was important to refrain from any roughness (aspereza); thus, the confessor should attend to his own disposition. No matter if something weighed upon him, whether he was ill-humored, tired, or restless, he should nonetheless treat the penitent kindly—with sweetness—showing no horror or reprehension at hearing their vices, “especially if a woman, young lady or country youth,” lest the penitent cut herself short and keep her sins undisclosed out of fear. As we shall see shortly, Jesuit missionaries were quite preoccupied with this “silence” in the confessional. The general confession was the mightiest tool in the Jesuit spiritual arsenal with which to effect a transformation of consciousness. As is well known, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) required that once a year Christians list all sins committed since the last confession. The general confession was distinct from this auricular confession promoted by the Catholic Church since the thirteenth century. The general confession, in contrast, required a more complex psychological selfevaluation. Through a daily examination of conscience, the penitent evaluated his or her entire life, in an effort to recognize and cull out enduring patterns of sin. Then, rather than confess a list of sins, the penitent would narrate the story of sin in his or her life.

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The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises asked the practitioner to recount his or her life, to recall sins committed over a lifetime. As discussed in Chapter 1, narrative memory exercises prompted a reediting of the self in which one narrative, a life to come, was traced over another, a life already lived. The notion of rereading a life as a text describes well the process undertaken in the Spiritual Exercises. However, this Augustinian legacy refers to the way the reading and writing of texts activated a process of re-creating the self. There was little in the way of reading involved in the Spiritual Exercises until devotional manuals for private use began to be published in the seventeenth century. Until then we have what might be called a literary or textual practice—minus an actual text. Attaining the ability to evaluate one’s entire life was an essential goal of the First Week, which culminated in making a general confession. The general confession was intended to jump-start a conversion process by inculcating a comprehensive understanding of one’s own history. Rather than merely listing sins committed since the last confession, the exercise of considering sins that spanned a lifetime encouraged the practitioner to develop the ability to recognize enduring patterns of decision making, and to narrate the effects of par ticular types of sin in his or her life. What we see in these itinerant missions was a pedagogical process. Early modern Catholics were to become literate in the reading of selves. This required attending to memory, as past instances of sin must be brought to mind. How did this work? We have already seen the body primed by communal ritual action. Calatayud’s guide for itinerant missionaries is instructive for the subsequent fine-tuning of the manner in which sin was brought to mind. The confessor should strive to understand the full context of the par ticular sin that plagues the penitent. What will provide the next occasion to sin? What are the general customs that surround falling into this vice? Which persons cause him to touch himself, or others or to say ugly words, or to commit sins with various single women? Here Calatayud takes a moment to expand upon the possible persons with whom one might sin (married women, relatives) as well as offering further suggestions for the possible sins that might plague one habitually: swearing, lying, cursing, working on holy days. The difference between a general confession as understood by early modern Jesuits and the more traditional auricular confession is best illustrated by comparing the frustrations expressed by medieval priests who complained that their penitents gave their confessions in a “vague chronological order” and had to be instructed in the manner of sorting sins into categories of “venial” or “mortal.”  Structured around the Ten Commandments and the seven deadly sins, late medieval catechisms instructed penitents (and confessional guidebooks instructed priests) to measure and weigh each sin in order to assign the proper penance. In other words, a notion of ordering was not unique to the modern period: a particular ordering was attached to each type of confession, but the form of order

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attained by the general confession was, indeed, quite distinctive. In contrast to the listing of sins, the general confession, building upon the narrative methods found in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, both constructed and reconfigured the sinner’s view of the self. The Ten Commandments still played a role, but were utilized differently, as we shall see below. The Jesuit confessor would go through the commandments to try to teach the penitent how to provoke a deeper examination of conscience and to find the par ticular sin that required special attention. This is a key point: nowhere in Calatayud’s discussion of the commandments does he suggest that penitents be taught the Decalogue. In fact, the Decalogue was deemed useful, especially for the uneducated, because it was assumed that they knew them quite well. Instead, running through the commandments could prompt a person to articulate sins that were shameful or overwhelming (abultados). Calatayud drove this point home: the commandments save time, prevent penitents from “beating around the bush,” and drive things more quickly to a crisis point, especially for the uneducated who do not know how to decipher the various circumstances that have brought them to a state of sin. The word that I have translated here as “decipher” is interesting: desentrañar was related to opening the human body. Las entrañas are alternatively the heart (of the matter) or the entrails (the bowels). The word here implies an untangling of something wound up inside the abdomen. The dexterous confessor had the skilled hand. He could get to the substance—ir al grano—get straight to the point, putting all that was superfluous to the side. The doctor-confessor pushed aside and unraveled the entangled entrails, so he could see, touch, and heal. Par ticular sins were not categorized as venial or mortal but rather, selectively systematized to fit into a narrative account of a sinner on the path toward salvation. Auricular confession (listing sins orally) accounted for each sin as a distinct event that might be categorized (i.e., venial or mortal). Listen to the voice of a late medieval reformer, who complained about the resistance to his efforts to inculcate the Ten Commandments as the bedrock of moral instruction and selfexamination, as he labeled certain penitents “obstinate, inflexible, ignorant, blind and asses! asses! asses! when preparing for confession, not bothering themselves about the thousands upon thousands of sins they have perpetrated against the Law of God!”  In stark contrast, Father Calatayud dismissed this listing of sins “as if by the pound.” He considered this litany of mixed-up stories inefficient and ineffective. General confession, by contrast, promoted—as the name indicates—a more comprehensive narrative about sin. Margaret Somers’s analysis of “narrativity” is useful to understand the difference between auricular and general confession in both style and effect. Her discussion of “emplotment” sheds light on the process meant to be attained in the general confession: “Indeed the chief characteristic of narrative is that it renders

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understanding only by connecting (however unstable) parts to a constructed configuration or a social network. . . . Without emplotment, events or experiences could be categorized only according to a taxonomical scheme.”  By means of emplotment, the sinner recognizes herself as an actor within a social context. Ideally, the penitent would walk away from this practice of plotting out her entire life with a clear view of the areas in her life that required improvement. In fact, when making a general confession the penitent might include sins that had been absolved in prior confessions if they were important to understanding her own personal life history. In a Mexican Inquisition case that I examine in Chapter 5, this “Jesuit style” of confession was considered too personal, driven by too many particular questions: where do you live, with whom? These Jesuits were condemned for breaking the promise of confidentiality in the confessional when they asked for particulars like names and addresses. And yet one can appreciate this interrogation as linked to the narrative structure of the Spiritual Exercises that prompted one to reflect on phases of life: time, place, state of life, and circumstances. Conscious of the power of confessional narrative to both reconfigure individual identities and to influence social transformation, Jesuit aims exceeded absolution. Instead, they labored to inculcate a habitual way of thinking that would carry beyond the confessional, a means of controlling the passions and ordering one’s decision making in everyday life. Finally, the contrast between auricular “listing” and general “narrating” is evident in the visual prompts that each style of confession drew upon to aid the penitent. Late medieval iconography might show two hands in which each finger indicated a single commandment. In contrast, a seventeenth-century illustrated version of the Spiritual Exercises shows a single hand that served as a visual guide to self-evaluation (Figure 3). The palm is inscribed with the reminder that one’s soul was in one’s own hand and prepared the penitent for a general confession. It was suggested as a mnemonic device—it was “handy,” as it were—for carry ing meditative practices into everyday life. The hand prompted an individual to give thanks to God (the thumb); seek inspiration from the Holy Spirit (pointer finger); full examination of conscience written (middle finger); heartfelt confession (ring finger); and vow to guard against sin (pinky finger). The image does not merely represent the exacting self-scrutiny and attention to soul and self advocated by the Spiritual Exercises; the hand provides itself as a physical technique, an embodied method of self-evaluation. One could look swift ly to the hand and, although still running through a series of suggested steps, the examination produced the story of a single sin, not a laundry list. The image is only suggestive. Let us look at how the general confession worked on the ground. Zappa’s first written account describes an itinerant mission that began in September 1685, ten years after his arrival in New Spain. From the beginning of Zappa’s account, it is clear that the primary goal of the mission was to prepare

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Figure 3. From Exercitia spiritualia S.P. Ignatij Loyolae. Antuerpiae : Apud Joannem Meursium, 1676. Courtesy of the Cudahy Rare Book Library at Loyola University, Chicago.

the townspeople for communion by offering the opportunity to confess. But Zappa’s sermons admonished not only those who shunned confession; rather, he informed the entire congregation that they had been confessing badly and were silent in the confessional. What did Zappa mean by “silence” in the confessional? According to Zappa, penitents consistently failed to reveal to the priest all of their sins when confessing. Shame was the most common roadblock to a complete confession. Turning to Calatayud once again, we see that the penitent labored

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and “gave birth” to a narrative of sin. When struggling to deliver his evil deeds over to the priest (le cuesta mucho el parir su maldad), Calatayud admonished missionaries to be “sweet” with penitents, “to animate and expand” the penitent: “You are silencing something out of fear, don’t be silly, don’t be silly, you won’t have surprised me with how much you need to tell me.” The missionary should supply the penitent with confidence that the sin, once confessed, would be absolved, enabling the penitent to receive the Eucharist in a state of grace. With a dexterous hand, “the Confessor removes the snake, and with labor and charity, disposes of and absolves them.” The penitent was to feel the confessor’s healing hand. The fundamental message that Zappa tried to convey in his mission sermons was that all penitents ought to make good confessions without letting shame “silence their sins.” The act of narrating the life story, as proposed by the general confession, not only furthered a personalized understanding of sin; early modern Jesuits believed the format actually facilitated the complete telling of all sins. By emphasizing the narrative structure, rather than the details of sin large and small, one’s sins and failings would come spilling out like so many details of a plot-driven story. Such narrative practices were critical to preparing for an apt completion of the general confession. “The greatest assistance to those who were wracked by shame,” wrote Father Zappa in a letter reporting back to the father provincial in Mexico City, “was to make a general confession of all their life.” Missionaries were advised to listen for what pained the penitent most, to elicit from her “those weighty sins that cause disquiet.” Accordingly, the general confession allowed the penitent to evaluate her life in order to pinpoint persistent ly problematic areas. “Many people heard the sermons and, with the light granted by God, they recognized what they had committed in the confessional. Spaniards and Indians both were inspired to confess themselves after they discovered the one sin which caused them the most shame, this shame that had silenced them for many years.” A complete confession required soul searching. Father Zappa recommended that penitents discover the single sin that caused them the greatest difficulty. The act of sorting out sins in an effort to discern thematic unity was an entirely different exercise from listing the wrongs committed since the last visit to the parish priest. Accordingly, sin was not an isolated act or a broken rule. This narrative format enabled an understanding of sin as a much more powerful and dynamic internal force. Stephen Greenblatt may be correct in his assertion that self-fashioning takes place in relation to something that is perceived as strange or hostile. Zappa described self-fashioning in the confessional staged against a strange presence within. Whether a voice, a pain, an ache, or source of shame, the inner alien was quieted and healed through an act of narration.

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This was a complicated process because even when inspired to make a general confession, most penitents were not well versed in the practice. Calatayud explained the many practical issues involved in training people to find that “one” sin. His advice was directed to the priest, not the penitent, and once again, he emphasized time management. Getting the penitent to this point could be difficult—“they waste a lot of time beating around the bush,” he moans. To get them swift ly to the point, the confessor must apply “the strong cautery of correction, followed by sweetness in the confessional.” Technically, “cautery” was a medical term that involved the removal of wounds, ulcers, blisters, and such by means of application of a white-hot iron. In late medieval and early modern medicine, cautery was applied to restore humoral balance and was a key remedy (among bloodletting, hot or cold foods, and medicines) to “regulating the quantity and temperamental quality of the humors.” Surgeons or barbers used cautery for internal complaints that were referred to as “complexional disorders.” Hot instruments would “direct good or bad humors to different parts of the body.” Thus, cautery was a potent confessional metaphor and seems to work well as a figure of speech for how confessors would work to draw a sin out of the penitent’s body, “animating and dilating” the penitent until what was unarticulated moved through the body from heart to mouth. In the confessional, one of these “hot instruments,” as I have mentioned, entailed the searing dismissal of a penitent without granting absolution. He ought to be given more time to examine his conscience, to be “sent home in the arms of his own disconsolation.” The confessor, too, had to have “the heart and the spirit” to quickly settle these cases, especially because penitents might argue with the priest. A most annoyed Calatayud described how penitents might attempt to cajole the confessor into just giving swift absolution. “Come on, toss me the absolution, Father,” seems to be the best way to translate what Calatayud called the impertinence of the penitent who would say, “Écheme la absolución, Padre.” “What are we to do in such cases?” lamented Calatayud. What, he asked, ought the missionary do with these disdainful penitents who just playact sorrow? Apply the cauterio fuerte by demanding of the penitent: “So, you really want the hangman’s noose, do you?” If the penitent continued to ask for absolution, Calatayud recommended replying, “Do you think you will trap me or fool me as you have other confessors?” Searing words might push the ill spirits out, saving the penitent from the noose that could result from a false absolution (which would have been the case had the penitent taken communion while not in a state of grace). The latter serves as a reminder that, despite the pools of ink spilled around and about confessional practices, the momentum driving this self-discovery was the theological concern that individuals receive the Eucharist more frequently and, most important, in a state of grace.

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Father Zappa seemed to have a gentler touch; he never claimed to have chastised any penitents, but he did describe instructing them. During one confession Zappa demanded from the penitent to know “if his sins had caused him pain. He responded, no. He had no suffering in his head or stomach, nor other part of his body and it seemed he had no sorrows, although he wished to quite desperately.” Zappa had to teach this man not merely how to go through the steps of saying a confession, but how to literally feel the pain of sin. In Zappa’s own terms, it was due to their “infinite ignorance” that so much of his own labor in the confessional was directed toward making penitents understand that, either by ignorance or malice, they had confessed badly. The prudent confessor, Calatayud would have replied, was compelled to do this work. He needed to understand the state of conscience of the penitent, his “sin” literacy (advertido y de letras), that is, his ability to read and interpret himself, which is apparent in the lines that followed: one should “be cautious with ordinary people, officials, youth, women, laborers, who usually come to make a general confession without sufficient self-examination . . . perhaps out of their rudeness and inability [poco alcance] and lack of time to examine themselves; still because of their occupations . . . or because they lack instruction.” Zappa operated with a similar set of rules. Only by successfully conveying—teaching—this embodied understanding of sin as pain that could be both located and narrativized would Zappa be able (as he so hoped) to “extract infinite souls from the clutches of the Dev il.” In another instance, a man heard the Jesuits preach about the example of the Princess of England and, fearing that he had not properly confessed in his lifetime, was moved to make a confession of “his entire life.” However, according to Father Zappa, the man “told many sins of the same species and it seemed that he could not find the resolve to tell all of his sins.” Zappa denied him absolution. Disconsolate, he left the confessional. He was admonished to commend himself to the Virgin, her saints and archangels. He returned the next day to make a complete confession. In a self-congratulatory tone, Zappa wrote that the man had praised the Jesuits’ deft ness for hearing his sins without being scandalized by them. Thus he was able to confess his “hidden sin” and left “full of consolation.” Because so many people succeeded in recounting their inner turmoil, Zappa characterized the mission a success, a hard-won triumph: “Almost all of the confessions heard in the time of the Mission were general confessions. Even though we were aided by the great fervor of the very reverent Augustinian fathers, it was still not possible to serve the number of people who answered the call to confess themselves.” To accommodate the greatest number of people, the Jesuits and the priests or friars who assisted them heard confessions well into the night. Because Jesuits alone were not responsible for confessions, writers like Calatayud

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wrote directives for managing priests who were unaccustomed to leading penitents through the general confession. Penitents spent long periods of time speaking to the priests and, as we have now seen, were often required to return more than once. Consider the following example of a man who had been married to a slave in Spain, but as Father Zappa told his story: Here in the Indies he made a good marriage and had seven sons. His wife had died, and now he wished to confess but was too afraid. After hearing the plática on the previous day, he pondered the gravity of having taken a false oath in the marriage ceremony. He took three days to examine and confess himself, and because he was a capable person he made his complete confession in writing.

Many of the confessions were quite lengthy, as people confessed the transgressions they had committed over an extensive period of time. One man had not confessed entirely for sixty years. Note, he had not failed to meet the annual sacramental requirement; rather, he came to confession now “ashamed of his continued sacrilege of repeated [incomplete] confessions.” Similarly, a woman had experienced sixteen years of “silence in the confessional” but had continued to go to communion. This caused her pain and sorrow and, wishing to be free of this, she sought out confession with the visiting priest. The novelty of the general confession and, importantly, the urgency that individuals expressed to know that all sins had been confessed and absolved, was evident in the reactions and commentary purportedly elicited by the practice. The elderly exclaimed that they had only been allowed to reach old age so that they would be taught this way of confessing sins about which they had kept quiet all of their lives. Zappa alleged that some of the elderly had been granted long lives, “some as much as one hundred years old, so they could make a good confession in the time of the Mission.” Accordingly, he cautioned that those advanced in age be confessed with great care, given that they were so close to death and often had traveled great distances. Zappa dramatically described the elderly “practically dragging themselves across the ground in search of the Fathers to confess them, declaring the desire to confess was the only thing that kept them from death.” At first glance, it appears that people knew their sins but were afraid to tell of them. For some, this was precisely the case. Several people explained their fear that, should they confess their darkest sins, they might damage their reputations with the local priests and their communities, thus the importance of the fresh set of ears that the visiting Jesuits provided. One woman was afraid to confess her sins because her confessors knew her as a pious woman with the reputation of a good Christian woman among her peers. But having heard the pláticas and exemplos of the mission, she commended herself to the Holy Virgin and “asked

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Christ our Lord for some relief from this wound of embarrassment and then confessed with copious tears and much clarity.” Another man had fallen into the grave fault of “slothfulness” for the space of six months. Father Zappa tells his story as follows: He had a good reputation, so on the pretext of business, he went to Mexico and other towns in search of confessors who did not know him with the intention of making a good confession. But at the time of execution, he felt too much shame and thus never had the nerve to make a good confession. He gave aid to the poor and assisted the sick, gave them gifts, cured them, etc. He had acquired the reputation of great virtue and sanctity, but in his soul there lived such pain and agony, such was the state of his sin and sacrilege. He heard the exemplo of the Princess of England and said that inside himself he experienced the same things that had happened to her. He vowed with the help of Our Lady and Saint Francis Xavier he would confess to one of the missionary Fathers, resolute to confess well. But at the time to make it, he was overcome with embarrassment and suffocation that he lacked the spirit to confess well. He was left even worse off and more affl icted and unconsoled. But finally he was encouraged when he heard the priests say that they themselves fall into sin and sacrilege.

In admitting his own failure, the priest claimed to offer himself as a role model, thus making the practice of confession more accessible to this penitent. Father Zappa ended the story at that point, leaving it to the reader to assume that the man was moved to confess by the admissions of priestly failings. Besides, Zappa had other exemplos to relate. The next case was a woman whose inhibition to confess was described as somatic failure: An Indian woman came to talk to the priest because she had spent the previous night in a house that was haunted and because of this she came with the resolution to confess herself completely, covering her entire life. She wanted to say the name of Jesus but her throat closed. She thought this was a punishment given by God for having remained silent in the confessional all these years. She passed the night crying out her faults and asking God’s mercy, and fi nally the next day she made a complete confession.

According to Zappa, the people had a great desire to confess in this new manner. Zappa visited the territory of Tulanzingo sometime between 1685 and 1687. There the Indians claimed that the fathers were not men but angels sent by God to effect their healing and salvation. Predominantly Otomí speakers, they expressed delight in hearing sermons preached in their own language. As Zappa described it, hearing the word of God in Otomí lifted the fog that had hung over the villagers’ practice of Christianity. Preaching to the townspeople in their own language “enlightened them. . . . Never had they heard the truth and

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the mysteries of the faith so clearly explained. Now they could begin to be Christians.” In the confessional one man got down on his knees to kiss Father Zappa’s feet, covering them with tears. “Do not leave us unconsoled,” and when one would approach [the priest] to confess, everyone [with] hands in the air and shouting asked the padres to confess them, practically telling publicly of their sins and their faults. “Father, confess me for I have walked so many leagues in search of you and I don’t want to lose this occasion.” Others said, “Father, do not leave me for I am a great sinner and it has been many years that I have not confessed.”

In Zappa’s third-person narrative, the scene resembled the biblical story of Christ surrounded by the lepers who were desperate to be healed by his touch. He wrote: “The force of this sight moved the priest and gave birth to such pain in his heart to see that he could not satisfy everyone at the same time.” The least he could do was console them by promising that he would not leave until all were confessed. In Zappa’s view, people came to him in search of solace and consolation. In a tragic example, a man had attempted suicide by hanging himself from a tree. A passing stranger cut him down, but Zappa commented starkly: “Unfortunately the man neither died nor improved his life. Despairing of attaining God’s mercy, it was well that he did not cease to commend himself to Our Lady for her intercession and moved by the pláticas of the Mission, he confessed with much consolation and pain.” Catharsis was a kind of suffering that carried a positive valence. Consolation could be found in the expression of pain, that keen desire for God that was experienced as simultaneously agonizing, ardent, and consoling, which reminds us that pain and consolation were not necessarily construed as opposed to one another. For many penitents, a failure to confess was even more complicated. They could not list their sins because they did not know their sins. “Some said, confess me, Father, for I have a grave sin that I can discover only with you.” The very act of confessing in the format of a life narrative enabled them to reveal sins hidden even from themselves. These examples disclose the creative power of the general confession. In the village of Otompán, we find one such example of ambiguous silence in the confessional. While the woman acknowledged “sin” as an enduring presence that caused almost physical impairment, the particularity of the sin remained unclear to the penitent herself and was only revealed through the act of narration: An Indian woman had committed a sin and kept it quiet por empacho in her confessions over many years, such that her conscience was constantly clothed with unquiet and uneasiness. Once when praying in front of an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, she asked, with a great urging, that she be sent a confessor to her satis-

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faction, to leave her without fear of discovering the wound in her soul, for only due to this did she lack the power to confess well. The Virgin answered in a clear voice that she should not fear, that some priests very much to her liking would be sent to the town and she would have the power to confess. In a few days the missionary fathers arrived. The india heard the spiritual talks in her language recommending that the villagers confess entirely their sins, even the most grave in the world. She understood then that these were the priests sent by the Virgin Mary to heal her soul, and accordingly she took pleasure in making a general confession with one of the Fathers, referring to everything that had happened before, including the encounter and conversation with Mary.

The account orbits enigmatically around sin already known and sin to be discovered through the intersubjective process of confession. The ambiguity of sin itself could cause pain or anguish, often described as physical. The fleshly experience of spiritual anguish paralleled contemporary understandings of melancholy as an illness associated with the abdominal area, particularly the liver, where an overaccumulation of black bile was thought to produce toxic emissions that addled the brain. This corresponds to the Indian woman’s association between her own guilt and her physical experience of empacho—which referred literally to an ache in the stomach and lack of appetite. Repression of sin could lead to the retention of bodily wastes. Yet to say something sin empacho—without blockage, we might say—was to be unashamed. This was not merely a manner of speech, but rather language that demonstrates contemporary understanding of how the body was affected by sin and how speaking sin healed the entire person. Another woman was portrayed as having been “silent” about her sins for twenty-four years. In the account that follows, she described her sin as a pervasive pain of unknown origin: Since she was a small girl she spent many days praying the rosary to Our Lady to whom she was most devoted and also to our savior Jesus. Three or four times she saw the same Señora [Mary] who knew her fault and ordered her to confess; she continued very desconsolada, crying without cease, asking her mother on many occasions to tell her the cause of her sorrow and disconsolation. Her mother replied that it was because she had seen Our Lady who gave her some complaints even though she did not declare the cause. She prayed many times asking her [Mary] to carry her to a confessor who did not know her but she never found one. Soon the Jesuit Fathers arrived with the Mission and she heard the first plática and then she confessed with much pain.

Father Zappa and others usually refrained from enumerating the various sins of their penitents. His accounts are littered with tantalizing innuendos but no actual description of sins committed. For example, “Another person had lived many years with great comfort and scandal.” As we have already seen in many

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of the previous examples, even when the penitent finally confessed the hidden source of pain and anguish, Father Zappa kept the reader in the dark about the nature of the sin committed, never revealing, for example, the source of the pain that antagonized the woman for twenty-four years. We have seen that the general confession was a ritual of self-discovery, intended to help people overcome their shame or aid them in discerning the sin that had been ailing them. The effectiveness of this ministry might be explained by the manner in which the preacher’s sermons called into question “narratives of self” that individuals had heretofore accepted, or at least the “face” that they had maintained with their peers. Recall the woman who feared confessing because she had a reputation for being a good Christian. Now she was forced to confront her own internal doubts and refashion a coherent narrative of selfhood that considered her public face and her private doubts. In this chapter, I have argued that the Jesuit itinerant missions were an evangelical revival that utilized communal spiritual practices to promote individualized interiority. The Jesuits believed that in transforming the individual Christian’s understanding of sin, they could encourage a refashioning of the self that would take shape in the activities leading up to confession and culminating in more frequent communion. Whether describing emotional community gatherings, or private moments of anguished contemplation, the mission accounts detailed an animated process through which the Jesuit missionaries introduced new modes of self-reflection and self-fashioning. It is tempting to point out the fleeting nature of Jesuit reforms. After two to four weeks in a town, the Jesuits left. Many people, perhaps all, eventually went back to their sinning ways. Where is the change? The concept of penance in the Catholic Church has always been a dialectical one, with confession an important part of one’s personal struggle to stay in God’s graces. The ritual process expects failure and offers reintegration. “Success” certainly did not mean that people went forward to “sin no more,” although that was certainly what they were admonished to do. Sin was a human constant. The achievements of the Jesuit missions, rather, came in the introduction of a new manner of confessing that entailed a much more gradual shift in consciousness, a new way of seeing, discussing, or arguing about the nature of sin in one’s life. It is worth commenting upon the layers of narrativity in Zappa’s writings. This chapter and the last chapter were, in part, about the power of words to move people. Zappa encouraged people to reform their lives or, at the very least, to make a good confession about past sins. His appeal to me, a reader of sometimes dull archival materials, resides in his power as a storyteller. Overall, I surmise that Zappa’s liveliness on the page reflects his own narrative powers at the pulpit. But perhaps most critical for his penitents and parishioners, I imagine that his

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penchant for a good story also made Zappa a perceptive and evocative listener in the confessional. His penitents’ intentions to confess completely were often ambushed by shame. Sometimes the only tangible aspect of one’s sins was a condition that was difficult to describe or categorize but that was commonly called “my pain” or “this misery.” The act of finding a name for sin in the confessional could relieve ailments that had been described as physical. Sins that were hidden from the sinner herself were unearthed and spoken through a process of dialogue. Naming sin was a “talking cure” that helped identify one’s personal avenue toward reform. But I have tried to refrain from leaving my explanations at the level of narrative; rather, I have explored talking itself as a physical act that provoked an embodied response, and how embodied action elicited words. How did an early modern Catholic perceive an interior self? Th is chapter has been built upon the premise that “knowing” one’s interior self was a problem of perception. Here Merleau-Ponty’s musings on interiority have been my provocation. He wrote, “Truth does not ‘inhabit’ only ‘the inner man,’ or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.” He understood concepts and objects to come into being through the intermediary of a mobile body, with consciousness trailing after embodied perception. He wrote, “Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body . . . and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it. . . . Motility, then, is not, as it were, a handmaid of consciousness, transporting the body to that point in space of which we have formed a representation beforehand.” In this chapter I have explored how a concept of “self” or “interiority” could take shape in the realm of moving bodies. I have explicated the contours of penitential reform promulgated in the Society of Jesus’s itinerant missions in order to understand the ritual world that called forth an “inner man.” In tracing the emergence of forms of modern subjectivity in a Catholic context, the material presented in this chapter simultaneously enables and destabilizes our assumptions about modern subjectivity. Embodiment, motility, and materiality have to be accounted for in the emergence of all concepts. The concept of a “self” is in no way exempt. I have sought to understand the possibility of the emergence of something new (or newer) by decapitating the rational actor (i.e., the assumption that change happens because historical subjects thought change was a good idea). Rather, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra showed us how logic follows the foot: “My heels twitched, then my toes hearkened to understand you and rose, for the dancer has his ear in his toes.” Thought appears as “logical” only if we bracket what body has enabled. The spiritual practices introduced in the seventeenthcentury itinerant missions in New Spain, particularly the general confession and the examination of conscience, drew heavily upon narrative practices that fostered a new, individualized sense of spiritual selfhood. While Jesuits made use of

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drama and spectacle to encourage participation in the popular missions, the spiritual practices they advocated led to an increasingly personal path to salvation that fostered a new, individualized sense of spiritual selfhood. While Jesuits made use of drama and spectacle to encourage participation in the popular missions, the spiritual practices they advocated led to an increasingly personal path to salvation that encouraged sinners to stand alone before God.

5

Facts Houses, Books, and Other Remains

In the last chapter we saw how the Jesuit itinerant missionary introduced key aspects of Ignatian spirituality such as the act of contrition, the examination of conscience, and, most important, the general confession. The itinerant missionaries reached Catholic laity in locales that were usually beyond the reach of the Jesuit’s everyday purview. The Society’s quotidian ministries were largely confined to the urban centers where the order had established its churches and colleges, or to the mission stations in northern Mexico. In this chapter I look to other ways in which Jesuit spiritual practices were made available to and taken up by urban Catholics in New Spain, namely with the foundation of retreat houses dedicated to giving the Spiritual Exercises, as well as the publication of devotional guides that facilitated more widespread access to Ignatian spiritual methods. The chapter closes with a discussion of a case that came before the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The case demonstrates that in an increasingly heterogeneous colonial Mexico (by the time of Zappa’s arrival in the late seventeenth century, New Spain had been witness to well over a century of cultural mixing of persons of African, Spanish, and Indian descent) the fact that Jesuit confession and meditation were made easy and accessible for todos modos de personas could be problematic. HOU S E S

The first retreat house dedicated to giving the Spiritual Exercises in the Americas was established in Córdoba, Argentina, in 1720; the first house in New Spain followed shortly on its heels in 1725. But before taking note of the construction of this establishment in Puebla de Los Angeles, we need to turn our attention back 131

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across the Atlantic to pick up where we left off regarding the birth of such retreat houses in Europe. Following the collaborative efforts of Vincent Huby, SJ, and Catherine de Francheville in seventeenth-century France (see Chapter 2), the Jesuit retreat houses began to proliferate in France, first in Vannes (1663), then in the surrounding regions in the following order: Quimper (1670), Rennes (1675), Nantes (1676), and Caen (1678). Finally Paris followed suit and constructed a house in 1682, almost twenty years later. The “flow” of this Jesuit ministry is fascinating. As I have mentioned, the impetus for itinerant missions came from urban Jesuit colleges and utilized aspects of the Spiritual Exercises in what was otherwise the format of an evangelical revival. But rural communities took the lead in demanding a more prolonged encounter with the Spiritual Exercises in the more solitary retreat form. In other words, in France, the development of retreat houses was not driven by urban demand, but instead was tied to a grassroots movement unleashed largely in response to itinerant missions in a highly contested area of France in the post-Reformation era. In contrast, the Parisian Jesuits merely continued to give the retreat to some twenty or so men per year as part of their work at the Jesuit college. Demands from the laity changed the Society of Jesus’s attitude toward the Spiritual Exercises, and only then did the Society establish the necessary infrastructure to support the Spiritual Exercises for the laity as a permanent ministry. A growing number of retreat houses and colleges scattered throughout France had the necessary quarters to house exercitants. Even so, the number of colleges and retreat houses are not an accurate indicator of the demand for the Exercises. Often the Jesuits simply used other locations, especially when offering what came to be known as “open exercises.” Similar to Catherine de Francheville’s early experiments with coordinating retreats for wealthy women, the “open” exercises offered a format in which townspeople would meet at the local church to be instructed in method, and then return to their homes to make some of the meditations from the Exercises. Thus the sacred space of the retreat house or church found its extension in the home. The Jesuits distributed leaflets, books, and medallions during the Exercises in an effort to assist meditation in the home. Devotional guides instructed laity to create silent spaces in their lives, so that even when surrounded by others, they could call upon el ambiente de recogimiento— an atmosphere of withdrawal or retreat. In the early seventeenth century, Spanish Jesuits vehemently opposed the movement toward popularizing the exercises that was taking place in France. Luís de la Palma (1559–1641), author of Camino Espiritual, best typifies this attitude. La Palma was a purist who advocated keeping the Exercises in their original format, taking one full month to complete. La Palma insisted that the “pure method” ought to be offered only to capable elites and not “diluted” for the masses. La Palma referred to the Spiritual Exercises as a “science” that followed a precise

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method. From our discussion of Acquaviva’s Industriae, it is clear that spiritual direction in its ideal form would develop as an intensely intersubjective relationship between a spiritual director and his directee. La Palma pointed out that a director who guided a group of persons, large or small, would lose the opportunity to “examine the disposition” of the individual and tailor the Spiritual Exercises to him. Thus, he repudiated the notion that the Exercises could be adequately adapted en masse and took issue with French reformers like Vincent de Paul or  the Jesuit Huby, among others, who persisted in viewing the Exercises as an  adaptable tool capable of fomenting personal reforms on a large scale. La Palma continued to deride the “adapted” form as akin to not making the Exercises at all. Despite the conservative attitude of Jesuits like La Palma, the Exercises became popular among more than just the members of the Jesuit order in Spain. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Exercises were given in the Jesuit colleges primarily to Jesuits and those who aspired to join the Society of Jesus. As the order grew, special quarters were added to many colleges in order to accommodate the increasing number of exercitants. By the eighteenth century, these quarters were transformed permanently into retreat houses for the laity. In Spain, the expansion of Exercises among the laity was a consequence of the special place that Ignatian spirituality held in Jesuit-sponsored Marian congregations. Members were required to make the Exercises at a Jesuit college prior to entry. As early as 1615, members of Marian congregations began to make annual retreats in a group, to renew themselves spiritually. These congregation members comprised the bulk of lay recipients of the Exercises in seventeenth-century Spain. The annual “open exercises” made by congregation members encouraged the practice of offering the retreat to approximately twenty laypersons each week during Lent, in addition to members of the Jesuit congregations. Accordingly, the numbers of people who made the Spiritual Exercises in Spain grew steadily throughout the seventeenth century, however, not at the pace set in France. Nonetheless, the biannual reunions of Marian congregations during Lent and Advent inspired other laity to ask for the Exercises. Iparraguirre also notes that, even though Spanish Jesuits did not encourage widespread practice of the solitary retreat, Spanish spiritual literature advocated regular meditation. Guides to daily meditation were impregnated with themes drawn directly from the Spiritual Exercises. In other words, one did not have to undertake a solitary retreat to become acquainted with Ignatian methods. We will have opportunity to examine how these threads come together in the eighteenth century in Chapter 7, when we see how guides promulgating devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus were linked to Jesuit congregations as well as private devotion in the home. The development of Jesuit retreat houses in New Spain followed a pattern similar to that in Spain. The Jesuits offered the Exercises to laity almost from the

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time of their arrival in Mexico City in 1572. In the annual letter of 1582, for example, de la Plaza wrote that the Society of Jesus had much success with the Exercises, and that people’s lives had been notably transformed. He offered no details about the number of people making them, but did remark that the Exercises were given in retreat form at the Colegio de Mexico. The annual letter of 1597 referred to devout members of the Congregation of Our Lady, who gathered to make the Exercises “accommodated to their state and occupations.” By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Exercises were given to laity and priests during school breaks at the Jesuit colleges San Ildefonso and San Andres. The first Casa de Ejercicios was built in 1725 in Puebla de Los Angeles, premiering in 1727, as reported in the Gaceta de México in February 1728: Brought to completion in this city [of Puebla] a house, a sumptuous building, adjacent to the Colegio de Espiritu Santo de la Compañía de Jesus, the purpose of which is to promote the most useful devotion of the Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, as much for the Religious inhabitants of the College, at the times determined by their Constitutions, as for the secular clergy . . . as have been practiced by the most illustrious Señor Dr. D. Juan Antonio de Lardizabal y Elorza, the bishop of the diocese; but also, for everyone else [las demás personas], who wish to leave the business of this century, with the wish to retire for a time to seek success in more important business.

A few years after the first announcement in the Gaceta de México, there was a second, slightly more detailed account of this casa in Puebla. On the eighth of December of the past year, [1]731, the nuns of San Jeronimo entered into the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, and following their example, so have the other Communities, and even the Recollect, not able to have it together, due to their small number, but each one retired for ten or twelve days to make them, with indescribable observance: for those who made them in Community [para no faltar á el Choro, y demás Oficinas] were divided in two retreats, and every day a Religious of the Company of Jesus went to them, to give the sermon on the Exercise for the following day, and to instruct them in the holy observances of this retreat; on those days, they did not attend to any other thing, but to those labors on the schedule [que a los empleos de la distribución], keeping a perfect silence, detached from all human commerce, and even in those very precious exercises, they go about with their faces covered with the Veils: they would find themselves in those days in notable mortifications, conducted with tenderness and edification, and very abundant fruit, as have experienced the other many Ecclesiasticos y Seculares, who have withdrawn to have these Exercises in the Casa that was constructed for this purpose, next to the Colegio de Espiritu Santo, so capacious and well disposed, all with vaulted ceilings and exquisite rooms, decorated with appropriate paintings, very proportionate cells, well-appointed with necessary books

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appropriate to the topic. . . . One only has to see the place to be convinced of the beauty [of the Spiritual Exercises].

The article in the Gaceta reported that not only religious men and women but also many laypeople took this opportunity to “attend to the business of their souls,” taking note of the punctuality of participants who carefully attended to the schedule. This was “of great edification.” The author notes that from late summer 1729 to December 1731, almost 1,500 people had made the Spiritual Exercises at the Casa de Ejercicios in Puebla. He also noted: “The Colegio de Espiritu Santo attends to all of the Exercitants with everything that is necessary in those days of retreat; to that end, there are servants who sweep, provide light and other [ser vices to avoid] distractions.” There was an important exception: the most illustrious Señor Doctor Juan Antonio de Lardizabal y Elorza (bishop) made the Exercises with such zeal that he did not bringing a single servant with him, the humble bishop therein providing an “edifying” example. In the late 1740s, the Jesuits broke ground on a retreat house in Mexico City that would be attached to the Jesuit college of San Andrés. Father Juan Antonio de Oviedo began giving retreats in 1751, although one of its chapels was not complete until 1760. By 1755, approximately ten retreats were given each year to approximately thirty-four persons per retreat. The French Jesuits had clearly provided a model. In private notes, Oviedo wrote that he had been moved while making the Spiritual Exercises to consider a house for women: “On the third day I felt moved to procure means for the Exercises to be given to women, in the form that I saw in Marseille and which is done in other locations; but this I see would be very difficult to do.” The matter, he concluded, rested in God’s hands. By the time Augustín Márquez (Decorme called him “the saint”) came to run the Casa de Ejercicios de Araceli at San Andres in 1764, he not only continued to give the monthly retreat to some thirty persons but frequently offered an additional two or three sessions each month. He augmented the retreat house to make the Exercises accessible to the poor. To gain a sense of how the Spiritual Exercises were given in Mexico, we can refer to a broadsheet that was distributed to those entering to make the retreat at the Casa de Araceli. This single sheet was titled “Distribución,” and it offered the exercitants an idea about the way the next eight days would unfold and how they ought to behave during that time. Conceivably, the broadsheet could also have served as an advertisement for those curious about making the Exercises. In the afternoon, you can enter until five o’clock so you can arrange your rooms, see the House, and enter into the Offices, greet each other and chat: until the bell rings. After the ringing, you must maintain a very exact state of recollection and an inviolable silence, such that no one leaves his cell, but only in accordance with the schedule and only for things deemed necessary. When it is necessary to say

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In contrast to the advertisement about the Puebla Casa de Ejercicios, exercitants at the Casa de Araceli would not have access to maid ser vice, nor should they bring any servants from home. The rules regarding solitude were precise: “No one can bring a maid to the House for assistance, nor can they write or draw on the walls or doors of the common areas, nor in any other part of the House.” Further, everyone must advise their families and friends to refrain from writing to them or visiting. An exception would be made in extremely urgent cases, but only with the express permission of the father director. Housekeeping rules were equally explicit: “When you retire to your room at night, you must not leave the candles burning.” The “Distribución” also made mention of some New World addictions: “Those who smoke tobacco [los que usaren Tabaco en humo], do so with necessary moderation, and never outside of your rooms.” The schedule would be full for the next eight days, down to the chocolate break—between 2:30 and 2:45 in the afternoons, for those who were “users”—a modern, but I think not inappropriate spin on the terminology used in this “Distribución,” “those who use it” [los que lo usan]—but perhaps more decorously translated as “those who are in the habit.” Leaving the exercitants at the door, a departing family member would know, if he had cared to read the “Distribución,” that by half-past five that evening the exercitants would have begun to pray the rosary and, from that moment forward, they would be completely immersed in meditation for the next eight days. In a note regarding the sacraments, the “Distribución” stated that no one was under any obligation either to take Holy Communion or to say the Mass during the eight days of Exercises (this latter note was directed at the exercitants who were priests, of course). However, on the ninth day, everyone was expected to attend the Mass together, after which they would eat breakfast as a group, presumably prior to departure from the retreat and back to their regular lives. From beginning to end, the schedule tacked back and forth between prayer, examination of prayer, and writing some notes on one’s good intentions for improving prayer. This was punctuated by some scheduled reading of devotional literature, such as the Contemptus Mundi (following the morning examination of prayer). Those who were not preparing to make a general confession were instructed to make good use of time by reading from the lives of the saints. Prayer would take place in community, in the upstairs chapel, where the Divinissima (the Eucharist) was kept; spiritual talks would be given in this small chapel, and this chapel was also where all exercitants would gather to hear the Mass. Exercitants, it was noted, should pray on their knees. Those who were unable due to weakness should stand on foot; and if even this was impossible, “you

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will sit, but with great respect and composure.” Those scheduled to make a general confession would need time to prepare and the schedule accommodated them, setting aside some hours for self-examination and “for the Lección de Historia.” The primary message conveyed in the “Distribución” was that the exercitant would be completely focused for the entire time: “You must seek to pass the whole day thinking about the points of the meditation and at night as you go to sleep, you will think of them [the meditations], and even when sleep comes you are to think of these, and each time you wake, you should be in accord with these.”

BOOK S

The “Distribución” singled out a particularly useful book to be consulted by all exercitants. From the moment they entered the Casa de Araceli, they were advised to consult the instructions written by Father Sebastián Izquierdo (1601–81), who had written a popular guide for making the Spiritual Exercises in its eightday format. Izquierdo’s Practice of the Spiritual Exercises of Our Father S. Ignacio was originally published in both Spanish and Italian in 1665, and reprinted in Mexico in 1756. The “Distribución” described Izquierdo’s book as providing very helpful pointers on prayer as well as offering a good introduction to the aims and methods of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises in the eight-day format. Father Izquierdo’s introduction to the venture that the exercitants were about to undertake contains no surprises for us: Our sainted Father [Ignatius] referred to Spiritual Exercises as any mode of examining the conscience, of meditating and contemplating, of prayer both mental and vocal, and other spiritual works which excite the soul, in order to free ourselves of all spiritual sickness; that is, of all disordered affection, and to facilitate the sure correction and to secure the ultimate aim, which is to serve, honor and glorify your Creator, complying with all his Holy Will in this life, for the merit of your works in this life to enjoy it eternally in the other.

Izquierdo’s guide was not the only book on the market. Ignacio Thomay’s La soledad Christiana was another guide to making the Spiritual Exercises in the eight-day format, and this book was also republished in Mexico in 1752. I can only conjecture as to why spiritual directors like Márquez preferred Izquierdo’s text. The Izquierdo is short (about eighty pages), to the point, and contains limited technical theological jargon. His work was also augmented by engravings to facilitate the suggested “composition of place” necessary to set the meditative mood. In contrast, Ignacio Thomay’s guide clocks in at over 500 pages. Of the three Mexican copies I examined, only one had an illustration—a single engraving of Mary inspiring Ignatius to write the Exercises. But perhaps I can best illustrate

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the difference by providing Thomay’s description of prayer: “Prayer or meditation has four parts: the first, is the preparatory prayer; the second, the three preludes; the third, the exercise of the three powers, and the fourth is the colloquy at the end.” If you compare his description of prayer with Izquierdo’s description as “any mode of examining the conscience, of meditating and contemplating, of prayer both mental and vocal, and other spiritual works which excite the soul, in order to free ourselves of all spiritual sickness,” it swift ly becomes apparent that Thomay’s interest is not in conveying the “gist” of prayer, but rather, its technical steps. Accordingly, there was nothing “easy” and “accessible” about Ignacio Thomay’s guide to the Exercises. In sharp contrast, Izquierdo emphasized the ease and accessibility of the Spiritual Exercises. Izquierdo sets up the universal applicability of the Exercises when he describes them as “revealed to a man without letters.” Here he neglected to inform his readers that Ignatius had perfected his Spiritual Exercises during his years of study in Paris. Rather, he focused on the unlettered figure, asking the reader to consider how those spiritual techniques not only attracted Ignatius’s first compañeros to him, but had also fueled the Society of Jesus’s extension into the world. Whether relying upon his guide or having a spiritual director at hand, Izquierdo instructed his readers to maximize their time in retreat. He admonished the reader to dedicate himself to the retreat, to apply himself to making the Exercises, and to take special care to follow each instruction with precision: “If you do not apply the medicine as instructed by the Doctor, the medicine will not work.” Rather, he advised, “put yourself in God’s hands with total resignation.” He emphasized punctuality and continued to underscore that keeping time as indicated in the schedule was an important part of the Exercises. Emotions should be kept in check: “Keep your joyful considerations private, maintaining the utmost recogimiento in your room, letting in only the light that you need to read. When you leave the room, observe total silence and modesty.” Some penitence was required: “Finally, decide upon some kind of corporal penitence in consultation with your Spiritual Director, or if you don’t have one, then with a Confessor.” Of course the exercitant should also be very obedient to the spiritual director (“if you have one”) and take care to describe all interior movements of the soul to him. The Exercises usually involve the participation of two persons. One is the Exercitant, who makes them; the other is the Father, or Spiritual Director, that each day practices them. Ordinarily one would make them in a room at one of the Colleges or one of the Houses of our Company, where the Exercitant remains in retreat for eight days. But if this is the only manner in which they are offered, then few will make them and few will partake of their fruit. Would that all Christians could make the Exercises once every year, as do those in the Society! Would that by another means the Exercises could walk the world! To that end, to facilitate its use for

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all men and women, of whatever state and condition they are in, I give to everyone this little book in place of a Spiritual Director. And I exhort you, guided by [this book], to make these Exercises once each year, if you will, living a Christian and holy life, in order to assure your salvation.

Izquierdo emphasized the important role of the spiritual director, but his book would have made clear to the exercitants at Araceli that there were multiple ways to make the Spiritual Exercises and that they might continue to make them on their own after the retreat. The spiritual director was only an option—more realistically, a luxury that prompted Jesuits to publish “do-it-yourself” versions of the Spiritual Exercises. The French Jesuit Jean Croiset also wrote a guide for self-directed Exercises. His most popular book, judging by the number of extant copies in Mexican libraries, was his multivolume Año Christiano that contained devotions for every day of the year. Croiset had also written Retiro spiritual para un día de cada mes, a guide to meditating at home one day each month. Here we have a glimpse of one more way in which an early modern Catholic might have incorporated the Spiritual Exercises into her everyday life without the assistance of a spiritual director. Croiset’s guide never mentions the formal retreat offered at either church or retreat house. As his title makes evident, he wrote this book to encourage and assist individuals to devote a single day of each month to solitary retreat. Yet at the end of the book, Croiset constructed an appendix that offered instructions for making a longer retreat of eight or ten days, again, on one’s own. The brief instructions function like an index, referring the exercitant back to meditations that she would have utilized once each month in the preceding year. In making the Exercises according to this indexical logic, she would be revisiting, or “re-seeking” with the aim to clarify the desire that had animated many of her own meditational experiences of the preceding year. Following Croiset’s guide, one should begin to compose herself on the evening prior to the week-long retreat by making some reflections on the previous year. Here the exercitant was instructed to refer back to “The Meditation about the Parable of the Fig Tree.” Presumably, once a month she had habitually read this advice as necessary preparation for the single day of retreat. Now she repeated these meditations in preparation for the eight days of Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Here, the exercitant was instructed to choose the days carefully. Perhaps it would be wise to plan the retreat around a holiday, Croiset suggested, especially for one who is preoccupied with business. Some suggestions included making a visit to the Holy Sacrament, if possible, and disposing oneself by making a more lengthy confession than usual. Note the “if possible.” Here we see that Croiset’s book layered chronological time (the marking of a year) over liturgical time (the rituals pertaining to the Eucharist) and, finally,

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disrupts both by staging the existential experience of “reexperiencing.” The last mode may have been the most important for the “success” of the meditative practice. While Christian theology dictated the telos—the ultimate goal was salvation in the next world—the penultimate goal was transformed living in this world. According to Croiset, a quiet, collected body enabled both. Thus he insisted repeatedly that the single retreat day each month be spent in total silence “as permitted according to one’s state.” But, importantly, in Croiset’s guide, solitude was a state of being, not a locale. The day was passed in silence with “an intense retreat within [recogimiento interior] and in a perfect solitude of the heart.” Nothing is more necessary than seclusion (again, the word is recogimiento) but the word does not reference a specific place of retreat. Rather, retreat could be created: “One must carefully remove everything that could be distracting. . . . Whether at home or in church, one must observe great recogimiento y solitude.” Given that recollection and solitude were embodied states to be attained, Croiset next offered advice for properly disposing oneself to garner the most fruit. Here he emphasized the necessity to move away from “speculation” to experience. “No, it is not enough to believe these great truths. The demons believe them! . . . Rather is it necessary to pass from speculation to practice, and it is in doing that our meditations reform our habits [costumbres].” In other words, Croiset added, no one should be content with having only read his book. But Croiset also sounds a sardonic note about the nature of thought: “Man harbors hatred in his heart for his neighbors, he is slave to his passions, yet does not wish to do the slightest violence to dominate said passions but rather, believes that he has a sincere will to save himself because he thinks sometimes about the Glory and delights he will enjoy among the blessed in Heaven!” His advice on reading meditatively makes clear that meditation ought not be a disembodied thought exercise, nor a recitation of a litany of beliefs. Here he advised reading with attention, which meant remaining vigilant over one’s affective state. Croiset suggested “lingering upon what moves us most . . . [and] to refrain from tiring oneself out reading everything. . . . Better to read little with fruit than a great deal uselessly. One must take great care, in this time more than others, to lift the heart to God with frequency, in order to avoid the dissipation of the spirit that drives ordinary conversation.” The proper focus of this conversation with God must be the exercitant’s desire for perfection. Perfection? Ah, but Croiset attempted to make this impossible task manageable, or at least approachable. As with the Jesuit general confession, he circumscribed this par ticular exercise to focus only on the single fault that most plagued the sinner. Croiset curtailed the time frame as well, advising his readers to limit themselves: “Emend faults since last month, with a great desire for perfection, victory over the dominant passion, an ardent and respectful love for Jesus in the Holy Sacrament.” This singular focal point would combat tendencies toward

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vague and general resolutions: “It is an excellent practice to determine in each retreat one par ticular defect to correct, and one virtue to practice: this single defect and virtue will be the material for the par ticular examination of conscience until the next month’s retreat.” Note that progress and transformation would be evaluated and marked from month to month. Another implicit evaluation occurred during the course of the weeklong retreat. At the end of the year, the do-it-yourself exercitant would retrace the same steps, including those first steps out into the world after the retreat. These, as Croiset commented, could be the most difficult. “One very effective method to maintain your fervor is, from this point forward, declare yourself for virtue. Do not be ashamed to appear reformed in your conduct.” The Croiset method entailed regularly marking progress, yet just as consistently envisioning oneself at the beginning of a process. Even though perfection was an approachable goal, it was not ultimately attainable. Primary emphasis was placed on disposing oneself to approach the task. Croiset negotiated this tension between grace and will by noting that God obliges one to walk to him by the varied means he has made available to this end, notably the sacraments, which are for humans a “bath in Christ’s blood.” The Eucharist allows one to better “keep Christ constantly before one’s eyes.” This specificity meant that these devotions were accommodated to each person’s status. Croiset sounded a conservative note here: “the best means are those afforded by the state to which God has called one.” Nothing extraordinary is necessary, he wrote. One must only “comply perfectly with the obligations of one’s status [estado].” He calls attention to women as his first example, asking the reader to reflect upon “the strong Woman, that Heroine, so esteemed and praised in the Scripture, who did not acquire great merits, rather, she cared for her family.” His second example was Jesus, who fulfi lled “simple obligations” in his lifetime. Croiset then directed the reader toward the chapter “False Piety” in Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. He cautioned that one ought to make the Spiritual Exercises, not picking and choosing, but rather practicing all of the Exercises therein. This, among all of the business that occupies humans, is the most important business. “Studies, business, amusements, courtesy calls [visitas de cumplimiento], pastimes, and tasks— all of these seem important to us—but none of these ought to distract us from the necessity to apply ourselves seriously to the business of salvation. . . .” Croiset required the individual to meditate on the final hour of his death, and how he will wish he had spent his time more usefully working toward the ultimate end of man, here indicating both the finality of human life and man’s only “end” as loving God. His repetitious discussion of salvation did not include discussions of hellfire and brimstone, but rather emphasized that one would regret wasted time, or time spent uselessly. The existence of the do-it-yourself version of the Spiritual Exercises offers an intriguing clue to Jesuit confidence that the process itself, if faithfully executed,

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could be effective without the oversight of a spiritual director. Yet even Jesuit oversight was no guarantee that undertaking the Exercises would produce results palatable to all members of society. There was a par ticular moment in the seventeenth century in which the Spiritual Exercises came under greater scrutiny, and it is to this moment that we next turn. R EMAINS

I close this chapter by returning to the late seventeenth century to look at the Spiritual Exercises from an “outside” angle, this time from the vantage point of a case that was taken up by the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the mid-1690s. Formal retreat houses had yet to be established, although, as this case makes clear, the Exercises had percolated into devotional life in Mexico City. This material offers one set of views on how the Spiritual Exercises were viewed by friends and foes alike, but also how Ignatian spirituality figured into current contentious debates about mental prayer, and the frequent reception of the Eucharist promoted by the Jesuits. The possibilities and pitfalls of Jesuit devotional offerings are laid bare in this Mexican Inquisition case in which a group of Jesuits were denounced and reprimanded on several counts. The case points to the perception that the accused Jesuits had strayed from Tridentine norms. But what I find most fascinating is that this case represents the variety of devotional options available in late seventeenth-century New Spain, many of which were ostensibly legitimate and apparently of Jesuit origin, but nonetheless deemed very problematic due to the social status of the persons who participated in them, thus highlighting some of the spiritual and social fractures in the colonial order. A Jesuit named Francisco Davi was the lightning rod for much of this inquisitorial criticism and it did not end well for him. Davi had just made his final vows in 1693, but was expelled from the Society of Jesus in 1695. He was identified in the fi le as el religioso expulso de la Compañía—the priest expelled from the Society. Davi was on trial due to the “propositions” he had preached from the pulpit and the general advice he had given in “certain homes” (casas particulares), but also for what he had inquired of his penitents in the confessional, as well as the way in which he exhorted his penitents—“every kind of person” (a todo genero de personas)—to take communion daily. He was also accused of “excesses” in his manner of directing the Spiritual Exercises, again, “the same to men as to women of all states” in private homes. Davi allegedly prohibited his followers from participating in other virtuous devotional practices. Two other Jesuits were named and censured (but had not been expelled from the Society): Francisco de Figueroa, SJ, and Diego de Estrada, SJ. Again, their “crimes” were not, if taken one at a time, aberrant practices; rather, one can recognize Ignatian inspiration and even some of the practices that had been promulgated among Indian students at the

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Jesuit college of San Gregorio (see Chapter 6). But in the late seventeenth century, “mental prayer” had become something of a hot-button issue in the Catholic world. The frequent reception of the Eucharist was a “good” on the spiritual marketplace promoted by the Society of Jesus, and the Eucharist was at the heart of the condemnation. The inquisitors opined that these par ticular Jesuits had pushed the limit by recommending frequent communion for too wide an array of people. According to the inquisitorial authors, Davi and his cohort were “advising all classes of people [todo genero de personas]”—even very young children (párvulos)—to take communion daily. In this case, frequent communion was portrayed as a gateway to a heretical spiritual life that would ultimately subvert the most basic Tridentine premises of salvation. Here the inquisitors remarked upon the direct attack—an infliction of “grave injury”—upon the sacrament of confession. Those who frequented communion might not attend to making a confession as often as they ought, it was feared. But worse, in their role as confessors these Jesuits had failed to follow the penitential norms outlined by the Council of Trent, and thus the inquisitors understood frequent communion to be injurious to “penitential virtue.” This was a very serious accusation. Davi was denounced for falling into the heresy of Lutheranism. The Jesuit style of confession was deemed lax and, in concrete terms, too similar to “the heretical doctrine of Luther that posits that, in order to receive the Eucharist, it is not necessary to dispose oneself and make preparations for the confession of one’s sins.” Here the writers made specific note of the Council of Trent, Session 14, Chapter 4, which had emphasized the importance of three components of confession: contrition, confession, and satisfaction. Without contrition, the penitent was not properly disposed to receive God’s grace, and the council had insisted, contra Luther, that the fallen must actively lean toward God, that grace could not be conferred “without any good motion on the part of those who receive it.”  The debate about grace versus good works had raised its head as the Jesuits’ scientia media was denounced for paying insufficient attention to contrition. The inquisitors upheld the dictates of Trent, emphasizing the compunction that the sinner must feel. The problem was the lack of pain in Jesuit spiritual guidance; absent were those tears of contrition, according to the accusations. “He must repent [se compugne] and declare that he had offended God our Lord.”  The inquisitors then linked these Jesuits to the grave heresies of early modern Catholicism. First, they invoked the specter of the alumbrados, “who, in their time, were discovered and punished in Spain.” The alumbrados were a group of laypersons who had been condemned for Lutheranism in Spain in the 1520s, charged with denigrating confession and the saints. Notably, the alumbrados had sought a quiet relationship with the Divine, to be illumined (alumbrado) from within. The group eschewed clerical intermediaries as well as external or bodily

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expressions of divine ecstasy. As discussed in Chapter 1, Ignatius had several runins with the Spanish Holy Office precisely due to fears that his Spiritual Exercises promoted alumbradismo. And this was not the first time the words alumbrado and “Jesuit” had been linked in an Inquisition case in Mexico. In 1613, the Jesuits moved against a Franciscan who wrote that the Jesuits were “like alumbrados, their new ways of teaching unprofitable, and that Ignatius had been investigated by the Spanish Inquisition for questionable propositions.”  Now, seventy-five years later, the shoe was on the other foot, for the Jesuits had been denounced to the Inquisition and the case against them taken up by representatives from three different mendicant orders, who charged these Jesuits with introducing “novelties” in their public preaching. Next, the complainants turned the accusatory finger to the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, taking par ticular note of the style in which these Jesuits conducted the retreats for the laity. An especially dangerous novedad had been set out in a sermon that the Jesuit Davi had delivered during itinerant missions: one might hope to achieve salvation through the Spiritual Exercises alone. First, the individual must achieve proficiency in mental prayer. Then, together with mental prayer, the Spiritual Exercises would be sufficient for salvation. The inquisitors could barely stand it: “What an absurd doctrine!” What would become of the multiple paths to God? “Fasting, whips, hair shirts are no longer necessary, because one does not need any more than prayer!” the writers scoffed. “The spiritual life and the road to perfection are no longer driven by penitence and mortifications.” Here we can see that the “prohibition” of other devotional practices referred to these ascetic techniques. Now boldly wielding the heavy artillery, the inquisitors claimed that not only was this similar to “the doctrine of the Alumbrados,” but was also the very doctrine of “the impious Miguel de Molinos in his propositions 26 and 38” which could be seen, they claimed, in the manner in which Davi conducted the Spiritual Exercises. After making the Exercises, an exercitant was overheard telling his wife, “those Exercises were a very sweet thing [una cosa muy suave].” The inquisitors explained that he said this because the exercitants “were not obligated to fast for those days they entered into the Exercises, even though it was Lent, so they would have sufficient time to pray.” Here they considered the Exercises, as conducted by Davi, as similar to the “heresies of Wycliffe and Luther, who did not recognize any fruit or merit in fasting.”  And, now naming names, they said, “Father Francisco Diego de Padilla had been publically heard in the city of Pásquaro, that the Spiritual Fathers had ordered some women who entered to make the Exercises not to fast, but to give priority to mental prayer [por dar lugar a la oración mental].”  Note that so much of what the inquisitors describe seems to be in keeping with Jesuit spiritual norms. Davi’s advice that the exercitants avoid the fast can

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be seen as an extension of Ignatius’s attitude about moderation. Recall his worries about “bodily fatigue” discussed in Chapter 3 and that his admonition to maintain “a healthy body” signaled a valorization of the active body in the now, a sense that one must not struggle to attain the body of the saints, but reside in and be attentive to the experiences of the moderate meditative body. Most intriguing is the inquisitors’ perception that penitential confidentiality had been broken. The Jesuits were asking too many questions. Yet this is quite explicable if we return to the kind of interrogation to which the exercitant was to subject herself when undertaking a general confession or when making the Spiritual Exercises. Where are you, who are you, your state of life, then and now? Granted, the fact that Davi was accused of requesting names and addresses was perhaps problematic, yet there is, in my reading, a palpably Jesuit feel to the questions, even if taken to an extreme. Had the spiritual life with these Jesuits become too pleasant? Yes, according to the following charge of excessive jubilance: “On the last day of the Exercises there was music with all kinds of musical instruments and even a picnic, and during the days of the Exercises, the Fathers fed the exercitants with great abundance and festivity.” Well, these were “vicious circumstances” according the inquisitors, demonstrating that “[the sin of] gluttony was derided as of little edification to the faithful.”  Did the joy of the Fourth Week lead to gluttony? Or were the inquisitors more concerned about the status [calidad] of the people who were attending these raucous picnics? We have seen how the writers deployed anxiety-ridden language to describe potential transgressions: the audiences who attended these Jesuits’ sermons and retreats included “incapable women as well as the rough and imbecile masses [pueblo rudo y idiota].”  “It does not seem to me that this practice is free of suspicion and there is probable danger in [encouraging these practices] with simple women.” Jesuit devotional trends taken to this extreme were decried for subverting gender, class status, and ethnic norms, the discourse about “simple women” harkening back to the long-standing problem of giving the Spiritual Exercises to women in the home. The inquisitors abhorred the fact that these Jesuits had female followers “who were known for their visions, revelations, which they announced publicly.” Further, these spiritual daughters mocked the need for penitential mortification by lacerating themselves only with their shoe ribbons (los listones de los zapatos) and, without shame, undressed down to their undergarments to show themselves to each other (and perhaps the better to feel the lash of those ribbons?). Were they an Adamite sect promoting a literal spiritual nudity? One way to interpret what we are seeing here is that “spiritual conditions” played a role in shaping and limiting the possibilities of those belonging to certain class and gender categories. These inquisitors condemned the Jesuits’

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inattentiveness to the spiritual condition of each individual, for failing to pay attention to whether individuals were “capable” of engaging in spiritual practices considered to require some practice and intelligence. But inquisitorial language indicates that most women and all plebeians should be written off in advance. This becomes more clear when the inquisitors stated that if the Jesuits merely made the purgative way ubiquitous, that would be fine, welcome even; but the denunciation criticized the Jesuits for making widely available the unitive way— techniques that facilitated unity with God—because this more advanced spirituality had led to visions, revelations, and women who felt empowered to “touch medallions” and, worse, criticize priests. The inquisitors lambasted these Jesuits for offering “elite” spiritual techniques willy-nilly to todo género de personas. The irony? These inquisitors deployed the same language that the Jesuits used to advertise the benefits of their spiritual techniques, namely, that they could be made by all kinds of people. These phrases—todos géneros de personas or todos clases de persona—were the subtitles of many of the popular guides written specifically for both Jesuit spiritual directors and for laity who wished to incorporate Ignatian spirituality into their private devotions at home. Take just three examples of the most popular Jesuit devotional guides in the early modern Catholic world, all of which were translated into Spanish and on Mexican bookshelves. The Italian Jesuit Pablo Segneri’s guide to prayer, whose title, Maná del Alma, o, Exercicio fácil, y provechoso para quien desea darse de algún modo a la oración, advertises itself as “easy” and “profitable” for “whoever” wants to learn to pray. The French Jesuit Jean Croiset’s guide to prayer and meditation for each day of the year sold itself as “adaptable to all kinds of people” (Año christiano, ó, Exercicios devotos para todos los días del año . . . adaptables á todo género de personas). And the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Calatayud titled his penitential guide Modo práctica y facil de hacer confesión general, again, an advertisement for how “easy” and “practical” the Jesuit method of general confession could be if, as Calatayud stated in the book’s opening pages, the dev il would only step aside. It is worth spending a moment with Calatayud’s description of the merits of the general confession, if only to see how his words would have had our inquisitors squirming with indignation: One of the most powerful maxims of the dev il is representing to so many that making a general confession is an impossible thing. “Padre, I have the desire to make it,” says one, “but this is impossible for me.” “Why?” “Because I don’t have the mind and capacity for this [no tengo cabeza y capacidad para esto] and you want, Reverend Father, that I am able to account for all the sins of my life.” Th is is the weapon of the dev il that I wish to disarm, by putting before our eyes this method so easy, practical, secure and sweet of making a general confession, that even the most rude and ignorant, grounded in the following rules, will be secure.

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The timing of this Mexican case is significant. The invocation of “the impious Molinos” indicates that there were some very live and dangerous wires in the devotional threads that connected early modern Catholics. Miguel de Molinos was an exceedingly popular devotional writer of Spanish origin who lived the latter half of his life in Rome. Seventeenth-century opinion about prayer, meditation, and contemplation condensed around Molinos’s highly successful yet controversial Spiritual Guide. Written and published in Spanish in 1675, by the time of Molinos’s condemnation to life imprisonment in 1685, the Guia had been translated into Italian, Latin, French, Dutch, English, and German. It is important to pay attention to the way in which Molinos, his defenders, and his detractors parsed the value of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Molinos had been Jesuit educated. He valued the Spiritual Exercises and, as he explained in a “defense” clarifying his position, he had always recommended the Exercises to spiritual seekers and would continue to do so. But the meditations were, he  stated, too temporal and not ultimately conducive to acquiring the state of contemplation. If a person is always praying discursively by way of sensible, intellectual, temporal, corporeal, and exterior objects, and if he makes use of images and likenesses, then he will never reach the goal that is contemplation and perfection. For in these things the understanding remains hobbled and hindered in its attempt to fi x itself in the pure faith of simple truth, which is contemplation, the end of meditation.

The first Jesuits had already tread this ground in the sixteenth century, when an inner circle of Iberian Jesuits’ advocation of recogimiento was, by the mid to late sixteenth century, considered a grave threat to the Jesuit way of proceeding. As we have seen in Chapter 1, the alumbrado controversy in Spain was a trial by fire for the early Compañía, and Jesuit leadership ultimately drew a very firm line: Jesuits would not promulgate practices of recollection aimed toward infused contemplation. But the fact is that the fine line that a contemplative in action walked would have to be continually drawn and redrawn by the Society of Jesus. Now in the late seventeenth century, although vociferously condemned by the popu lar Italian missionary Paolo Segneri, SJ, as well as Daniello Bartoli, SJ, Molinos’s Guide had won the approval of Jesuit censors prior to publication, and another Jesuit, Domenico Ottolini, had written to General Giovanni-Paolo Oliva (1600–81) advising that the controversy ought to be allowed to die out without any further action on the part of the Society of Jesus. But the specter of Molinismo threatened Catholic authority on both sides of the Atlantic, and Davi suffered the consequences. Tirso González occupied the role of Jesuit general at the time of this case. Thus it was Tirso González who affirmed the current Mexican provincial Diego de Almonacir’s decision to expel Davi, and he signed the formal notice of Davi’s expulsion sent from Rome in

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1695. In the short notes González wrote in the ensuing years, it becomes clear that it was the decision to expel him that brought Davi to the attention of the Holy Office. In 1696, as González explained the decision to the newest Mexican provincial, Juan de Palacios, the reason for Davi’s expulsion was “lack of obedience.” Davi had failed to heed warnings “given with love and desire for his amendment.” “I approve the resolution that was taken,” wrote Tirso González, “because, despite his being subject to such hard and extravagant justice, he [Davi] demonstrated very little meekness. That is not for the Society. Rushing into things always brings danger to them and this can also bring very bad consequences for the Company.” He went further to press Palacios to ensure that Jesuits proceed with caution and prudence, especially concerning the administration of the sacraments “and to remain guarded in conceding the use of Holy Communion to lay persons.” But Tirso González wrote to the Mexican Provincial Palacios on the topic once again in 1699: “I have great misgivings [grandes recelos] about this Holy Office of the Inquisition, so intent on some much-talked about novelty and the expulsion of P. Francisco Davi.” No small wonder that González expressed concern: Davi had been sentenced to death. He donned the sambenito in 1697, was “relaxed”—a term meaning that he admitted his sin, so was swift ly executed instead of being burned at the stake—and he was burned in effigy. González worried that the expulsion from the Society of Jesus had called attention to Davi and had ultimately put him into the hands of the Holy Office. The Society of Jesus’s decisions had played a role in this eventual death sentence. He also wondered if the Holy Office had been intent on snubbing and discrediting the Society. With that in mind, he cautioned Palacios to proceed with great caution. For González, a lingering sense of doubt about decisions made and the impact they might have on Jesuit futures moved him to ensure that internal decisions no longer be exposed outside of the Society. There should be no reason, he asserted, why others need to know the details of how the Society governed itself. •

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In earlier chapters, I emphasized the experience of joy as a result of the Spiritual Exercises. While I do not wish to close this chapter with the impression that “joyful” Spiritual Exercises were forever quashed by inquisitorial edicts, it is clear in this case that when spirituality became a “laughing matter” that swept women and plebieans into its path, it was swift ly dealt a death blow. What would the inquisitors—so upset about gender and class transgressions—have found “edifying”? I venture that the short description of nuns making the Exercises published in the Gacetas de México discussed at the start of this chapter would have been much more palatable to these par ticular inquisitors. These pious nuns of Puebla “kept their faces covered with the Veils” and they were careful to engage in “notable mortifications, conducted with tenderness and edification.”

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The Jesuit spiritual guides had sent a more ambiguous message. Recall Croiset’s words: Nothing extraordinary is necessary. And yet one must “comply perfectly with the obligations of one’s status [estado].” Perfection may have been unattainable, but a quiet, still, and composed body was achievable. Anyone could make the monthly retreat at home and could appear in public as a reformed Christian and feel no shame about this—if this were in accord with one’s social status. In Chapter 6 I ask the question, what kind of spiritual status was “Indian”?

6

Colonial Indifference? Another Approach to the Colonial Other

We have heard Father Zappa preach and describe his spiritual triumphs, and, in Chapter 4, I suggested that his concerns and techniques, as he portrayed them, would not have differed much from those of Jesuits conducting itinerant missions in Italy, France, or Spain. But Father Zappa was in the New World. Does that fact matter? If the goal is to assess the influence of Jesuit spirituality in the lives of Indians, attempting to utilize Father Zappa’s writings as a vantage point will make that difficult: he was interested in souls; thus, whether in city or country, he painted a very monochromatic picture of “Indians.” Nonetheless, I propose that we remain with Father Zappa’s writing, and in this chapter, I hew closely to the twists and turns of Zappa’s words as they unfold, to hear more of what he had to say about his life in the New World. To be sure, Father Zappa was no burgeoning anthropologist, nothing like the famous José de Acosta, SJ, who categorized the indigenous peoples of the Americas according to a schema of civilizational “types.” Nor was Zappa like the Mexican missionaries of the sixteenth century, such as the Franciscan Bernardino Sahagun (1499–1590), who sought to “know” in order to better convert and was also motivated to document a culture that was quite literally disappearing before his eyes; the Dominican Diego Durán (1537–88), on the other hand, wrote about pre-Columbian peoples in part because he was skeptical that their cultural practices were disappearing quite as fast as an earlier generation of friars had hoped. Yet I contend that it is worth staying with the writings of this less heroic figure, Padre Juan Bautista Zappa, SJ, for several reasons. The first is for what his perspective reveals about the practice of Catholicism in the central valley of Mexico in the seventeenth century. But a second and equally important goal is to disclose a bit more about 150

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the life of this individual man, to nuance our understanding of early modern clergy. Latin Americanists have made tremendous gains in discerning the histories of indigenous peoples and women. Yet Luke Clossey made an important point when he cautioned that the quest to give voice to “the other” has at times resulted in painting a very monochromatic picture of “Europeans.” And as Jodi Bilinkoff puts it so well, when we pause to consider the religious men themselves as worthy of study, “suddenly, as it were, men so often lumped together as ‘the clergy’ or even less accurately, ‘the Church,’ emerge as fully drawn individuals.”  Accordingly, with Zappa’s writings in hand, I aim to put some flesh and bones on the category “Jesuit,” to invite you to step deeper into the Jesuit echo chamber in order to understand how prefigured possibilities shaped this one man’s engagement with world. But in so doing, we are brought straight back to the problem of missionary desire for the Other. We have seen that the distance toward a consoling unity with God was increasingly marked in worldly terms as a yearning for “the Indies.” With Francis Xavier as a model, many Jesuits held out “difference” and “distance” as twin goals. “More, more, more” could be had if one just kept moving toward a mimetic experience in which self was confirmed in the transformation of the other. When Zappa arrived in New Spain—the West Indies—he inhabited both a locale and a metaphor. How would difference and distance be marked and measured? How could he continue to live the metaphor of distance when he had, in fact, arrived? How could difference be maintained when transformation to a Christian sameness was the ultimate goal? Father Zappa’s use of the term “Indian” alerts us to the utility of both difference and distance. Reading carefully, his language informs us about the multiplicity of “Indians” that the missionary might encounter in the Indies. Indeed, one of the advantages of reading with Zappa is that we see how colonial difference could be mapped spiritually, how distance could be marked not only by a geographic distance between centers and peripheries, but by the colonial difference that the missionary required to console his own soul. I N DI A N S : T H E DE V I L I S I N T H E DE TA I L S

This chapter juxtaposes two sets of narratives told by Father Zappa. The first are the more tremendous or incredible Dev il narratives drawn from Zappa’s relaciones describing his itinerant missions, wherein the Dev il served as a marker of the authenticity of Zappa’s experiences. I characterize these encounters as “incredible” based, first, on Zappa’s own reactions to the stories he related, substantiated by the fact that, among the myriad examples he cata logued in the relaciones, he chose just these few to repeat in a short letter to his Jesuit provincial. In other words, they made an impression upon him. The letters Zappa wrote to his father

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about his life in New Spain are helpful in unraveling what these Dev il narratives might convey about Zappa’s own desires and experiences, as well as about Indian Christian practices. In the search for Indian spirituality through Zappa’s eyes, the greatest hindrance is the word “Indian.” If we look at his mission relaciones, Father Zappa used spoken language to differentiate between Indians and Spaniards (he made no mention of castas, people of mixed ancestry): he preached to the “Indians” in “their own” languages. In this sense, then, an “Indian” was simply a person whose soul needed to be accessed in a different language. But this interpretation would be exceedingly naive, for we know that the term was laden with other meanings: childlike (natives were often called niños con barbas, or children with beards), neophytes, superstitious, pure, and so on. Nonetheless, upon first glance, any meaningful sense of indigenous religious life remains difficult for the modern investigator to find in Father Zappa’s missionary accounts. Was there meaningful difference among “Indians” and “Spaniards” in the way they practiced Christianity? Can we take Father Zappa’s silence in his missionary relaciones on this topic as a “no”? Fortunately, we do not have to rely solely on Zappa’s experience as an itinerant missionary, which formed only a small part of his duties. He was also a priest and teacher at the Jesuit Colegio de San Gregorio in Mexico City, a college for the “sons of natives.” In other words, Zappa ministered to many different kinds of Indians and accounted for “Indianness” in various ways according to place or situation. It takes some doing to get a sense of his perspective, as will be evident when we begin to wend our way through his writings. But it is this ambiguity in his language that makes Zappa such an interesting case study. Through Zappa’s writings, we can probe “difference” as perceived by one man in several different settings. Reading Zappa’s missionary relaciones alongside the letters he wrote to his father in Milan presents the unique opportunity to examine missionary discourse about “Indians” that crossed rural-urban boundaries, with the added benefit that we gain a better sense of Jesuit perspectives on various types of Christian spiritual practice among acculturated seventeenth-century Indians. What did Zappa perceive when he traveled from pueblo to pueblo in midcolonial Mexico? Zappa took note—among a variety of others things—of the work of the Dev il. Sabine MacCormack has argued that “the dev il was becoming less fashionable in the seventeenth century.” Ruth Behar’s work on eighteenthcentury folk healing practices offers evidence to the contrary; in fact, the Dev il had become a fi xture in everyday life, especially among women struggling to survive la mala vida with an abusive husband. But perhaps we can use Zappa’s accounts to parse Dev il references more precisely and conclude that Satan, sometimes required for love magic, was not called upon quite as much to mark or explain radical cultural difference in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The

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Dev il was omnipresent in Zappa’s chronicle because, ultimately, Zappa saw the struggle to reform Christians in the central Mexican valley as a battle between God and the Dev il. As Cañizares-Esguera points out, “the dev il appears in many disguises to oppose the hero.” Indeed, it was a unique brand of heroism: young Jesuits imagined themselves as the avatars of the missionary hero Francis Xavier, and they joined the Society that made bold in its claim to walk in the company of Jesus. After meditating on the Two Standards (and, of course, electing to stand with Christ), the Jesuits could expect to see Satan and his minions in all corners of the world. Jesuit representations of their missionary successes were staged this way, as we can appreciate in the plays and comedies put on by students in Jesuit colleges. The Devil’s hoof hit the stage in Evangelización del Japón, a Jesuit play performed in Mexico City in 1578. Satan only departed in flames when he was bodily kicked out with such vehemence that he “broke” through a hole in the backdrop. Offstage, Jesuits were alert to the more subtle evidence of Satan’s handiwork. A Spanish Jesuit was informed by people from a village in Spain that Satan, in the form of a wolf, had sauntered right through the center of town. When the Jesuit missionary saw the actual animal—“thin, exhausted and with his tongue hanging out”—he commented that “the infernal powers must have had a pretty poor opinion” of the missionary in pitting him against “such a wretched dev il.” Whether termed “mountain ways” or the “pestiferous customs” of los naturales, Jesuit missionaries in both Europe and New Spain shared concern about Satan’s influence on habits such as alcohol consumption, witchcraft, and the continued use of relics that the Church considered idolatrous—all of which Church authorities considered persistent aspects of folk culture. Often in missionary discourse, “the power of the Dev il” was a way of expressing a generalized distaste for local customs, a vernacular for the persistence of folkish ways. Zappa most often invoked the Dev il as a literary flourish, best depicted in some of his sweeping and triumphal conclusions: “the Mission freed the people from the reign of the Dev il.” But I am more interested in distinguishing moments when Zappa revealed himself to be completely amazed by the belligerence of the Dev il. By attempting to measure Zappa’s astonishment at the power of the Dev il, we can gain a better understanding of his perception of the various states of “acculturation”—or the state of the souls—of the various peoples of pre-Columbian descent he met during his life as a missionary in New Spain. Who was Satan for the missionaries in New Spain and for Zappa in par ticular? When Zappa described souls as “tormented by the dev il,” what did that mean? Were these phrases people themselves used, or did they instead reflect only the missionary’s understanding of the situation? Consider, for example, this general remark: confession had “relieved a man tormented by the Dev il, leaving his soul in peace and tranquility.” Ambiguity prevails: did the man expressly

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state that he was “tormented by the dev il” or was this the priest’s general summary of his woes? Phrases such as “he escaped from the captivity of the Dev il with the aid of the general confession” seem more easily assigned to the missionary’s interpretation. In contrast, we can speculate that the sentence “She gave herself over to the devil and signed it in her own blood” signifies either conscious action—she did, after all, sign her name—or pure sensationalistic reporting. Sometimes, however, the Dev il was neither quick summary nor literary flourish. The Devil proved himself a force with which to be reckoned, and, if only occasionally making himself known, Satan’s presence was a power to incite and explain, producing narratives that our Jesuit friend found marvelously compelling. One day, while on a mission in the town of Minas de Sultepec, Father Zappa was sitting at the table with a local priest, when an Indian chief (un Indio Capitán) came, “accompanied by all of his people” to see the visiting Jesuit priests. Zappa was impressed by the reverence they showed the Jesuits, as was the parish priest, who informed Father Zappa that “neither threats or punishments” had been sufficient to “reduce” this very same quadrilla de Indios to a European-style municipality. Instead, the priest complained, they lived divided into bands and only succeeded in killing and wounding themselves and other such tribes. The parish priest called it a miracle to see these same Indians “so submissive and anxious to solicit a remedy for their desperately needy souls.” This opportunity was “sent by God into our hands” and, according to Zappa, the men were consoled by the Jesuits’ assurances that they would pay a visit to their region. On the prearranged day, the Jesuit missionaries approached the pueblo. The difficult pathways had been cleared and decorated with celebratory arches. The Jesuits were met halfway by a procession of people carry ing banners and crosses, and playing musical instruments. Men and women, boys and girls, came bearing flowers and “demonstrated such jubilation that the priests cried tender tears.” They arrived at the chapel of the hacienda, named the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception. The Jesuits took the opportunity to build upon this devotion to Mary. “Our Lady passed felicitous times when, ten days after our arrival, we celebrated the fiesta of the Immaculate Conception. We chose this day to gave communion to everyone.” Further, he commented, given that “all were naturales [natives]” every sermon was preached in Nahuatl. “They took very well to the Act of Contrition.” He closed the paragraph describing the pleasure of the Virgin and the despair of the Dev il who, via the Jesuits, was delivered “quite a heavy blow.” Let us look quickly at the details we have been offered. An unruly band of Indians who had resisted all efforts to conform to “civilized” living came to the priests and invited Zappa to their pueblo, requesting spiritual assistance. This clearly seemed a more “native” community than any Zappa had ever visited, marking a new experience for him. He commented that all of the sermons were given in Nahuatl. He was moved to tears by a procession of flowers. He used the

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words “instructed”—referring to catechism, a word he did not often use in relaciones when discussing other towns with perhaps a more urban (read SpanishChristian) sensibility. The community was commended for an apt performance of the Act of Contrition. Satan, Father Zappa informs us, was reeling from the blow. Was this another rhetorical flourish? No so in this case, if we judge by the fact that Father Zappa offered evidence of Satan’s displeasure. After the supper hour, he reported, an alarmed group of Indian men and women ran to where the Jesuits were housed. They had seen deformed black children (unos niños negros y disformes) on top of a tree branch that had fallen next to the church. The children were crying out: with these express words: a nanita a nanita, by which they judged that these children, isolated and gone astray, were calling to their mothers who had abandoned them at night by the Church. They moved closer to record this, but as they drew near the children threw flames and thunderbolts from their eyes. They [the children] gave a frightening roar that sounded like an infuriated bull and then fled with haste to a cliff where they all disappeared. 

He added that “a great number” had heard the two boys crying, as well as their terrifying bellows. In a separate letter to his superior, he modified the description slightly—but importantly—when he added that the Jesuits “did not give full credit to what these Indians said until they sent other gente de razon [people of reason] to verify.” The appearance of the bewitched children, he inferred, was a sign of the magnitude of the blow that the mission “by means of the patronage of Our Lady” had delivered to the Dev il. “Th is pueblo, plagued for so many years by hatred among enemies and other vices, was now pacified.” The following is another story in his relación about his experiences in the same town in which Zappa registered his total astonishment at the dramatic presence of the Dev il. In this instance, the struggle between God and Satan took place on the battleground of one man’s body. A poor Indian man without use of his feet or hands could only drag himself across the ground. In this manner, he moved from town to town, begging for alms. The indio gave a short confession that night. The priest asked him if there was nothing more that he wanted to confess. He declined to say more. But the next day, after Zappa delivered a sermon on the gravity of going to communion when one had not completely confessed his sins, the man came back to the confessional again. They talked for a long time, “for this man’s sins were numerous,” and as he began to speak about his life, the priest “recognized that this illness required a larger cure than a single reconciliation.” He advised the Indian to consider well the sins spanning his entire life and to come back in the afternoon to confess. Zappa assured him that this way he would have no doubt about the completeness of his confession. Zappa commented again on the duration of his confession, as he had invested much time in

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discovering “the errors, sins and superstitions with which the Dev il held him tightly, that poor and unhappy soul.” The part of the confession that Zappa shared with his readers pertained to this sinner’s world travels. If Father Zappa found it difficult to take seriously this crippled man’s assertions that he had wandered the world, visiting Spain and Italy, he never said as much. The man explained to Zappa that he had once known an Indio hechicero (male Indian witch) who promised to send him on a journey to Spain and Italy. He was directed to enclose himself in a box. As Zappa explained it, “for the unknown duration of his concealment, he seemed to have embarked upon a journey. Crossing the ocean, he arrived in Spain and saw many things from those lands—the clothing worn by those in the cities abroad, the castles.” The indio made a pilgrimage to Rome, where he saw the pope, the cardinals, and “the grand things of that City. . . . So distinctive were his descriptions that he sparked the admiration of the priest who heard him.” Eventually, he boarded the ship once again and returned to New Spain. But upon opening the box in which he had been enclosed, he found himself crippled in his legs and hands, “for this is the price that he paid the Dev il when, like Christ, the Dev il offered him omnia Regna mundi.” In closing, Father Zappa observed: “The Dev il had dispensed with him like his own slave so sold.” Zappa’s eighteenth-century biographer elaborated upon this explanation: Hidden and enclosed under the pressure of this very tight box for so many days, the nerves in the man’s limbs were damaged and he was left without use of his hands and feet. He did, however, concur with Zappa that this was “just punishment . . . for anyone who ascends the wings of the dev il to fly through all the world.” According to Zappa, the man had also discussed “other things touching upon superstition and witchcraft” and that many Indians in the unnamed pueblo took the opportunity to confess such superstitions to the visiting priests, contending that they had feared confessing to the parish priest. Others held that they had never fully understood the Christian doctrine. “Now they were determined to leave behind their superstitions and to inform others of these errors.” Some passed on to friends and family what they had heard in the doctrinas and brought them to be confessed and instructed by the priest. The missionaries clearly had some success stories: one Indian showed the priest some papers written in Nahuatl containing “their superstitions and witchcraft,” which the Jesuits promptly burned. These “successes” had their limits. The informant in question here may have been “freed from his errors,” but his malos compañeros belittled him and would no longer have him in their homes. Unlike earlier stories that emphasized Christian renewal, in Zappa’s eyes, this was clearly a conversion narrative and, accordingly, the man endured blessed persecution: “He suffered all of this now that he was a Christian. Up to now he had been living like a blind man. Now he preached to everyone at the Church, encouraged them to confess, attend the doc-

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trinas and mend their errors.” He closed by commenting that this converted indio was the best help that the fathers had. These events during the visit to the unnamed pueblo mark a shift in register in Zappa’s commentary. He was overcome with amazement at the audacity of the Dev il in the first narrative, and the clarity of the crippled indio’s descriptions of Europe, earned at such high cost. Also, this was one of the few occasions upon which he mentioned the abuses of superstition, witchcraft, and the relics of idolatry that still remained hidden in various towns. A frustrated Zappa preached, “only God had the power to make men sick or make them well,” and cited the continued practice of using peyote for divination and various healing practices that included “giving voices” to rocks or small sticks or bones with bird feathers. Another “aggravation” was that on the Day of the Dead (Dia de los finados), after having gone to Mass, he was told some would return to their homes or to the homes of their relatives and neighbors, where they would throw the pulque out of its customary container and fi ll it with tamales, chickens, beans, tortillas, tochomite, and other foodstuffs. Praying “in their own language words signifying some superstition, they lit the fire and when the blaze was very big, they threw all the food from the xicara [a gourd container] into the fire, believing that with this they would be able to feed the dead who had passed away the previous year.” These Dev il narratives surpassed the typical comment, flourish, or quick summary. The relación documented his wonder and astonishment, but also Zappa’s own sense, rare in his writings, that he was finally a participant in extraordinary events. The opportunity “sent by God” into his hands was a moment to act—or at least portray himself—as a spiritual conquistador, the occasion to dust off his hands and remark: “This pueblo . . . was now pacified.” It is to this desire for heroism and adventure that I turn next. M I S S IO N A RY FA N TA S I E S : A DE S I R E F O R DI F F E R E N C E

Father Zappa’s description of his time at the hacienda outside Minas de Sultepeq was fraught with ambiguity. On one hand, he suggested “untouched natives” became “true converts.” Yet he also supplied evidence that the inhabitants of this region were already practitioners of Christian devotions. Not only did they know some prayers and carry the banners and crosses, but the most telling proof lay in the veneration of the Immaculate Conception already evident at the hacienda. Similarly suspect is Zappa’s description of a quasi-frontier where a man able to locomote only by dragging himself across the ground (or through out-of-body experiences) managed to “pass through town” begging for alms. The veracity of Zappa’s depiction of a remote location was undermined by details he offered that, to the contrary, paint a picture of a people, who despite a purported tenacious

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resistance to colonial rule, were in many ways well acculturated to the norms of New Spain. In order to apprehend Zappa’s attitudes about the Indians he encountered on his itinerant missions, it is important to consider his career as a whole. In Chapter 4, we discussed Zappa’s early career, when he studied with the Jesuits in Milan, Nice, and Genoa, and how his appetite for the “apostolic life” was whetted by his devotion to S. Francis Xavier, and by reading the missionary accounts written by Jesuits in China. The hacienda may have been the most remote site that Zappa had visited. But these were not the “Indians” with whom, in his missionary fantasies, Zappa had imagined himself working. Neither were the sons of caciques, those elite Indian students at the Jesuit college San Gregorio. Nor were the Indians in the villages surrounding Mexico City. We need to know more about Zappa’s urban duties to understand his desire to transcend them. Call to mind Zappa’s complaint to his father about his de facto status as parish priest. Mexico City’s parishes were, ideally, divided along caste lines, with Indian parishes founded to serve districts occupied by Indian inhabitants. Yet Miguel Venegas, Zappa’s biographer, described the church at San Gregorio as “una Parroquía universal”—a universal parish—“where the faithful from other parishes of Indians, here in Mexico, as well as other more distant Pueblos, could come to receive the Bread of the doctrine and the Fruit of the Sacraments.” He concurred that, when Zappa came to the college, he found everything at San Gregorio in a fallen state. The church itself was old (and under Zappa’s care it underwent a renovation). Zappa’s engagement with his “parishioners” and students offers clues as to how the varied acculturation of different “Indians,” both urban and rural, elite and plebeian, played into Zappa’s own narrative self-fashioning. The letters to his father allow us to continue to trace the ambiguities in Zappa’s descriptions. When Zappa described his new position at San Gregorio, he consistently depicted Indian Eucharistic habits as exemplary. Indians attending ser vices at San Gregorio showed such devotion that they were worthy of imitation. Indeed, he commended them for approaching the sacrament with an exemplary reverence, a model for what Spanish conduct ought to be. Note that his tears of consolation were prompted by Indian transformation—the fleeting moment of mimetic unity: I truly cannot contain tears of consolation I receive in seeing these newly converted Indians already transformed to be so affectionate about the things belonging to the Christian religion, the reverence in which they hold the Church and the Priest, the devotion with which they take communion. They spend the day in which they receive the Holy Sacrament in holy exercises and prayers, retiring in a church or in a corner of their house. Therein they are on their knees almost the entire day without talking or dealing with any other person. This is to the confu-

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sion of so many Christians who, on the same day in which they receive God in the Sacrament, immediately chase him from their souls by sinning mortally.

Note also that the operative categories of difference here were “newly converted Indians” versus “Christians.” Zappa continued to find fault with the “old” Christians: “It is pleasing to God, that these new Christians are like the Old, and it is my estimation that the Day of Judgment will cause [the old Christians] the greatest confusion.” He implied that “Spaniards” would be surprised to see so many “Indians” seated at the right hand of the Lord: If you could see the solemnity with which they celebrate their feast days and how they make the processions, principally at Holy Week. . . . There could not have been many who did not weep from joy to see it, for where Idolatry reigned and the Dev il was adored, now the Holy Faith was quite well planted and our God adored. I am blessed to have always been called to this Apostolic Ministry.

Surprisingly, however, on the very next line, he depicted Indians as “barbarous”: Every Friday of Lent and Advent, there are great processions of Indian children who sing the Christian Doctrine in their own language in the Plaza, with all of the Indians crowded around . . . and as they are a very barbarous and ignorant people and are very moved by the senses, every Sunday of Lent they make representations of the stations of the cross.

First the new Christians were held up as “exemplary.” Then his readers were instructed to envision a barbarous people who loved exterior demonstrations and could be appealed to only through the senses, which, if not properly disciplined, were not to be trusted. Even though they were Christian, he stated in the letter, “there was no less the toil to preserve them in their belief and teach them the necessary things to save themselves. . . . They live like Gentiles. Worse, the Dev il tricks them into returning to their Idolatry and use of superstitions.”  How are we to interpret these incompatible descriptions? Zappa had already demonstrated that the Indians valued “interior” devotion. The same letter testified again to their penchant for the interior life: they closed themselves off in their homes and occupied themselves with “devout things” on days of communion. Others, he informed his father, “don’t take the smallest single bit of food, for at midday they have not left the Church, where they remain all day inside.”  This once again elicited the comment that “this causes confusion to many who are old Christians, who perform few of these devotions to prepare for the Sacrament of communion. Many on the same day in which they have taken communion in fact do more to offend than to please God our Lord.”  In another letter, he complimented the Indians for their skills at mental prayer. This was not inconsequential praise. As we have seen in Chapter 5, mental prayer signaled spiritual

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maturity or advancement, or, as modern Jesuit theologian George Ganss has written, “They are in union with God and love of him dominates their actions.”  How can we explain these apparently contradictory characterizations of Indians as capable of spiritual excellence and at the same time barbarous? This represents an instance when the descriptor “Indian” does little in the way of helping the modern investigator understand how Zappa could switch so quickly from compliment to castigation. Is it possible that he is talking about two different groups of people? He may very well have been. In fact, San Gregorio referred to both the Jesuit College and the Jesuit church that was attached to it. And when Miguel Venegas lauded San Gregorio as “a universal parish,” he indicated that the Jesuit church attached to the Colegio San Gregorio was open to all. We need to understand the implication of these words: the fact that the Jesuit church provided devotional space outside the confines of the parish church had social and political, in addition to devotional, implications. If we consider just the parish’s administrative function, it becomes clear that the parish priest was in many ways the keeper of the people, charged with documenting births, marriages, and deaths, as well as certifying that each parishioner had made the annual confession required by the Lateran Council in 1215. But the parish priest was much more than a notary of Catholic sacramental requirements. Spiritual life centered around the parish, or, as Matthew O’Hara notes, “Like the periodic chimes of the city’s bells, sacraments and other religious rituals helped to define the tempo of life—from attendance at Mass to the yearly celebrations surrounding Corpus Christi or a patron saint’s feast day.”  The Jesuit colleges were centers of piety and, importantly, functioned as nodal points of transatlantic transmission and exchange of current devotional trends. For example, Zappa was inspired by the Milanese Jesuit P. Carlos Calvanezi, who passed through Mexico on his way to the Philippines, to start a secret group for young men, so they could be formed into “saintly and virtuous youth.” He first asked permission from his superiors (Venegas is careful to note his deference) and then selected the most apt students for this secret congregation. They met for communion in the chapel devoted to Our Lady of Loreto, offered themselves as slaves to Mary, and established the rules they were to guard. They gave themselves over to a more pious life, ensuring a firm start by making a general confession. At their regular meetings, the students in the secret congregation were instructed in points of meditation and were offered guidance suitable to each individual’s spiritual development. Zappa gave them some lessons in mental prayer and closed with a colloquy to provide them with some words to carry away with them through the week. At the end of the colloquy, they sang “with some very good music in the Italian style, the hymn Stabat Mater Dolorosa which makes them tender [enternescia] and brings them to greater devotion.”  These young men also ben-

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efited from individualized spiritual direction from Father Zappa, so they could “better know themselves interiorly.” The college instructed elite indigenous boys from an early age. As one scholar has commented about the Franciscans in the sixteenth century, “the children raised in the shadow of the monasteries” were better instructed and were seen as the more devout Christian Indians. The same holds for those children reared from a young age by the Jesuits at the college. When Father Zappa spoke fondly of his “children,” he was not always being patronizing. In one letter, after complimenting his father for rearing children who had all taken vows as priests or nuns, he wrote that he felt “like a father of a family himself” as he oversaw the education of many Indians from a very young age. The boys were first taught to read, and then, if they showed aptitude, they were taught to write. Those demonstrating the greatest promise were trained to be cantors or to sing the Mass. The children of the indigenous elite were being trained to assist the priest. While officially barred from the priesthood, this was nonetheless a prestigious position that afforded native elites status in their communities, second only to the priest. The Colegio de San Gregorio functioned, in part, to “promote and reproduce the prestige of the indigenous elite.” Thus, we might safely assume that when Zappa spoke about exemplary “Indians,” he was referring to the sons of the elite who were well trained in forms of Jesuit spirituality. The college was a site of spiritual condensation, a showcase for the spiritually elite, and in this sphere the indigenous elite functioned as role models in the neighborhood. Jesuits at the college of San Gregorio produced devotional materials and guides specifically for Nahuatl speakers. A version of the Spiritual Exercises was not published in Nahuatl until 1841, yet manuscript versions produced at San Gregorio circulated by the late seventeenth century. Some Jesuits were on the record as opposed to establishing a convent for Indian women; instead plans were launched from the college to create a house (casa de recogimiento) for young Indian virgins. They would be taught to read and write in the Spanish language. The daily schedule included time for private devotion and instruction in the points of meditation and the proper examination of conscience, as well as both oral and mental prayer. The young women would be models of composure and modesty, as they would be taught how to wear their clothes and, importantly, how to keep them clean because, as the unknown author proclaimed, “there is no conflict between cleanliness and poverty.” They would also be instructed in the “modesty with which they ought to walk through the streets.” When Father Zappa turned from his students to offer details about the lives of his urban-dwelling Indian parishioners, he emphasized their poverty. Many lacked clothing and shoes, and slept on the ground. They had little food and the quality of their drinking water was poor. Their homes were small. This made him

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grateful for his own good fortune. “For this I give great thanks to God, seeing that despite all of this, he has given me the health to labor in this, his Vineyard.” And yet these impoverished Indians could sometimes be held up as exemplary Christians. This story that Zappa relayed is one that continued to be passed on well after his death. One day our Father Juan Baptista Zappa passed an Indian woman praying in the church at the College. A ray of light shone from the sacristy that penetrated the chest of the neophyte. He asked her, did she understand that it was the holy sacrament that she adored? She answered, full of pride and joy: “You, Father, know how to explain it better than I, but I understand better than you.”

When Father Zappa left Mexico City, the Indians he encountered became less exemplary the further he moved from the urban center. His discourse changed: no longer spiritually elite and exemplary Indians (his students at the college) nor the exemplary poor but barbarous faithful Indians (his impoverished parishioners), he perceived these rural Indians as “abandoned.” Significantly, he criticized the Spanish king for neglecting the Indians: “For this great Lord is not lacking in any kind of assistance at his side to serve him and help him, but these poor Indians are very abandoned.” In some pueblos, he wrote to his father, people lived such distances from the parish that they might pass an entire year without hearing Mass or seeing the priest. “Consider, Father,” he wrote with horror, “such is the case that these poor people at times die without the final sacraments.”  In another discussion of his itinerant missions, he characterized the Indians as crude and of limited “capacity.” He was uncertain whether ignorance or malice kept them from confessing well but, as he described it, he sought “in so many words, to baptize them anew and instruct them in the things of the Faith and in the things necessary for their own salvation.”  This invocation of the joys of labor in God’s New Spanish vineyard moved Zappa to discuss the life of his friend and very close companion, the Jesuit Juan María de Salvatierra. As a missionary in the northern frontiers of New Spain, Salvatierra was an absent presence in Zappa’s life, and he served as a reminder that, from Zappa’s vantage point in Mexico City, the promise of “the Indies” remained at a distance.

C OM PA Ñ E RO S

Zappa and Salvatierra met as young men in Chieri, just outside of Turin, when they were both in formation as novices. Venegas (who wrote both men’s biographies) described them as fast friends, like brothers to each other, as well as spiritual helpmates, each stimulating the other’s mutual desire for perfection. Zappa was a mere fifteen years old when he entered the Society of Jesus, and Salvatierra

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was his elder at eighteen, but Venegas commented that the young Zappa served as the spiritual example for Salvatierra. The “elder” Salvatierra finished his studies at Chieri and moved on to Parma, but the two were united again in Genoa to undertake their course of study in philosophy. “Hermano Zappa began with the Logic, while Hermano Salvatierra entered a course of Physics [La Physica].” After four years, Salvatierra “and his beloved compañero, Hermano Zappa, were assigned to the same task of teaching humanities [las Letras Humanas] at the Jesuit college in Nice, France.” From there, they were assigned to the Indies. They made this journey together, and while waiting in the port town of Cadíz, Zappa was ordained and transitioned from a “brother” to a “father.” They shared their transatlantic voyage with Jesuits headed to the Philippines, three of whom, Venegas noted, would later “win the Palm of Martyrdom at the hands of the Infidels.” These Jesuits were P. Manual Solorzano (died 1684 on the Mariana Islands), Juan Ortiz de Foronda (died 1690 as part of the Tarahamura Mission), and Manuel Sanchez (Tarahumara Mission). All five men arrived in Vera Cruz together on September 13, “on the Eve of the Exultation of the Holy Cross.” The year was 1675. The compañeros traveled to Mexico City, where together Zappa and Salvatierra began the next chapter of their lives, specifically, “Chapter Seven,” according to Venegas, who narrated this new stage: “Chapter Seven: Pass to Mexico, Begin their studies in Theology, And apply themselves with fervor to the Ministries with their Neighbors [Los Proximos].” After his second year of theological study, Salvatierra was sent to Puebla de los Angeles “to read Rhetoric.” But Zappa kept Salvatierra at his side in his devotional life. The letters he sent to Puebla included phrases such as this one: “Thursday, Feast of Saint Catherine, I went to Guadalupe with Father Medina and you, in spirit.” The next year he wrote, “The Virgin is always more beautiful, and she remembers us very well, she sends you her regards.” When he wrote to say: “Cogita tu de me & ego cogitabo de te,” the Virgin Mary gave voice to Zappa’s sentiments about Salvatierra: Think of me and I will think of you. In a similar vein, Zappa described another visit to pay his respects to the Virgin, this time “with Hermano Manuel Sanchez in place of you.” He followed this with an exclamation about the beauty of his friendship with Salvatierra (O quam pulchra est Amica nostra!). He then used the words of the Resurrected Christ to his Apostles: “Ego sum, nolite temere . . . . I am the one with whom you walked the earth.” These are poignant words for young men who had come of age as Jesuits together as, indeed, they had traveled a fair portion of the globe side by side. Salvatierra was an absent presence for Zappa, perhaps shedding light on why Salvatierra appears as a non sequitur in Zappa’s letters, the faraway Jesuit’s experiences fi lling in for Zappa’s inchoate descriptions in much the same way close friends and lovers finish each other’s sentences. Thus, when Zappa spoke of laboring in God’s vineyard, he had in mind a par ticular “elsewhere,” and his

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friend, Salvatierra, was the figure capable of transporting him to a place where labor could be more easily exchanged for unity with God: And Padre Giovanni María Salvatierra, my companion, lives still with much necessity with his Indians on his Mission. Several times he has written to me, that they are cheered to eat what in Italy would be given to the dog under the table. They can do nothing other than seek God, and are consoled to be his servants, suffering and living in a constant state of danger, for the idolatrous Indians might martyr them.

We want to keep in mind two aspects of their shared biographies. Many Jesuits were motivated to seek martyrdom. By the seventeenth century, novitiate walls in Rome commemorated martyrdoms from the corners of the globe. Salvatierra and Zappa had traveled to New Spain in the company of men who were later martyred. In the chapter describing their joined-at-the-hip spiritual life, Venegas’s word for “neighbor” can also be translated as “proximate” (los proximos), implying that the ideal was contact with a distant neighbor. The proximate neighbor was a stopgap measure, and Zappa yearned to travel yet further distances. Thus, it is not surprising that Zappa fetishized labor further afield as a privileged source of spiritual consolation. Even though Father Zappa’s vineyard was the parish of San Gregorio and the pueblos surrounding Mexico City, his letters leave the distinct impression that he considered true labor for God as entailing struggle, greater hardship, and, importantly, the threat of death. When Zappa’s discussion turned to the outlying areas of Mexico City, his desire to be a missionary akin to Salvatierra becomes more palpable. Consider the range of what he discussed in a letter to his father dated June 10, 1687. He began by stating that he was about to embark on another itinerant mission, and that this time he would travel approximately sixty Italian miles outside of the city, “where I hope to move many souls, despite the great cost in labor.”  The task of preaching and confessing was indeed arduous, but here he referred to the physical journey: “In this country one cannot travel on foot because it is somewhat uninhabited, such that many times one walks many days without encountering a living soul, and one seeks to pass the night sleeping under the trees in good weather. If you do not carry dried [food] you will be fasting the entire trip.”  It is questionable, however, whether this discussion of an empty landscape drew upon his own experience. It seems, in fact, that the experience belonged to Salvatierra, who had been assigned to the Jesuit missions in northern Mexico. Immediately following his description of fasting on the journey, Zappa’s prose wandered toward another discussion of his compañero, Salvatierra, who had traversed the sparsely populated landscape at the mercy of Indians for food: My companion, Father Giovanni María Salvaterra, is on a distant Mission, more than three hundred leagues, which measures nine hundred Italian miles. He has

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succeeded in making this trip twice. For about three days he was without food, unable to find but what was given to him. The ordinary food that they are accustomed to eating, these Indians, is one called Atole, that seems to be what in Milano is called Polenta [but] made by fermentation, and outside of this, it is difficult to find another thing, aside from a few beans, zucchini, etc, that are for them delicacies. Our Missionaries pass many months without having any other food to sustain them, other than the said Atole.

In the very next sentence, Zappa returned to the topic of his own life in New Spain. He had become accustomed to this life, he told his father. Zappa’s words marked distance once more, but this time measuring his distance from both a place he wished to be and a past that was slipping away from him. Where once he was Italian, now he had been made like an “Indian” (vi sono assuefatto di forte, che d’Italiano mi sonno fatto al presente Indiano), for he rarely spoke, and never ate, nor in any manner acted like an Italian. Here he used another term that can cause confusion: Indiano is a term indicating how geography was understood to shape embodied being: he had become like one from the Indies. “It is a marvel that I can remember the Italian language!” Still, Zappa continued, he was content in his vocation to minister to “these poor Indians” and he would not change the fact that his strength lay in confessing and preaching for the King of Spain. The existence of so many forsaken souls gave him hope that he might still be sent on a mission. Hence I have a little ray of hope that I might be sent on a remote Mission to these infideli. This New World is very large, of the four parts, three still remain to be converted. Now I see that there is a very numerous nation of Indians, who are of gigantic size and are called Lacandones, there is demand that the Fathers of our Company conquer these people for Jesus Christ.

Note that he wished to convert the unfaithful—gli infideli—a far cry from attending to the daily needs of merely fallen Christians. He closed the letter with an expression of hope that he would be called to “participate in the work and the fruits” of this new conversion effort. Zappa’s “New World” was not to be found in central Mexico. In fact, the implication here is that the New World was not limited to the Americas, but rather better understood as the new shape of the globe, in which so many remained to be converted. And, regrettably, thought Zappa, he had yet to meet any of gli infideli in New Spain. Fortunately, there were other miraculous things to tell his father, such as the signs that Saint Thomas had been to the New World, but these things must wait for another letter. “I can only conclude that in the Church of this Seminary of San Gregorio, I have constructed a Holy House of Loreto, with all of the correct measurements, that a Father sent me from Italy. . . . Even though I did not have the chance to visit her in Italy, I am at least consoled to propagate her devotion in the Indies.” Zappa longed to

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experience the alterity of the “gigantic Lacondones,” yet, ironically, his greatest success lay in replicating European devotional material culture, down to the exact measurements. Zappa’s eighteenth-century biographer, Miguel Venegas, had found it impossible to tell the story of one man without invoking the other. Yet in the recent multivolume Diccionario Histórico de la Compañía de Jesus: Biográfico-Temático, Juan María Salvatierra, SJ, has a relatively sizeable entry from which Zappa’s physical and spiritual companionship must have been consciously excised. The name Zappa does not merit an entry. The entry (coauthored by Burrus) reads that under Salvatierra’s leadership the Jesuit missionaries in California “achieved what Hernan Cortes and other daring men of action had sought in vain for nearly two centuries: to establish permanent populations in California, which, due to the prior insurmountable obstacles, had seemed an imaginary island in a book of chivalry.” Early modern Jesuits are not alone in privileging labor in the distant mission field; for years the historiography written by scholars in the United States particularly has privileged the “remote” when telling stories about Jesuits in Latin America. S P I R I T UA L DI F F E R E N C E : A DE VO T IO N A L E Y E , A S AC R A M E N TA L M A P

Scholars who study colonial settings have been trained to read for “colonial difference,” a term that in postcolonial studies originated with Partha Chatterjee and referred not only to the way racialization underwrote the perpetual deferral of political rights, but also how colonial difference was mobilized in the demand for full participation and self-governance that subsequently fueled the flames of burgeoning Third World nationalisms and anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century. “Race” is not such an easy category to deploy in the early modern colony. Decades of excellent scholarship on the question of race and ethnicity in colonial Mexico, built upon a variety of methodological approaches, have demonstrated that in a society in which “passing” from caste status was possible through marriage, legal disputes, or social and economic circumstances, “Indianness” will forever be a moving target for scholars of the period. In colonial Latin America, the term “Indian” denoted a legal category and a corporate identity. From the early years of the Spanish Empire, this notion of belonging rubbed against the grain of the individual responsibility laid upon the person who, by choice or force, had become a Christian. Neither the mass baptisms of the early sixteenth century nor the communal prayers for the souls of the dead negated that fact that Christianity claimed to ensure the salvation of individuals, one soul at a time. The Mexican Council stated as early as 1555 that, as far as preparedness for communion was concerned, the status of Indians should be con-

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sidered on a case-by-case basis. As early as 1569, the boundaries of the two Repúblicas had been breached: the Indian doctrinas counted Spaniards among their flocks, and, by the seventeenth century, efforts to maintain caste divisions swam against the tide of individual preference. O’Hara deploys the term “spiritual marketplace” to describe the richness of devotional offerings in Mexico City. He also discusses the fascinating case of the Parroquia de Indios Extravagantes. This parish was founded in the sixteenth century in consideration of the Mixtecs from the Oaxaca region, migrant laborers who had no traditional landholding community nearby and therefore no “natural” parish. Notably, this parish, established in the center of the city, soon began to manage the spiritual needs of all foreign “Indians”—including chinos (immigrants from Asia). Again, we see both the slipperiness and the expansiveness of the category “Indian.” In the seventeenth century, the Franciscans and Augustinians complained that this church, located in the non-Indian center town, had also attracted parishioners who were local Indians and, accordingly, ought to have centered their devotional lives in Indian parishes. In a vibrant spiritual marketplace, the parishes could be in competition with each other over parishioners, and clerics sought to keep those boundaries clearly defined. The Jesuit college and church at San Gregorio played into the competition between the various orders, offering yet one more “market” where both Indian and Spanish spiritual seekers worshipped alongside one another. Indeed, Jesuit churches offered a certain mobility to the average parishioner who could wander further afield of her parish church. Some mendicants complained about this. They included among their grievances the fact that the Jesuits had not honored established parish boundaries because some parishioners failed to confess annually with the parish priest, seeking out Jesuit spiritual direction instead. The precepto anual (the requirement to confess and take communion once per year) should have been fulfilled under the auspices of one’s own parish priest who, ideally, was to ensure that the penitent demonstrated proper contrition. Nonetheless, it was difficult to stem the tide of individual parishioners who continued to “vote with their feet” as they sampled the goods of a very rich spiritual marketplace. This ability to avail oneself of multiple options can be considered one outcome of the 1555 Mexican Council’s statement about “individual spiritual status” of indigenous persons. Upon first glance at his letters, Zappa did not depict Indians as “others.” Life in Mexico City was all too recognizable, even dull, to a man who had nostalgia for an apostolic past he could never know, but was painfully close, in the form of the missionary life to which he aspired. The northern mission fields of Mexico called to him, and he wished to serve as a remote missionary with his life modeled on that of S. Francis Xavier, that Christian adventure that required living with the threat of martyrdom. Zappa’s discourse about Indians reflects a similar understanding about Indian “capacity” to undertake various Jesuit spiritual

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practices: none of his writings expressed a stock reaction or set stance toward “Indians”—instead, some were “very abandoned” while others (generally those he trained) exhibited exemplary spirituality. Thus, Zappa’s fluid use of this legal category “Indian” is in keeping with recent research on the genealogy of what would become racialized classifications in the nineteenth century. Now, to be certain, Zappa’s ethnic mapping has serious lacunae. If Zappa was “indifferent,” it was not to Indians, but to the Africans and castas (peoples of mixed Spanish-Indian-African descent), whose numbers had grown exponentially by the late seventeenth century. This is an idiosyncratic view, counterintuitive to what one might expect to see reflected in the writings of a man who lived in a very ethnically mixed city. No, Father Zappa was not indifferent to Indianness. My goal, however, has not been simply to confirm current scholarly findings. Instead, I have bracketed these ethnic and racial categories in my initial reading of Father Zappa’s writing in order to allow his perceptions of difference to emerge. Zappa deployed this single term—Indian—as a spiritual category and in his writings the Indian was a figure that marked Zappa’s distance from his own salvation. Accordingly, his mapping of religious practices provides yet another set of way markers for the multiple and contradictory ways of construing Indianness. Zappa helps us ask not only who is an Indian, and where is an Indian, but how one’s prayer life (or the lack thereof) affected social status. For Zappa, the “state of souls” served as a measure of social worth. Relatives of elite Indians had an opportunity, as perhaps did some of Zappa’s parishioners, to demonstrate spiritual promise. He related Indian status not only to lineage and social status (already closely intertwined) but also to one’s adeptness at traversing Christian spiritual hierarchies, with mental prayer signaling the highest level of spiritual practices. And although Zappa marked certain Indians as capable of mental prayer and examples for Spanish to heed, we have already seen (Chapter 5) that this was considered by some to be a dangerous assertion. Carlos Eires notes that the turn to the study of popular religion—“the way religion was actually lived out by individuals”—has focused primarily on “those who were not clerics.” But as Eire notes, religion is “lived” for clerics as well. Can we peek over Zappa’s shoulder, to see what can be seen of seventeenthcentury Mexico from his perspective? Only if we forget that we do not have Father Zappa, let alone his shoulder. Both of these we must conjure, or, as Derrida says in an aside, “Whoever believes that one tracks down some thing?—one tracks down tracks.” We have traces of Zappa, tracks on a page. This can be the cause of much hand-wringing about what things a historian might reliably say. But a scholar’s reading of historical documents is an interpretation built upon imagination. I do think Zappa’s writings lend themselves to imagining how a fleshed-out character might have viewed his life in colonial Mexico in ways that

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both embodied and exceeded our currently available categories of “race and religion.” But in my reading, Zappa also has a devotional eye, and he maps New Spain in relation to diabolism, sanctity, and the sacraments. The Jesuit college and church at San Gregorio appear to glow with white light, blessed as they were with the likeness of an Our Lady of San Loreto that had, notably, touched the original in its Italian locale. Indians with access to this inner sanctum were depicted as devout, but the degree of holiness dropped sharply when they stepped outside the church doors. Further afield, Zappa laments Indians’ distance from the sacraments. For a society of religious men who promoted frequent, often daily, communion then, “the horror, the horror” of being outside of urban civilization was measured in the infrequency of the sacraments and the fear that one might die without a final confession and extreme unction. Yet traveling even further afield again took on a positive valence for the missionary. Even though northern Mexico promised contact with the least acculturated Indians, these mission fields ensured the hardship, sacrifice, and potential bloodshed constituent of “true” missionary labor that could confer the palm of martyrdom. Zappa’s route toward consolation and salvation could be plotted as so much distance on a map. None of the Indians whom Zappa encountered were sufficiently Other to satisfy his desire for the unknown; they were not sufficiently Other to deliver that fleeting experience of consolation in its purest, most exotic form. There is an element of unfulfi lled longing in Zappa’s discourse when he discussed his vocation and his experiences in New Spain. If the voice in these letters to his father differs from the triumphalism of his missionary relaciones, the shift in voice can be heard in the way Zappa expressed his disappointments and frustrations as a missionary, best encapsulated as a great desire to be elsewhere. Recall that he had written longingly of his desire to “go forward on the long-yearned-for Mission.” Only by understanding his passion for the frontier missionary experience expressed in letters to his father in Milan can we understand that many of his descriptions of Indians function as attempts to convince someone—either his readers or himself—that he had traveled the distance, that he had arrived at the far reaches of the New World, risking life and limb to spread the word of God. In sum, Zappa’s writings are “good to think” about the inherent difficulty of categorical thinking. The legacy of colonial categories shapes the objects of our studies and, in this case, when we write about “Indians” or “the Indian,” we invoke something of a Teflon category, uncanny in its ability to slip past decades of scholarly nuance. Is it, as Gruzinski writes, that we are still animated by a stubborn desire for difference? “How can this reflex be explained, this irresistible tendency that spurs us to seek archaism in all its forms, to the extent of overlooking— willfully or not—whatever concerns modernity in any way? It is almost as though we take malicious pleasure in creating difference.” If self is a moving target,

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Zappa’s self was also scattered, distended, part of him in Mexico City, another yearning to be on a distant frontier mission, another aspect linked to his distant Milanese audience. As we have seen in this study of Ignatian spirituality, seekers required a difference that could be traversed because that transition itself was consolatory pleasure, thus producing that transitory unity of God, self, and Other, a form of consolation that dissolved again and again into disappointment as provocation. Zappa’s inner antagonist was externalized and named: “Indian.”

7

A Heart-Shaped World

While browsing through Jesuit materials in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, I called up a box marked “miscellaneous.” Among other items in this folder, I chanced upon a set of letters written by a number of Mexican women to a Jesuit priest named Augustín Antonio Márquez (1714–68). Convent writing, according to Asuncion Lavrín, has been “hidden, subverted, plagiarized, and forgotten.” Left unmarked and unremarked upon, this body of correspondence was the product of the very close relationships that these women had with Padre Márquez, the director at the Jesuit Casa de Ejercicios de Araceli, the retreat house attached to the College of San Andrés in Mexico City. As we have seen in Chapter 5, Jesuit priests offered retreats year-round where both lay and religious persons could progress through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, and many of Márquez’s correspondents had made the Exercises there. These Jesuit spiritual daughters sought out proper comportment, asking their Jesuit confessor to “create” them anew, in both body and spirit. Their practice of letter writing continued the spiritual self-formation begun in the retreat house. In their letters, the nuns utilized a language of the heart to describe cultivating the self as a project, and I take this opportunity to look once more at the intensely intersubjective relationship between the spiritual director and his subject, to ask, what do their letters tell us about the nature of spiritual obedience for eighteenth-century Mexican women? Current literature on women’s spiritual writing in Latin America has emphasized women’s resistance to patriarchal norms and has largely been concerned with finding evidence of women’s resistance within the strictures of this literary genre. Much knowledge of religious women’s lives and their writing is derived from the spiritual autobiographies written about subjects with exceptional spiritual 171

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and/or intellectual gifts. Scholars have told us that these religious women often worked very closely with their confessors to construct narratives that met the demands of hagiography. Women labored, but literary production was in the hands of males, who compelled the women to write their life stories. Among many in a flourishing field, Kathryn McKnight’s excellent study of a Colombian nun and mystic is formulated precisely around the question of women’s resistance to patriarchal authority. She writes, “I seek to uncover spaces and forces of resistance in the history of literary production, places where writers who were in some way marginalized contested those master narratives that represented them in ways most convenient to the dominant social forces.” As currently configured, the history of religious women’s writing in colonial Latin America poses a problem for framing these par ticular archival materials. The women’s letters to Father Márquez are markedly different from the structured autobiographical manuscripts or published life stories held to hagiographic conventions. The women’s letters I consider ask only for the spiritual attentions of their confessor and declare obedience to him. If agency is construed primarily as resistance, how are we to make sense of these letters? Saba Mahmood brings Talal Asad’s critical reconfiguration of agency to bear upon Western feminist theory. In her study of a women’s mosque movement in Cairo, Mahmood suggests that we ought to be conscious of the blinders that progressive politics can place on scholars attempting to understand agency in nonliberal settings. Further, and critical to my task of understanding early modern women’s religiosity, she argues that docility and submission can be a means of attaining greater mastery over the self. In fact, Mahmood takes feminist scholarship to task for utilizing a model of agency that “despite the important insights it has enabled . . . sharply limits our ability to understand and interrogate the lives of women whose desire, affect and will have been shaped by nonliberal traditions.” There is no doubt that early modern religious women’s writing can be read productively to find moments of resistance to patriarchal norms. Nonetheless, much of this scholarship has been so preoccupied with reading between the lines that we have taken the bulk of what these women wrote to be superfluous. Are we unable to understand this language or just unwilling? We take the nature of submission to be passive: without action. Yet as we have already begun to see in Chapter 2, when women chose to conform to the spiritual and corporal demands of Ignatian spirituality, they endeavored to follow a regime of correct living that they believed would lead to greater empowerment over body and soul. In this chapter, I continue to investigate women’s desire to submit to the direction of a Jesuit confessor and explore the kinds of selves produced from relationships that required docility. As we have seen, “obedience” is a difficult concept to pin down with any precision because—for both men and women—the will of God was not known but was acquired through a process of discovery that, in the terminology

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of the Spiritual Exercises, was referred to as “discernment.” These Mexican nuns’ letters, I argue, were a means of salvation—a practice of moral formation that was conducive to leading a life of virtue that ultimately, it was hoped, would lead to eternal salvation. Thus, I suggest we pause before moving too quickly to the heroic and feminist moments, asking instead, what, concretely, did “salvation of the soul” entail, and what were the implications of pursuing a life of virtue? Appreciating these letters as material evidence of individual struggles for virtue brings us closer to a historical understanding of what these letters best convey: the nature and experience of spiritual transformation among early modern Catholic women. We may characterize these as “conservative” aims given our twentyfirst-century standpoint, but in so doing we miss an opportunity to appreciate the capacity for innovation within practices aimed toward replication of an ideal form or, in this case, techniques aimed toward the formation of an ideal self. This chapter presents the practice of letter writing as a “technique of the self.” The nuns’ letters reveal a moment in history in which moral-theological and psychological discourses of self coexisted, not just as styles of reasoning but as embodied struggles for spiritual perfection. Yet while “perfection” may have been the aim, the materials under consideration allow us to appreciate the experience of selftransformation not as a “result” but as a way of being. While these women’s words may have been filed away as “miscellaneous,” in fact, they take us straight to the heart of the matter because their ongoing struggles to transcend themselves initiated an (often anguished) practice of self-formation. “ M A R Í A J O S E P H A , YOU R U N WO R T H Y DAUG H T E R ”: S E L F  N E G AT IO N A N D S E L F  F O R M AT IO N

The letters under discussion are of historical import not only because they are the first-person narratives of women who are most often absent from the historical record; the letters are of profound interest because they came into being due to a formal process of narrative making. We have seen that the Ignatian Exercises drew heavily on narrative practices designed to foster a new, individualized sense of spiritual selfhood. The narrative memory practices found at the heart of the Spiritual Exercises were intended to help the practitioner develop a narrative of self as a sinner. The box marked “miscellaneous” contained a response by a nun named María Josepha, written while undergoing her retreat experience. The structure of the retreat offered María Josepha tutelage in narrative self-formation. Yet she wrote quite cryptically about her intense struggle with the practice of narrative self-fashioning. The Jesuit invitation to articulate a spiritual self did not, on its own, constitute cultural permission to write about herself. Yet the Spiritual Exercises and the letters she wrote thereafter provide a window through which to observe a pedagogical process of becoming.

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As I have repeated throughout the book, Ignatius of Loyola wrote that the method and purpose of the Exercises was “to overcome oneself, and to order one’s life, without reaching a decision through some disordered affection.” As we have seen, the Exercises asked the practitioner to examine her life and form a narrative about sins committed over a lifetime. Recall, for example, the memory exercises that required the exercitant to construct a personal history of her life that included home, family, friends, and occupation. Or the elaborations on the Exercises written by late sixteenth-century Jesuits who asked the exercitant to “consider oneself” by asking questions such as, “Where are you? Who are you?” These would prompt reflection on various moments in her life, to recollect the phases of life and how she sinned in each of them, closing with a reflection on her “state of mind” in both past and present. Further, we have seen that the general confession encouraged the exercitant to consider the single sin that had plagued her over a lifetime, and therefore encouraged her to develop the ability to recognize enduring patterns of decision making and to narrate the effects of par ticular types of sin in her life. Perhaps now one can better understand the thrill of my archival find. I had in my hands letters written by women who had been instructed in this process of self-narration—surely I was going to be reading fascinating firsthand accounts of women’s lives framed in terms of their understandings of sin. There is no better way to convey my ultimate frustration than by discussing one of Father Márquez’s regular correspondents, María Josepha. In her letters, she discussed her struggles to lead a life of virtue. Her letters are valuable not only because she wrote frequently, leaving a record (albeit cryptic, as I will explain) of the ongoing nature of her spiritual journey, but also because she wrote a short, spontaneous response while undergoing the Spiritual Exercises—something that was otherwise missing in what remains of Márquez’s correspondence. Her communication with Márquez began with this initial response letter, followed by letters in which she requested that Father Márquez serve as her regular confessor, and then by a series of letters she wrote with some regularity. Given my expectations, reading María Josepha’s letters was often maddening. The product of a confessional relationship, the letters disappoint in that they never fully described the afflictions and necessities that participants in modern Western secularized confessional culture have come to expect to hear. We can imagine that these early modern nuns feared invasions of privacy, especially the nuns who relied on others to deliver their letters. In fact, María Josepha wrote one letter just to check on the status of a previous letter: Had Father Márquez received it? She had sent the first letter unaware that he was in retreat at the time and expressed anxiety about the fact that the letter was left in another person’s care. A hesitancy to be explicit was palpable in all the letters the women wrote to Márquez. For example, one woman expressed doubts about whether her letter

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would be comprehensible, given her economy of words: “The first letter that I struggled to write . . . I was left doubting whether you would be able to understand that which I conveyed in only a few words.”Another woman wrote, “I told my father that this afternoon I would go to see Your Reverence, and trusting in your great piety and love, I will then tell you everything that happened in the matter.” Darcy Donohue has suggested that veiled language reflected a “conflict between self-preservation and self-expression.” However, perhaps mere convenience kept that woman from writing down what she would have told him later the same afternoon; she lived, after all, in a face-to-face culture. Yet questions linger: What was the purpose of writing these letters? Why did she write to him at all when she would soon see him? What was her purpose in picking up a pen that morning if not to lend coherence to her thoughts, to examine her own sins and emotions before visiting the priest? Yet the remaining traces of these moments of scrutiny are cryptic, leaving us little actual evidence of the content of this act of self-reflection. In the entire corpus, the closest we get to narrativity might be the response letter that María Josepha wrote during the Spiritual Exercises. Addressing her missive to Jesus, she summarized her experiences day by day: “I passed days one and two in great struggle as I was very tempted to be impure and I was very involved in these thoughts.” Although she offers no details about the exact nature of her impure thoughts, one could surmise, broadly speaking, that they were related to struggles with the vow of chastity. While most nuns, excepting widows, were expected to be virgins upon entering the convent, the vow of chastity also referred to efforts to maintain purity of mind. Impure thoughts could also refer to “temptations of the flesh,” which were construed broadly as the temptation of sinful thoughts more generally. In fact, calming one’s heart and settling one’s mind were very much part of the struggle of meditation and prayer. In the ensuing days, María Josepha was consumed by doubts about writing the very narrative under discussion. Like other women writers, she described a deep anxiety about putting words on paper. She wrote that she struggled with writing because she did not know what “the Enemy” (the dev il) intended. Later she had “the spirit to write and give thanks,” yet she was unable. This gave way to a “horrible impure temptation” that immobilized her. To appreciate the complexity of her agitation, we might consider that, on one hand, her spiritual goal was to surrender herself to God’s will; yet, on the other hand, writing about herself could be construed as self-glorification that could lead to the sin of vanity. In fact, in spiritual guidebooks, self-love was considered the most common and pernicious hindrance to spiritual virtue. A better understanding of María Josepha’s struggles is attained by examining the advice that Jesuit confessors wrote about the difficulties of teaching penitents the art of spiritual discernment. The opposite of vanity is humility, insisted the French Jesuit

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Jean Caussade (1675–1751) in his Treatise on Prayer from the Heart. He wrote, “From this I conclude with St. Teresa that every flush of zeal and devotion which disturbs the harmonious dispositions of the interior and troubles its peace is in no way characteristic of divine inspiration, but rather a mixture of self-love that slides in everywhere and that mixes in all and spoils all, says St. Francis de Sales.” By contrast, one could escape the clutches of self-love and seek humility through meditation and prayer. But even this was fraught with the dangers of self-love: “This interior humiliation must likewise be exempt from bustle, sorrow, resentment against oneself; for not only do agitations unsettle the soul and solve nothing, they are likewise new faults often more dangerous than the initial ones. Why? Because they arise from vexed self-love and pride scandalized at seeing ourselves still so imperfect.” We need to grasp the complexity of submission and obedience as a studied practice in order to appreciate the nature of María Josepha’s moral torment. If we turn to Caussade once again, he wrote that “humility of the heart” did not consist of “blind submission” but rather of “a perfect submission in all and everywhere, always avoiding anything that can possibly offend and displease God.” In other words, perfect submission requires not blind abnegation of self but an intense knowledge and scrutiny of the self that one is also struggling to transcend. These efforts seem contradictory, but Rebecca Lester captures this complex dynamic in her ethnography of contemporary Mexican nuns in Puebla, Mexico. She writes that, for these modern nuns, surrender of the self is not “a complete relinquishing of personal agency but a nuanced renegotiation of this agency characterized by the progressive externalizing of control and internalizing of responsibility.” It is not anachronistic to read this interpretation back into the early modern period. Luís de la Puente, a Spanish Jesuit theologian whose guides to the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and mental prayer were published in Mexico City and widely read throughout the colonial period, wrote that meditation ran along the two poles of knowledge of God and knowledge of one’s self: In between [the two poles] moves the machine of contemplation and meditation, passing continually from one to the other, and climbing like the Angels up Jacob’s ladder, until the highest rung, where Jacob sleeps. And turning once again, one scales up and down the stairs of these discourses and meditations, in order to know well the good that belongs to God and his greatness, and at the same time, that which is man and his misery.

This intricate movement between a probing knowledge of self and a complete surrender of self was corroborated in Caussade’s treatise on prayer. When advising penitents who may have experienced difficulties similar to María Josepha’s, he counseled them to treat the self with the charity and kindness one might offer a neighbor—in fact, to see one’s self as “other.” This advice could be drawn di-

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rectly from the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises, for Ignatius wrote in the section titled “The Second Method of Making a Sound and Good Election” that one ought to engage in an imaginative exercise about an absolute stranger. “I will imagine a person whom I have never seen or known. Desiring all perfection for him or her, I will consider what I would say in order to bring such a one to act and elect for the greater glory of God our Lord and the greater perfection of his or her soul. Then, doing the same for myself, I will keep the rule which I set up for another.” Adopting this attitude, Caussade wrote, “is the great secret for quickly acquiring great purity of conscience and, in the meanwhile, perfect knowledge of yourself and deep humility of the heart founded on frequently experiencing our pitiable weakness. In this way, all things turn to the advantage of people of goodwill.” We have seen how the very structure of meditative practices may have shaped María Josepha’s emotional responses. But amid the possible explanations for her angst-ridden letter, we must reflect on the doubts and fears—the existential crisis, to put it more boldly—of the Christian who takes up meditation as a means of knowing God. Consider this crucial detail: María Josepha wrote her letter to Jesus. What of the apprehensions she must have experienced in her struggle to be worthy of the attentions of a sacred being? Tanya Luhrmann’s interpretation of the invented religion of twentieth-century goddess worship is helpful. Luhrmann brings her essay to a close by reminding scholars to push beyond social or functional explanations of religious experience and, in a very nimble Lacanian analysis, prods us to pay attention to expressions of awe and fear that are “the human response to the radical otherness of God.” Drawing upon Luhrmann’s examination of her subjects’ fears of self-annihilation, it becomes easier to see that, in her attempts to approach God, a deeply religious woman like María Josepha may have been suff used with both anticipation and dread before the image of herself, like Jacob, lying motionless at the top rung of the ladder. Whatever the nature of her anxieties, María Josepha did not document her experiences at the retreat. Instead, she wrote about her spiritual struggles to describe her experiences. Unlike formal autobiographies written by mystic women, these letters leave us without any kind of narrative life history. Given the method and structure of the Spiritual Exercises, with its required practices of taking narrative stock of one’s entire life before making a general confession, there is no doubt that she experienced this form of spiritual narrative practice. And yet, undertaking such self-description clearly required a new way of being and seeing the self in the world, a way of being in which María Josepha was untutored or, more accurately, was just beginning to learn. Accordingly, María Josepha left us without the expected linear narrative record, but rather with a tantalizingly circuitous document. Rather than pinpoint her on a map, we can more accurately note that she was on an ironic trajectory: María Josepha was aimed toward

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a self-transcendence that would find her engaged in the constant and elusive task of forging a sense of self. As María Josepha left the solitude of the retreat experience, her ensuing letters indicated that “self” remained a moving target, and she sought assistance in locating those stabilizing moments of unity found in spiritual consolation. Her letters depicted the manner in which she sought out Márquez as her spiritual advisor. She described how unsatisfying it was to confess to other priests, how she was often left “unconsoled.” In another letter, María Josepha was more specific: “Since leaving the retreat, my heart has been so very closed. I have not wanted to tell you—the trouble that it costs you, you will soon tire of listening to me—but I know you can clear my heart. . . . With such afflictions I do not have the spirit to confess until Our Lord concedes and you are able to come.” There were occasions when María Josepha referred to clashes of “the will” between herself and male authority figures. In a letter describing her invalid companion, Madre Anna, she complained that she was unhappy with the priest who regularly confessed Madre Anna. She wrote to Márquez to discuss her uneasiness about harboring negative impressions of the other priest. She was unsure about the implications of her reaction. Her question to Father Márquez was simple: Should she be reconciled before attending communion? A similar letter described another disagreement with a male authority figure, this time a doctor, who was also a caretaker of Madre Anna. Similarly, María Josepha left this encounter feeling doubtful. “Should I be allowed to go to communion?” she asked Father Márquez. “Or, if I am at fault, what should I do?” Ought these encounters to be interpreted as resistance to male authority figures? In par ticular, the phrasing of her question to Father Márquez about the second episode indicates that she thought she was not at fault. (Perhaps she experienced less mental anguish clashing with a doctor than with a priest.) Her move to discuss these men with Father Márquez can also be read as a means of mobilizing one male authority against another, in a strategy that Steve Stern has dubbed “pluralizing the patriarchy.” While all of these interpretations are possible, I construe these words as evidence of María Josepha’s painstaking labor to highlight her own “perfect obedience” to Father Márquez. In her struggle to be virtuous, she not only felt the need for him to assess her actions but also sought his guidance as to how she ought to feel. Religious women often referred to their confessors as their “pilots” or “lamps” that lit the way on their spiritual journeys. Ultimately, María Josepha sought reassurance that she continued to walk the road to salvation, her ability to attend communion frequently an embodiment of a humility that marked her as worthy. Through her descriptions of Madre Anna’s illness and suffering, one understands the seriousness with which María Josepha regarded Father Márquez’s role as mediator. With some urgency, she wrote, “If this letter arrives in your hands, I

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beg you to commend to Our Lord the one who is in agony and who is attached to Our Lord Father and to Your Reverence.” At other times, when sharing her problems or the travails of others in her convent, she wrote to Márquez, “By your hand, Our Lord will provide the remedy.” But her discussions of Madre Anna’s suffering also signaled her sister’s sanctity, indicating to the priest that her companion indeed kept to a virtuous path. In the spiritual exercises written by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz for her convent sisters (Ofrecimiento para el Santo Rosario para rezarse el Dia de los Dolores), the practitioner asks the Virgin to grant to her soul “the love necessary to tolerate the bitterness of life with the sweet nourishment of grace.” Indeed, in much hagiographic literature, suffering was depicted as a gift from God. Here we are reminded that spiritual exercises were not undertaken to escape from pain (in the way that we might consider an excruciating but cathartic therapy session) but rather to learn how to suffer and to suffer perfectly—in other words, how to suffer by combining self-awareness with selftranscendence, a process facilitated by seeing the self as “other.” The care María Josepha took to elaborate a new self is abundantly evident in a short letter she wrote, stating that whereas she might have offered “a word of triumph” (never stating what her victory entailed), instead she declared total submission to the Jesuit: “Neither have I returned to utter a word of triumph, only because I have resigned myself to whatever is Your Reverence’s Will, with which I desire to comply, and as such I hope that you will make it known to me.” These hints of conflict are rare, and even this moment reveals that the overall emphasis and direction of her writing entailed submitting herself to the ongoing process of understanding God’s will in her life. Her signature revealed as much: “May God dispose of me according to his Will, Your Unworthy Daughter, María Josepha.” This could be construed as a rhetorical flourish, and for some it might have been. Yet, coming from the pen of a woman like María Josepha, the phrase can also be read as a cultivated habit designed to function as a reminder that she must conform herself to this symbol of piety. For María Josepha, obedience was a spiritual practice. DE S I R E F O R PR E S E N C E , O R , L OV E I N A M E X IC A N C O N V E N T: PE T R A DE S A N G A B R I E L

“My beloved Padre Augustin . . .” So Petra de San Gabriel, a nun in the convent of Santa Ines, began a letter to her confessor, Father Márquez. Such words of adoration were certainly indicative of love and passion. As we shall see, Petra de San Gabriel was unequivocal about her need for constant priestly attention. Yet invocations of the heart had multiple meanings in the context of spiritual self-understanding. In fact, the heart played a distinct role as the seat of selfunderstanding in the medieval and early modern periods. The “book of the heart”

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referred to an interior space that, by the late Middle Ages, as ably demonstrated by Eric Jager, “came to be identified with the hidden or private self.” If well prepared, the heart could receive the imprint of God’s grace, a notion echoed in María Josepha’s request that Márquez assist in “clearing” her heart. To have God write his word upon this space, the heart must be made ready, as it was often described, as a scribe would prepare a parchment: First, with a knife he begins to clean the parchment of fat and to remove all gross fi lth. Next with the pumice stone he smooths away all hair and sinews. Without which the script will not be legible or durable. Then he applies the ruler to serve as a guide for writing. All of which you also must do if you want to have the book I have described. This parchment book shall be your heart.

The “parchment” was also inscribed with one’s sins. The book of the heart served as one’s conscience: sins and faults were marked in the book of the heart to serve as “a moral record of the life of the unique individual” to be read at the final judgment. Increasingly, the imagery of a moral record drew upon the language of accounting or private record keeping. Language of the heart inhabited spiritual guidebooks for the laity. A fifteenth-century author counseled women, “Your heart or conscience is a book wherein you should read during this life, for it is the book whereby you shall be judged.”  Further, the heart was the site where one’s experiences were held. In this context, the heart held the “more subjective, emotional side of a person’s life,” including “feelings, imagination, and even the senses.” Here the heart was linked to memory and to the emerging genre of autobiography that was written “from the heart.”  The individual became both the reader of the heart and the writer of the heart, both the holder and the interpreter of a hidden or undeciphered self. Thus, Jager concludes, “The book of the heart [was] a crux for medieval anxieties about writing and truth, language and desire, identity and the body.”  Finally, the heart was a palpable symbol of the intense relationship between a confessor and his spiritual daughter. Fernandez de Santa Cruz, the bishop of Puebla, offered a powerful testament to symbolism of the heart in spiritual “father-daughter” relationships when he made a gift of this organ to the nuns of the convent of Santa Monica. His heart was to be entombed in the convent chapel. In a eulogy preached at Bishop Fernandez’s funeral, Miguel de Torres exhorted the mourners to embrace the heart as “the living center of love, palace of the will, and the most noble part of all those that compose the living human.”  Equipped with these particulars about the heart as the seat of religious being, we can begin to understand the traditions that Petra de San Gabriel drew upon when she spoke of her heart in letters to her spiritual director. Petra expressed her special relationship with Father Márquez in terms of the heart: she wrote that

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he alone knew her and “appreciated” her heart, indicating his special knowledge of her unique self, her secret self. If we take all three meanings to be operative here, then Father Márquez was helping her to know God’s will—what God had written—upon her heart. He also knew her sins, as we might expect, given that their relationship was based on the sacrament of confession. Finally, he knew her as a person: her hidden thoughts and emotions. She had allowed him into her heart, and together they read her heart in an effort to improve her self. In this sense, Petra expressed the totality of her relationship with Márquez when she wrote: “Dearest Father of my heart, you are the keeper of my soul.”  The intensity of Petra’s relationship with Father Márquez is evident in the proprietary tone she often used in her letters. In one letter, her emotions ran high, ranging from tenderness to anger and jealousy. Two and a half weeks had passed since she sent the errand boys to inquire after his health and, more to the point, to see if he would come to see her every day of the Jubilee. “If you wish,” she said, seeming to offer a choice, and quickly added, “because I am your charge,” reminding him of his duty to her. In fact, by the second day of Jubilee, he had not come to the convent. Furthermore, to aggravate the situation, another nun in her convent was now seeing Father Ventura, the priest Petra had dismissed in favor of Márquez. “My compañera entered into the confessional with Padre Ventura while I, your charge, was left without confessing on Jubilee. I was in such great anguish with my sins, I did not know what to do with myself, because I used to tell that priest my cases of conscience.” She had been stranded without a priest. She was incensed and reminded him again of his obligations as a spiritual director and of the reciprocity of their relationship. She wrote angrily to Márquez, “There are privileges a nun has to confess herself with her priest.” Some of Petra’s letters expressed desperation for his company. Did she really want his advice, or merely his physical presence? Sometimes this desire reflected her insecurity or unworthiness: she feared that no priest would deign to deal with her “mala alma” (wicked soul). “Perhaps you can see that I have no remedy to save myself,” she wrote. “Who can look upon my disgrace but to see that there is no one to love my unworthy soul?” Yet more than “love me,” Petra’s letters said “save me.” Petra ultimately declared obedience to Márquez: “I obey you in all, without concern for myself. What you command, I follow.” On the surface, these words indicate a loss of self in the total submission to another’s will. But, in fact, she was trying to fashion a new self. Her next sentence read, “Form me, Father.” The verb is crear—literally, she says “Create me.” Her submission to Father Márquez’s will was key to Petra’s crafting of a new self. As she said later in the same letter, “I beg you, Father, tell me how to comport myself to be more agreeable to the eyes of God.” Her phrasing indicates a submission of body as well as soul to the care of the priest. She literally needs to learn how to be in this world to gain favor in the next.

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If there is a constant in Petra’s letters, it is discussion of Father Ventura Perez, the confessor she left for Father Márquez. Nuns like María Josepha and Petra de San Gabriel were free to choose their own confessors, provided the priest was willing. Although Petra’s letters, like most in this collection, were undated, it is less difficult to establish the train of the narrative because there was a “before and after” leaving the spiritual care of Father Ventura. In the beginning, she made clear that she wanted to leave his care but was torn about it. She wrote that she had made things worse with Father Ventura the day before but now wanted to put things right: “Please visit me and advise me how to reach some accord with him.” The decision to leave his care was made more difficult because Father Ventura ministered to other family members. In par ticular, he confessed both her father and her grandfather, she wrote to Márquez, “but I am consoled only by your doctrines.” Other worries surfaced. Father Ventura was once the keeper of her heart. “I used to tell that priest my casos de consciencia.” She despaired that her privacy would be violated, that what she told him might come back into the convent. Convent politics played another role in Petra’s worries about having Father Márquez as her spiritual father. She wrote to Father Márquez, “I want to tell P. Ventura of the proposal [to take Márquez as her confessor] for through God nothing is impossible, but I do have this doubt.” She wrote to ask for guidance about the frequent reception of communion, to which she was accustomed. Petra not only must prepare her soul before the eyes of God, but also she must shape her physical being before her watchful convent sisters. Petra’s limited access to her confessor once again sheds light on the importance of frequent communion to spiritual self-fashioning and hints at the necessity of communal approval of one’s worthiness. She was subject to her sisters’ comments about her “exterior faults” precisely due to the frequency with which she partook of the Eucharist. She was disoriented and uncertain about how to proceed, as becomes clear in the letters, because confessing with Father Márquez resulted in more limited access to the confessional for Petra and, as we have heard from the inquisitors from Chapter 5, daring to approach the communion altar without confessing could be risky. As Petra notes, she feared that taking communion every day without having confessed might cause scandal. She tells him in a matter-of-fact tone, “There are many times when I fall into sin, that is who I am, and sometimes my sisters comment on my exterior faults.” Frequent communion may have been Petra’s autonomous choice, but her worthiness to receive it would be judged by her community of sisters. Her sisters’ reactions also gave her pause about her decision to leave Father Ventura. Petra had suggested to a nun named Bernarda that she should also leave Father Ventura for Father Márquez. Bernarda was “inconsolable at the thought of losing Padre Ventura” and, as Petra later explained, was loath to lose her more

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frequent access to the confessional. Petra hoped that Father Márquez would persuade Bernarda to choose quality over quantity, as this was clearly how Petra assessed her own decision, although she was often vexed by it. For Petra de San Gabriel, the process of self-formation was intended to result in consolation, but her desire to confess to a priest who was not always available, combined with her desire to frequently commune with Christ, made her subject to the criticisms of her convent sisters. The letters that Petra de San Gabriel and María Josepha wrote to Father Márquez offer an alternative point of view on women’s writing. These letters were private, undated, and highly unstructured. None of the letters included a formal life story. The correspondence provided little in the way of raw material for publication at a later date, nor did the letters serve to compile evidence proving the sanctity of a mystic woman’s visions. In fact, neither woman discussed visions or other mystic experiences. There are few facts detailing individual lives at all. I read these scratches in ink on paper as traces of momentary landings or resting points of birds on a circuitous journey. Were “identities” forged? If so, it was of sinners who took on becoming as way of being. This is what Pierre Hadot was driving at when he cautioned against assuming that a spiritual identity can be forged through writing. The point is not to forge oneself a spiritual identity by writing, but rather to liberate oneself from one’s individuality, in order to raise oneself up to universality. It is thus incorrect to speak of “writing the self”: not only is it not the case that one “writes oneself,” but what is more, it is not the case that writing constitutes the self. Writing, like the other spiritual exercises, changes the level of the self, and universalizes it. The miracle of this exercise, carried out in solitude, is that it allows its practitioner to accede to the universality of reason within the confines of space and time. . . . A person writing feels he is being watched; he is no longer alone, but is part of the silently present human community. When one formulates one’s personal acts in writing, one is taken up by the machine of reason, logic and universality. What was confused and subjective becomes thereby objective.

Indeed, Hadot is correct that the goal was spiritual surrender to the universal. But for Petra de San Gabriel, the watchful eyes of her not-so-silently present convent sisters rebuked her. For María Josepha, the potential audience—“the silently present human community”—drew her miserably back to her sinful self. The mere attempt to place her personal acts in writing resulted in struggle—even panic—more than reason, logic, or universality. The intended goal of the exercise of writing was to transcend individuality, yet in the actual practice of writing, she returned to square the circle of self. What do these letters reveal? On one level, the letters show a pattern of comfort seeking in daily life. Neither woman was concerned with recording the details of

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a past life for posterity’s sake. Instead, the writings were themselves rituals of redemption, simultaneously technologies of self-negation and self-formation. The letters represent the struggles of various women to find God’s will in their lives by means of the spiritual direction of a much sought-after confessor and, thus, their writings offer insight into how women struggled to produce and transcend themselves through a regime of obedience to God and confessor. James Fernandez contends that autobiographical writings are redemption narratives written by redeemed selves, sharing a narrative of conversion and redemption. But these letters were written by women who lived as “unredeemed selves.”  Petra and María Josepha reveal transformation as a constant process, a technology of the self that was future (salvation) oriented but that ultimately linked them to a quest for the ever-elusive now. We gain a better sense of how sinners experienced themselves not only as “fallen” but as continually falling back into the self that they had sought to overcome. Again and again, Father Márquez provided a listening ear and was a source of solace and emotional sustenance. Can we see a moment in history? I believe so. These women’s letters can be read as a snapshot of a momentary condensation, a fleeting intersection in which the moral-theological and the burgeoning psychoanalytic could be located in consolation, that fleeting experience of unity that dissolved into an ever more urgent searching. T H E S H A PE O F T H E H E A R T

Thus far, I have focused on very personal examples of encounters with Jesuit devotional life and I have noted that the remaining traces of these two women’s spiritual journeys were marked with a language of the heart. As we have seen, the heart as the crux of anxieties about self had endured since the late medieval period and continued to be critical to spiritual self-formation well into the early modern era. But by the eighteenth century, the cultural currents that crisscrossed heart discourse and iconography had multiplied and transformed. Notably, heartcentered spirituality left an iconographic trail. The evidentiary remains of this visual culture allow me to pull the lens back, so to speak, to examine the heartcentered devotional trends that animated eighteenth-century Catholicism as a global entity. And so I bring the last chapter of this book to a close by linking this very local attempt to overcome one’s self with the Jesuit mission to conquer souls worldwide. In examining devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, we see the Jesuits replicating their history with the Spiritual Exercises. Once more, the Society of Jesus picked up and ran with a devotional thread that antedated them. In this case, devotion to Christ’s heart had long preceded the Society of Jesus; nonetheless, they put a decidedly Jesuit stamp on the devotion. The result was a differently oriented devotion and, importantly, a very different shape of the heart.

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Figure 4. The Adoration of the Sacred Heart with Saints Ignatius Loyola and Aloysius Gonzaga (La Adoración del Sagrado Corazón con Ignacio de Loyola y Luís Gonzaga). Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer. Image courtesy Denver Art Museum.

At center stage of this discussion of the transatlantic circulation of “heart” texts and images is a particularly striking painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus produced by the eighteenth-century Mexican artist José de Páez. The painting prominently features an ascending anatomically correct human heart (see Figure 4) circled by angels and adored by two distinct kneeling figures, St. Ignatius and St. Gonzaga. The earth is in shadows; the flames of Christ’s resurrected heart illuminate the faces of the angels and the Jesuit. The Madonna lilies glow a pure white on this darkened earth, indicative of the innocence of Gonzaga, who died very young. The gestures of Gonzaga and Loyola indicate preparation for the Good Death, made possible by the death and resurrection of Christ, as indicated by the cross victorious that protrudes from the aorta.

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What was the significance of the fact that the object of admiration in this painting was an anatomically correct depiction of the human heart? In Chapter 5 we heard Jean Croiset, SJ, describe the Eucharist as a means to “keep Christ constantly before one’s eyes.” But here the heart stands in—floats, ascends—as Christ. Paradoxically, to represent Christ without his entire human body was a move to depict Christ’s full humanity—the symbol of Christ’s subjective self— here represented as his pulsing and bleeding human heart. Thus, not only did the artist’s ability to represent a human heart exemplify the Christian message, but Páez’s realism provides a context in which the physiological discoveries made by anatomists and natural philosophers circulated outside the literate elite. My simple but important point is that new ideas about human anatomy were consumed in popular forms, which in this case included Catholic devotional materials. Páez’s painting skillfully displayed new knowledge about the human body, but why? Devotion to Christ’s heart was not new, but this par ticular iconography—the floating carnal heart—was indeed novel, and the Jesuits were closely linked to its promulgation. Images were key to propagating Ignatian spirituality, and Jesuits took up devotion to the Sacred Heart with a par ticular sense of urgency. The Italian Jesuit Domenico Maria Calvi (1714–88) was a key promoter of the devotion to the Sacred Heart. Calvi asked quality engravers specifically for images that included St. Luigi Gonzaga (1568–91), a Jesuit who died young and became the patron saint of Jesuit colleges following his canonization in 1726. Calvi sent packets of images such as these to Jesuits around the world. One of these, the Sacred Heart with St. Lawrence and Charles Borromeo, may have served as a model for Páez, who completed his small oil painting shortly after the official feast day of the Sacred Heart was given limited approval by the Vatican in January 1765. Páez’s painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was a small work—about 16 × 12 inches—painted in oil on copper plate. Small copper plates facilitated mobility: religious iconography could move, from church to church, smuggled into regions where the Jesuits were excluded, or—like the paper prints sent by Calvi—across the Atlantic. These luminous copper plate paintings were often set at eye level to evoke emotion in the individual viewer. When exhibited in Mexico City in 2007, Páez’s painting was displayed above a writing desk, an indication that it was intended for private devotion in an intimate space, either a home or a small side chapel. Páez was not the first to depict an anatomically correct heart in Mexico outside of medical treatises. A Jesuit named Juan Antonio Mora published a text promoting the devotion in Mexico in the 1730s (Figure 5). He translated and edited a book titled The Cult of Devotion That Every Christian Ought to Give to the Sacred Heart of Christ as Man and God. The original was written and published in Rome in 1726 by a French Jesuit named Joseph Gallifet, who had been keen to establish a feast day dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. While his very early attempts to write about the devotion (late 1690s) had been approved by

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Figure 5. From the Cult of Devotion That Every Christian Ought to Give to the Sacred Heart of Christ as Man and God. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Eusebio F. Kino de la Provincia Mexicana de la Compañía de Jesús.

Jesuit censors, the Jesuit General Tirso Gonzalez prohibited the publication in 1697 with the pointed comment that “the Church does not favor new devotions.” Gallifet’s book described how, over a period of four years in the late seventeenth century, Christ appeared to a French nun named Marguerite-Marie de Alacoque and asked her to promote devotion to his Sacred Heart, specifically linking this devotion to veneration of the Eucharist. Alacoque relayed not only her vision in which Christ named the Jesuits to promote the devotion, but a specific image she sketched that Christ wished her to promulgate. The illustrations of the anatomically correct heart and Christ holding his own heart in Gallifet’s 1726 devotional treatise were originals produced by the French

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artist Charles Natoire specifically for Gallifet’s publication. Mora’s book contained a very similar, slightly less refined, image of the carnal heart. In his study of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in France, Raymond Jonas links the popularity of Alacoque’s visions to burgeoning French nationalism, or, as he states it, “the Sacred Heart was offering a new covenant to a new chosen people.” While this localized interpretation makes sense within French historiography, the fact remains that the devotion was not promoted as such outside of France. In fact, the French Jesuit Gallifet wrote his book in Rome. Gallifet’s efforts included the foundation of confraternities dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as well as sponsoring the production of Sacred Heart iconography. He aimed to attract a global following and, in fact, proclaimed that the devotion had been taken up not only in France but in places as remote as Canada and China. And, as Juan Antonio Mora wrote in his redaction of Gallifet’s text, it was time to augment this devotion among those living in New Spain. Mora’s book was printed several times. His was the first but, importantly, not the only eighteenth-century publication on the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Mexico. In the late 1740s and 1750s, there were several devotional books on the market with Sacred Heart themes and often (but not always) Jesuit authors or explicit Jesuit connections. Interestingly, the majority of the subsequent publications of devotions to the Sacred Heart used the exact engraving that decorated Mora’s book, even when written by other authors. For example, Práctica y modo de prepararse a celebrar el Sacro-Santo Corazón de Jesus was written by an anonymous priest in 1749 specifically for nuns and “other devout souls.” This anonymous text reprinted the Mora engraving. A “sweet and efficacious” novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was published anonymously in 1757 by a “Father from the Company of Jesus.” This very short and small booklet contains the same engraving, yet the author made some effort to cover a few more devotional bases: he connected devotion to the Sacred Heart to the release of souls from purgatory and included a special prayer to “implore” Saint Joseph at the hour of death, noting that the Illustrious Señor Dr. D. Manuel Joseph Rubio y Salinas, archbishop of Mexico, would concede forty days of indulgences for anyone who said this prayer. He also mentioned the specific devotions one ought to undertake during the three days of Carnival, which primarily involved praying publicly. Another book, Devoción al Sagrado Corazón de Jesús en el SSmo Sacramento, contained excerpts from Marie de Alacoque’s vida as written by Jean Joseph Languer from the Academy Francaise, which was originally translated by the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Loyola (he also augmented her story with some chapters about the importance of the devotion to Christ’s heart to a young Spanish Jesuit, Bernardo Francisco de Hoyas). The Juan de Loyola translation was reprinted in Puebla de los Angeles. I have compared the Spanish publication and the palm-sized Mexican reprint. Again, the same engraving decorates the frontispiece of both versions, as it did another

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guide, Día felíz en obsequio del amoroso Corazón de Jesus Sacramentado, also published in Puebla in 1752. The Mora image also decorated a Franciscan guide to the Via Crucis published in Mexico City in 1747. This devotional guide appears to be Franciscan in nature; that is, there is no meditation on Christ’s resurrection, and the heart of the Christian who makes the Way of the Cross is described as “crucified.” Yet the image of the heart decorating the text is the engraving of the carnal heart borrowed from Mora’s text. All of these predate the Páez painting; none include images of Jesuit saints. They all either made reference to or are copies of either Languer’s text, Gallifet’s text, or Mora’s text. For example, the anonymous author of Práctica y modo de prepararse specifically advised readers to turn to Mora’s text for the necessary preparatory exercises for the solemnidad of the Sacred Heart, which would take place after Corpus Christi. Padre Juan de Loyola, the author of Devoción al Sagrado Corazón de Jesús en el SSmo Sacramento, mentioned above, made note of Gallifet’s Latin text, Cultu Cordis Jesu. All of this demonstrates that a single image dominated eighteenth-century heart spirituality in Mexico at the same time that a marked shift in heartcentered spirituality was underway. Heart discourse and imagery had generally followed one of two precedents. In the first mode, the pious Christian prayed for access to Christ’s heart. Even prior to the full-fledged devotion to Christ’s heart, devotional writers referred to his side wound as a dwelling place, not only as a space of refuge but as a means toward mystical union with Christ. The Song of Songs (2:14) provided the general source of this very widespread discourse: the dove (soul) takes refuge in the clefts and crannies of the rock (Christ). Both refuge and union were operative when, famously, Francis de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal spoke of Christ’s heart as a space where the mystical lovers, merging with Christ, could be with one another. In the second mode, the Christian sinner could labor to make her own heart a worthy space for Christ to occupy or for the word of God to be imprinted. We are familiar with this genre from the previous discussion of María de Josepha, who wrote of preparing her heart, with the assistance of her confessor, to receive God’s word. Whether images of Christ’s heart or the sinner’s, both forms of imagery narrativized access. When the seventeenth-century Mexican artist Juan Correa painted St. Augustine writing on the heart of Santa Maria Magdalena de Pazzi, the heart in question (shaped like a valentine, and attached to Maria Magdalena’s collar) provided ample space for the written word. Such symbolism would have been familiar to Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic, given the popularity of the Wierix brothers’ prints that made great use of heart iconography. Mario Praz has specifically linked the Jesuits to the cupid iconography common to these prints. The diminutive hero had once represented profane love, but now, as a symbol of divine love, the child beckoned the sinner, offering a variety of very literal demonstrations of how one might prepare the heart for salvation and spiritual consolation. If

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Figure 6. From Francisco Xavier Fernandez, SJ. El Alma Victoriosa. Madrid, 1777. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Eusebio F. Kino de la Provincia Mexicana de la Compañía de Jesús.

there is a transitional stage from the symbolic heart to the carnal heart in Jesuit devotional literature, it may be best captured in a series of prints that accompanied an eighteenth-century Spanish guide to contrition titled Alma Victoriosa (Figure 6). Instead of cupid-Christ, an adult Christ occupies the interior of a heart whose contours are decidedly carnal. In effect, the cupid and carnal are blended. Christ’s bodily openings—his leaky fluids—represented his nurturing humanity. In seventeenth-century emblems, the image of a cracked-open pomegranate referred allegorically to the opening of Christ’s body. “A fruit which opens its chest to offer its entrails deserves to be crowned/Fruta que rompa su pecho, y

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sus entranas ofrece, ser coronada merece.” The insides of the dramatically colored fruit provided an image that had grist, a visible and (potentially) tactile center that sparked the senses, a messy sweet body to be consumed—symbolism that referred to Eucharistic devotion, but also the search for “self.” This opening of the heart was a component of Ignatian spirituality. In the Rosignoli text that helped to popularize the Exercises (discussed in Chapter 3), the author utilized a discourse of therapeutic self-surgery to laud the utility of the Spiritual Exercises: “Moreso, they [the Exercises] comprise a practical science and a Canonical method, a great art . . . to efficaciously cut open our hearts.” Rosignoli used the notion of practical or “experimental” science but was also careful to note its orthodoxy or acceptance as “canonical” method. Artists like Páez took the visual effect to a higher pitch by merging the symbolic with realism, reflecting early modern observations of and experimentations with nature. In contrast, the Páez painting does not tell a narrative of the heart as refuge or dwelling. Nor does it offer lessons for the Christian stumbling along the fraught path toward salvation. Instead, the heart seems preoccupied with itself. Despite the wound that acknowledges the traditional point of entry, the muscularity of the heart works at cross-purposes. Is penetration possible? If we return to the matrix of possibilities unleashed by the Song of Songs, the muscular representation of the heart should make no difference, for, as Amy Hollywood offers, “Christ’s body is both masculine and penetrable, both rock and feminized.” Hence, one might posit continuity with a long-standing tradition. Yet it is the chronology that forces the point, the chronology that provides the very stark contrast between the sweet cupid-Christ of the seventeenth century, who quite literally demonstrates how this space might be inhabited, and the eighteenth-century compactness of a heart composed of dense tissue. To return to our eighteenth-century devotional writer, the French Jesuit Gallifet advocated realism as the best way to portray Jesus’ heart: [Jesus’ heart] has been represented in various manners and ornamented in different fashions according to the painters’ taste and genre, or according to the devotion of those who wanted it. There are pious persons who wished it to be given to them very simply and in its natural form, that is to say in the same form as in the human body, finding more devotion in honouring the heart of Jesus Christ as it really is in the sacred chest of the divine Saviour. This appears to conform more to reason. If one had to honour the hand of Jesus Christ, the most natural and exact expression of this divine hand is what one would want: why not think the same of his Sacred Heart? Thus, in order to satisfy the devotion of these persons, we have engraved and presented here the hearts of Jesus and Mary in their natural form.

Here we can recognize the valorization of realism that we have come to associate with the Enlightenment, but cautiously so. I want to refrain from over-

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stating the novelty of realism. For in fact, by the eighteenth century, naturalistic depictions of Christ’s body did not reflect a particularly new trend. Seventeenthcentury baroque painting and sculpture had made powerful use of blood and bruises. Typically, sculptors shaped Christ’s body as delicate and lovely, “contrasting the beauty of the Christ figure to its gruesome suffering.” Even earlier, we can look to late medieval devotion to the Five Wounds, which entailed a highly specific—indeed, compartmentalized—view of Christ’s body. In his essay “The Passion Measured,” David Areford has shown how late medieval devotees to Christ’s wounds were also concerned to calculate, for example, the precise number of drops of blood spilled by Christ or the exact measurement of his side wound, and then replicate that in woodcuts that could be distributed to the faithful. For example, one print included commentary that guided the devotee to an exact contemplation of Christ’s body: “This little cross standing in Christ’s wound measured 40 times makes the length of Christ in his humanity.” So the small cross, multiplied, also provided imaginative access to a more realistic conception of Christ’s living body. But for early modern followers of the devotion, the human nature of Christ, as well as the historicity of Jesus’ heart, were both of critical importance. Even the lance that pierced the side of Christ (and touched the side of his heart) was to be venerated because of its contact with the precious blood, as well as other artifacts that had become sacred through contact with the dying Christ’s blood (the nails and the thorns). Mora writes, “Finally, and what is par ticular about our heart is that it is a receptacle, that contains the blood, forms it and perfects it: following the infinite valor and dignity of the Blood of Christ, that was the price of our redemption, it is infallible, that the same cult and reverence we ought to give to the Sacred Heart of Christ, that we offer tribute [tributamos] to his divine Blood.” The heart is to be worshipped because it labored to perfect that key element in the Christian history of salvation: the blood of Christ. Yet this heart is the resurrected heart of Christ and, as I have noted, the heart in this iconography is aflame. For the Jesuits, the culmination of the imitation of Christ was not his passion and death but rather the joy of walking with the resurrected Christ. When his own passions had been properly distilled by an inflamed heart, the Jesuit not only was in a state of spiritual health, but also was prepared to move into the world. For Jesuit followers, the flames signal the conquest of disordered passions that made standing under Christ’s banner possible, calling one toward a consolation that could be sought “even if to the Indies.” H E A R T I N T H E WO R L D

Eighteenth-century devotional writers like Mora performed a complicated dance as they struggled to put a distinctively Jesuit stamp upon the devotion to Christ’s

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heart, all the while distancing themselves from charges of novelty. Mora’s emphasis was on continuity in his presentation of three Christian saints who loved Christ’s heart. But did his saints share one and the same experience? Despite the quest for the canonical, the Mora text highlighted the very Ignatian transformations in the eighteenth-century devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. First, Mora quoted St. Bernard, who described Jesus’ heart as a place to inhabit: “Purify me of all my faults,” Bernard prayed, “so I am worthy to inhabit your heart all the days of my life.” His next example was St. Gertrude, a thirteenth-century Benedictine nun, to whom Jesus offered his heart as temple and cloister: “My heart is to be your temple, my body is to be like the cloister, where henceforth you shall live.” Mora summarized his brief examples thus: “In both of these cases very clearly one can see . . . that Christ’s kind heart is the sweet and secure abode for our souls.” Yet the reader is drawn away from the sweetness and security of sanctified monastic space when Mora offers the seventeenth-century Ursuline nun Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672) as his final example. Her experience of the Sacred Heart presents itself as critically different from those of both Gertrude and Bernard. Christ’s heart was no longer a place of retreat but rather the vehicle by which she was brought to God. Marie de l’Incarnation struck this tone in the following prayer: “Oh Eternal Father, God and my Lord, I am carried to you by the beloved heart of my JESUS, which is my way, my truth, my life.” Although Jesus’ heart brought her close to God, she did not plead for access to the private retreat of the Sacred Heart. Rather, her next movement was outward, for the Sacred Heart must be known and thereby provided the camino—the path or road—that led her into the world. “Because this Heart is worthy of all adoration, I adore you for all men who do not adore you; I recognize you for all those who, voluntarily blind, do not recognize you.” Meditating on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, she imagined a world on whose behalf she labored. Language of the heart expressed a missionary ideal—a desire to move outward and convert others. In the very next lines, Mora quotes her: “I wish to go around the whole world looking for souls to be redeemed with the precious Blood of my beloved Spouse, and to have them satisfied by your most holy Heart. . . . My God! Don’t permit it to pass that JESUS will be for one more moment unknown and ignored by so many souls!” That Marie de l’Incarnation’s heart-centered spiritual imaginary was worldly comes as no surprise to those who are familiar with her role in French overseas expansion. This nun founded an Ursuline convent in Quebec, learned and wrote in the Iroquois and Algonquian languages, and catechized young girls, both colonizers and indigenous. Historians may be less aware of the French nun’s familiarity with the Jesuit exercises. The excerpt Mora chose to include reverberates with Ignatian influence. The heart, no longer a dwelling place, was a blazon that signified Jesuit-inspired hopes for a universal Christian empire and the personal aspirations of women like Marie de l’Incarnation to participate in a worldly Catholicism.

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The connection between contemplation and action is at the center of Mora’s description of Marie de l’Incarnation’s devotion to the Sacred Heart. When Mora wrote, “Who does not love this heart so wounded?” this was not merely a rhetorical question, but a challenge and a call to action. The clear implication was that there were those in the world who did not—yet—love the heart so wounded. We can see this as a call to action if we recall the Fourth Week of the Exercises, in which joyful reflection on Christ’s resurrection moved the exercitant to demonstrate God’s love more by deeds than words. The Páez painting, with the raised heart surrounded by angels, depicts the resurrected Christ. A common schema of resurrection iconography in the early modern period typically depicted a floating Christ (his entire body) surrounded by angels. To note one relevant precedent, we can look to the Jesuit Jerome Nadal’s guide to the Exercises with illustrations designed to aid one in composition of place. In Nadal’s guide, Christ personified floats above his tomb on a cloud surrounded by angels. Nadal’s images provided meditative points for the Fourth Week and was linked to the following directive: “The Fourth Point. Consider how the divinity, which seemed hidden during the Passion, now appears and manifests itself so miraculously in this holy Resurrection, through its true and most holy effects.” Christ, hidden in the cave, was now visible. But the carnal heart of Christ takes this resurrection iconography one step further: Once hidden in the cavern of his chest, Christ’s anatomically correct heart took center stage. If we turn back once again to the Spiritual Exercises, it becomes clear that the activist Christianity found in Jesuit devotion to the Sacred Heart was, in many ways, a logical extension of the exercises from the Fourth Week. The Exercises as a whole entailed a carefully controlled distilling process that culminated in a meditation on love, designed to ignite affect in its purest form. The objective of this dynamic love was dual: reason could control the passions; but love would inflame and direct them. Accordingly, the Fourth Week closed with the Contemplation to Attain Love, which was intended to imbue the practitioner with love and passion for God, self, and neighbor. Recall that joyful experience of Christ resurrected spurred one to action. As the Fourth Week made clear, deeds were more important than words. The Contemplation to Attain Love moved one toward activity originating from gratitude and joy, not sin or fear. Reflecting upon creaturely self (“I am created”), one would then consider other creatures (God’s labor “in the heavens, elements, plants, fruits, cattle, and all the rest”) before moving once again to reflect upon self. “Finding God in all things” entailed contemplating nature as a means of accessing God. The Ignatian Exercises forged a tangible link between contemplation, action, and the requirement for observation that helps to explain, ultimately, the naturalistic or realistic representation of Christ’s heart. In other words, here we see a link between natural philosophy and moral philosophy, wherein the practice of a humanistic moral philosophy

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(the control of the passions) made possible the practice of natural philosophy (experimentation and observation). Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus carried with it new iconography, ideas, and vocabulary with which to think about Christ’s body as a human body. Transformations in this devotion in the eighteenth century envisioned Christ’s heart not only as a place of retreat, or a touchstone on the path toward mystical transcendence, but also as advocating engagement with the world. Accordingly, Páez’s painting functioned as an iconographic commentary on how Christian love animated a self-other dynamic that promoted a worldly Christianity. Love animated an exploration of God’s works in the world that, indeed, helps explain why the “natural” or “carnal” heart of Christ was best loved in its anatomically correct form. The physiological parameters of human being were key to this devotion. In the texts and images that depicted the human and divine nature of the god-man’s heart, we find evidence that the convergences of spirituality and natural philosophy in the pursuit of knowledge about self and world that began in the sixteenth century had continued through to the eighteenth century. In an essay on the anatomized heart, Jonathan Miller begins with the comment that it is actually in spite of the human body that we have, as he writes: “inherited a clear-cut inventory of the parts we own.” He shows a sketch of an open cadaver to illustrate the point that one must know in advance how to actually perceive organs as separate, to see a body in parts. Miller explores the metaphors that would have made a certain kind of seeing possible, arguing that only when pump metaphors became available could someone like English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) begin to see the heart as a pump. For early modern Catholics, Christ’s broken body made available a certain kind of metaphor, to adopt Jonathan Miller’s terms. Did devotional material contribute to the Western view of a body in parts? This is a question I have taken up in a new study; at this point, what is clear is that a new view of the anatomically correct human heart circulated in devotional material culture. Here I have discussed two tangible fragments of Jesuit heart-centered devotional practices—a book and a painting—to demonstrate how heart iconography sat at the crossroads of the multiple shifts that historians have demarcated with the over-drawn historiographical bookends “medieval” and “modern.” While many of my arguments have privileged bodies in motion, we must also keep Catholic material culture in view, and especially the devotional guide. These small books functioned as critical pieces of material culture, “hinges” that connected past experience to future action, between history (objectification of one’s past actions) and imagined future (transcendence). When an individual retreated to a corner of her home with a Jesuit guide to daily meditation, the spiritual investment made at the most microlevel (the soul) had profound global consequences for the Society of Jesus. In fact, to unpack this further, her ability to retreat to a

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corner with a concrete piece of material culture in hand—with books written expressly to facilitate meditation in the home—is to firmly embed her within a dense network of processes of self-formation and affective proliferation. Jesuit devotional practices were animating forces that wrought tangible results. Small acts—even devotion described or experienced as “interior”—could have cumulative effects. Devotional guides circulated on Jesuit information networks. The translations into Spanish and subsequent publications in Mexico highlight the transregional nature of early modern Catholic devotional practices that supported an intangible (a global imaginary) through the transmission of very concrete material links—books, paper hearts, letters—that often passed from person to person, from hand to hand, even after the Society of Jesus was dissolved in the 1770s. This local and global framing of the “heart” demonstrates the reach of the Spiritual Exercises in the early modern period, and, once again, confirms the capacity of religious material culture to move people, ideas, and practices.

Conclusion Re-membering the Past

I have called the Spiritual Exercises a “selfish” experience. Although they were structured as meditations on the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, they also compelled the exercitant to work very hard to know himself and to attain those glimmers of consolation, to sense (quite literally) how his whole way of being could be made to resonate with God’s will. The exercitant’s narrative view of self was a moving target, as self-understanding had to be continually recalibrated to remain attuned to God’s will in the face of changing situations, locales, the passage of time, and his own relationships with superiors and subjects. Indeed, the Spiritual Exercises were relational as the success of a retreat experience was premised upon a notion stated clearly at the beginning of the Exercises: “Presupposition. That both the giver and receiver of the Spiritual Exercises may be of greater help and benefit to each other.” Forging a self was an inherently intersubjective process. This process linked self to other, and many exercitants developed a sense of self as active in a world imagined as an Indies, a metaphor that signaled the struggle for salvation. And what of the less metaphorical Indies? What kind of experience was arrival? Juan Bautista Zappa had difficulty finding “the Indies” in cosmopolitan Mexico City and its surrounding villages and towns; the experience that beckoned to him was that of his compañero, Salvatierra, who had been assigned to the distant missions of northern New Spain. I have approached the gendered implications of formation of self obliquely by asking if obedience was gendered. Both men and women were instructed to give themselves over to the spiritual director, but the spiritual director also labored to negate himself to join forces with his spiritual subject. Both men and women were taught to discern God’s will in their own lives. But as we have seen, first in 197

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Ignatius’s tugs-of-war with women who wanted to become Jesuits, and later in the “do-it-yourself” spiritual guides of Croiset, the exercitant only “need” aspire to a spiritual perfection akin to her own status and station. There is great ambiguity here: Jesuit efforts to accommodate the Exercises to the spiritual ability of each individual can be read as a closing down of options (remain in your station, be a mother, not a daughter), but accommodation also widened access to spiritual consolation and offered new ways of working toward salvation that were “easy” and accessible for everyone. Early modern Catholics no longer had to aspire to “the body of the saint” to attain moments of unity with God. There were other options. Indeed, inquisitors worried when heretofore monastic practices moved beyond the confines of a narrow elite, and they wrote, most vexed, about the way that Jesuit spiritual practices could threaten the social order. The ancient imperative to “know thyself” was unleashed from school and monastery, as even villagers, Indians, and women were instructed to develop a narrative sense, dare I say, a philosophical sense of their lives. Divine authority for self-transformation was attained through obedience to the spiritual director. But in the do-it-yourself spiritual guides, we also see the development of the option for autonomous self-transformation as the exercitant, in her own home or in a church, gave herself over and declared obedience to a process that promised the same result as the Exercises led by a spiritual director. This highlights the nature of the Exercises as a course of action and why, from the beginning, Jesuits insisted that one must not merely read them, but actively make them. Whether in a retreat house under the direction of a Jesuit, or with a book (written by a Jesuit), the exercitant indubitably entered into an experience that was the Spiritual Exercises. They entered. We are left behind. Many of the spiritual instructions, devotional guides, and private letters drawn upon for this study have left us peering into the door of a retreat house, a confessional, a convent, or a home. After the Jesuits were expelled from New Spain in 1767, a man named Señor Ochoa seems to have peered into the old Casa de Araceli where the Spiritual Exercises used to be offered in Mexico City. He took note of some of the art and other devotional accoutrements that he thought could still be put to good use. Among the many things he listed were the following: a wooden statue of Christ, six candle holders of white metal, a San Luis Gonzaga (presumably a statue, since he noted that it was “dressed”), and the bell for one of the four altars. What happened, he asked, to the niche of Our Lady of Loreto? And what of that clock that showed the time and whose ringing was so important to those who made the Exercises? In 1774, he fi led a more formal petition to turn the materials over to the Congregación of S. Felipe Neri. Could they have the paintings, statues, books, chairs, and merchandise that had belonged in the House of the Spiritual Exercises in San Andrés? This list was more complete:

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Ten very fine large paintings of the Passion; Three large pictures, two of hell and heaven and the other of the par ticular Judgment; One of the Cave at Manresa; Another of the greatness of the Glory; Another large one of Señor S. Joseph Barton; Twelve paintings of the History of Joseph; One illustration of the Judgment, numbered in oil One painting of the Conversion of Saint Paul; One of the Sacred Family; Another of Our Lady of Sorrows; Six medium paintings of the Jesuits; One painting en tabla of the nuptials (desposiorios); One painting of S. Xavier; Another of the Divine Pastor; Another of the Holy Trinity; One of the Feast of King Baltasar; A painting of the Divine Lord; Another of Our Lady of Sorrows; Another of the conversion of S. Francisco Borja; Another of the par ticular Judgment; Another of the Glory over Hell; Another of the Life of Man; Five dozen plus nine prints of different Saints. What does this inventory tell us? Many things. Everything. Nothing. “Facts” do not speak for themselves. Much depends upon the angle from which we engage in our imaginative peering through the conjured window. Do these devotional materials represent the remnants of obscurantism? Or were they, rather, some of the tools that forged modern notions of “self”? We often speak of interpreting the past, but I would prefer to conclude with the suggestion that my book remembers the past. Here I am adopting “memory” in the medieval monastic mode that I introduced in Chapter 1. Following Mary Carruthers, memory was not a stored set of data, an inventory of facts. No, not at all. Memory was machine, a means of “fabricating schemes and patterns for thinking.”  In the monastic sense, the machine of memory requires a full stock of “things”—because one must have an inventory of items to collect, move, replace—as

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we compose scenes “within which things are caught and into which they are ‘gathered’ and re-gathered, in innumerable ways.” Memory can only function if we consciously forge webs and networks that enable us to gather and collect, or, in Carruthers’s words, to “move ‘things’ into relationships with one another.”  Memory requires action; it is what we do with the inventory that is important. In these terms, then, yes, historians do indeed engage in memory work: we take bits and pieces from archives, fragments of stories, and the aspects of others’ research that we have found enlightening. These form the stock in our inventories, the tools or fictive devices we use to think. We do this memory work in a here and in a now. We call to mind these “facts” from our inventories in ways that mark out new possibilities for the movement of thought. We follow a way or path that is open—an invitation to wander—but also structured by the emplacement of the inventory. Shaping. Re-shaping. Re-membering. And forgetting? In this vein, “forgetting,” too, is an art and a practice. This memory art is accomplished not by erasure but by a re-placement of the elements within a scene. “Forgetting,” writes Carruthers, “is a variety of remembering.” To forget is not to obliterate, but to reorient. This is to say that I have re-placed or re-situated the concept of “self” within a network of unexpected associations. I have juxtaposed some recognizable entities—early modern Catholic spirituality of the Ignatian variety is one, the Western “self” another. But in positioning them in relation to each other and within the history of Mexico, I hope that all three of them appear both familiar and a bit strange, even slightly jarring. For, you see, one possible way to bring to a close the series of arguments I have been making about the history of early modern Catholic subjectivities is to conclude with the claim that I have successfully secured a place for Catholicism in the history of rationality and bourgeois modernity. Yet I hesitate to go that route. The dilemma is as follows: if we can place what has until only recently been understood as “Catholic irrationality” practiced by the “shock troops of the pope” at the center of a story about modern subjectivity, what does that say about the concept of modernity? In Habitations of Modernity, Chakrabarty writes, “So how would one write of forms of modernity that have deviated from all canonical understandings of the term? . . . Some, of course, question the value of the very idea of modernity, but the word is all around us, and it may already be too late to legislate its uses. It is, of course, entirely possible that the word modernity has outlived its utility as a rigorous concept.” Chakrabarty concludes that we cannot get rid of the word “modernity” because it is deeply embedded in our lexicon and therefore still useful. Yet is “modernity” a word we cannot do without? Of course I have to disagree, first, because my book has been an exercise in how these “stagist” ideas of history obscure more than they reveal and, second, and more important, democracy and

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human rights are battles that no longer need the modifier “modern” to legitimate them or explain the demands of those who struggle for these kinds of rights. The metanarrative of “normative modernity” functions to set the stage for an abundant response—but isn’t this an overplayed plotline? Of late, I have found the invocation of modernity in historical writing perplexing—yes, vexing, even— and this is why: in a discipline that fetishizes the detailed specificity of contingent events as articulated within equally contingent and complex contexts, to insert what is often an undifferentiated and (relatively) timeless notion of “modernity” seems to run counter to historical sensibilities. At best, the invocation of modernity is a tactical move, a demarcation that gives us greater awareness of that which overflows its boundaries (which is quite a bit). At its worst, it serves as a form of mechanical manipulation—a deus ex machina that, instead of swift ly solving an intractable problem, substitutes with an all too convenient plotline. Have I told the story of an “alternative modernity”? I am skeptical about ending upon this note, too. An “alternative” modernity merely deconstructs modernity to reconstruct it anew. As Bruno Latour has reminded us, modernity as a concept can easily accommodate skepticism and dissent. Latour’s phrasing is wonderfully succinct: “To unmask: that was our sacred task, the task of us moderns. To reveal the true calculations underlying the false consciousnesses, or the true interests underlying the false calculations. Who is not still foaming slightly at the mouth with that par ticu lar rabies?” Historians in par ticular are trained to “foam at the mouth” just a little at the prospect of such an unmasking. “I would play a very modern role indeed,” he writes about his own work, “taking my turn in a long queue of debunkers and critics.” I tend to agree with Latour: we have never been modern. We read philosophies of modernity (and now postmodernity), but how well or how completely does anyone “inhabit” any of these? Yet is it possible to forget this modernity that never was? Chakrabarty’s conclusions are provocative. He writes that modernity, once resplendent with meaning, once signifying a hope for emancipation, now merely misleads. Seen in this way, I am most intrigued by his closing lines: “We must, therefore, engage and reengage our ideas about modernity in a spirit of constant vigilance.” I hear in Chakrabarty echoes of the seventeenth-century Jesuit devotional writer, Sebastian Izquierdo, who wrote: “Meditation is nothing other than to bring to memory some sentence, or saying, or discussion, aiming to arrive at some understanding of it, pondering its circumstances and inferring some things from others, and with this to move the will to sympathy, good desires and intentions.” As an act of being vigilant over thought and intention, it becomes clear that writing and thinking—re-membering—terms like “modernity” is an academic spiritual exercise, the means by which we not only link mundane dust-covered facts from the archive to a transcendent and meaningful vision, but also a way to order our everyday. In this sense, is contemporary academic work so very different from

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what Izquierdo described as the aims of spiritual exercise? We are not as far removed as we imagine from the inheritances of either the early modern Jesuits or their medieval monastic predecessors. So let us aspire to be positively medieval in our approach to modernity. As a concept, modernity is futile to try to forget, so I prefer to dis-place it, that is, to re-member it as a category that no longer has the ability to fully explain our present. I am aiming for a “conversion” which, in the context of Carruthers’s notion of memory work, is “a procedure of changing orientation and way-finding, as though within a topography of locations among which there is a variety of routes.” To that effect, I have re-membered some of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, to borrow Geertz’s lovely phrase; I have re-assembled the inventory in order that our memories might work, but differently. What follows are some routes for re-membering. R E M E M B E R I N G T H E M E X IC A N BA RO QU E

Pamela Voekel was delightfully concise when she described the “baroque backdrop” to Enlightenment reforms as a period of time in which “the eternal was approached through the external.” Similarly, Brian Larkin summed up the two eras that shape the historiography of colonial Mexican religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: At the beginning of the eighteenth century, baroque Catholicism with its exuberant ornamentation of sacred space and lavish rituals dominated both ecclesiastical and lay religious practice in New Spain. During the second half of the eighteenth century, a group of reforming bishops attempted to remake religious culture, to move the faithful away from baroque Catholicism to a simpler and, in their minds, more interior piety.

Taking for granted that baroque spirituality is characterized by its external dazzling spectacle, scholars simply invert this framework to describe the transformations of the eighteenth-century Bourbon-era, when reformers attempted to rationalize baroque “excesses.” Interior piety, it is argued, is the key feature of Enlightenment Catholicism. The story I have told is set within this “baroque backdrop,” yet intimate rituals of self-reform have taken center stage. Scholars of colonial Mexico, blinded by the splendor, sound, and drama of the baroque, have missed a key part of the drama; that is, they have overlooked the interiorizing effects of baroque spirituality. In attending to Jesuit spiritual practices that encouraged “interior piety,” it becomes clear that the demand to shape an “inner self” developed alongside and in conjunction with the dramatic “exteriority” of baroque piety. Jesuit techniques of self-formation fostered introspective behavior as well as an active en-

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gagement with the world. Catholic religious practices in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included brilliant external forms of expression and fostered a more intimate relationship with both God and self. As I have suggested, accounts of eighteenth-century religious reforms are skewed in the opposite direction. David Brading portrays Enlightenment clergy in late eighteenth-century Mexico cringing at the sight of popular pageantry. Rather, they were “more persuaded of the necessity of good taste and sober piety.” In this literature, the “still body” stands out as the external sign of the emergence of a rational, interiorized form of piety. Yes, ritual life began to change in the eighteenth century. But reformers of all stripes notoriously describe “breaks” from a maligned past. Can we really take them at their word about the novelty of interiority? Here, it is helpful to take the long view, to include in this history of interiority a time when the Jansenists were not yet a gleam in an Augustinian eye. If we look to the history of Christianity, the “inward turn” took place prior to the convening of church prelates in Trent, prior to the doctrines of Luther and Calvin. Scholars of medieval Christianity mark “the inward turn” as a phenomenon that began in the twelft h century. Simply put, limiting “interiority” to the shift from “baroque to Enlightenment” is to ask the history of Christianity to turn on a dime. In this study of Jesuit spiritual practices, I have called attention to the monastic practices that preceded and made possible the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Mexican reformers were working with a very long cultural legacy shaped by embodied means of orienting oneself toward salvation in the afterlife. This helps us to situate “interiority” within longue durèe trends in the history of Christianity that itself had roots in ancient philosophy, to chart the ebb and flow of multiple styles of “inward turns” that stretch from Plotinus to Augustine, through and beyond twelft h-century Europe that, notably, include techniques of self-making in colonial Mexico. The long view provides some productive leverage with which to approach the discourse of eighteenth-century reformers. We can no longer overlook the possibility that the “modern” practices that reformers claimed to be introducing grew out of spiritual practices that belonged squarely within the baroque Catholicism that the reformers disavowed. Indeed, quietude and self-control were advocated by Ignatius himself as early as the 1520s and were much discussed in the sixteenth-century Jesuit directories that offered recommendations for giving the Spiritual Exercises. Father Zappa’s ministry at San Gregorio in Mexico City demonstrates that—at the peak of baroque culture—a quiet, controlled piety marked an elevated social status among Indians affi liated with the Jesuit parish and college of San Gregorio. Jesuits’ praise of Indians who maintained proper bodily comportment before and after receiving the Eucharist was intended to provide an example not only to other Indians but also to Spaniards, whom the sources

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criticized as spiritually lax. Mental prayer that stilled bodies threatened the centrality of corporeal disciplinary practices in Catholic devotional life that had been extremely popular since at least the thirteenth century. Importantly, as Karen Melvin notes, these ascetic forms remained popular well into the nineteenth century. This is not a story of Jesuit spirituality supplanting mendicant spirituality. Jesuit spiritual practices expanded the possible devotional options in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New Spain. But we ought not be so bedazzled by the admittedly spectacular external and communal forms of devotion that we fail to notice that an exacting self-scrutiny developed as part of baroque spirituality. What if, instead, we utilize a more simple definition of baroque that recognizes the interplay of both sides of the baroque coin? As Fastiggi and Pereira point out in their study of baroque Catholic theology, to deploy the label “baroque” is to be cognizant of structure and counterpoint. “Structure, the coordinated arrangement of parts into a comprehensive whole, is the focus of all Baroque creations [and] counter point, the harmonious juxtaposition of two or more elements in antithesis.” The latter, these authors point out, is the essence of the era. Counterpoint “is the great Baroque passion, expressing antitheses like drama and repose, darkness and light, abasement and glory. Counterpoint is at its most intense when the more exalted note of the antithesis is attained through the less exalted note, as the resurrection through the Passion, greatness through humility, and glory of beatitude through the agony of the Cross.” We need only consider how a joyful and glorified resurrected self (Fourth Week) was attained via the meditations of a debased, sinning self of the First Week to see the pointcounterpoint structure of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Indeed, the Exercises are baroque in the manner of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro. His paintings are stark, poignant, and intensely focused on human emotion in context. The Exercises demanded not an overdrawn or grotesque exposition of self, but a carefully directed method, a rationally invoked but dramatic evocation of properly situated emotion. The Jesuit mainstay—contemplation in action—demanded an embodied fusion of structure-counterpoint. Navigating this world of “an unstable synthesis of contraries,” as Ramón Kuri Camacho points out, is what made the New Spanish baroque such vital cultural terrain, a space in which the Jesuits navigated a “middle way” between freedom and grace, between what was “real” and what was “possible.” This, Kuri Camacho says, “is the human condition, the terrain of human weakness, limitations and possibilities.” The eucharistic and penitential sacraments have been essential pieces of inventory in my book. They have functioned as way-markers, to continue with Carruthers’s prose, in the invention of thoughts about baroque devotional life. In almost every chapter, this study has taken note of the centrality of the sacrament of Holy Communion in early modern Catholicism. The frequent reception of

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communion was an integral part of Jesuit piety that informed almost every aspect of the Ignatian spirituality. Current literature on colonial Mexico has emphasized the role of pageantry in reinscribing colonial identities and promoting social control; a Corpus Christi pageant is analyzed as mirroring the social order with Christ as the symbol that both unified and made hierarchy manifest. The implication is that Spanish colonialism can best be understood as a continuing conquest that relied upon spectacle—people were dazzled, amazed, entertained into submission. But the Eucharist exceeds the pageantry of the feast of Corpus Christi, as Larkin’s attention to liturgy makes clear. His study draws upon testaments of New Spaniards who willed gifts of illumination (candle wax or oil) as expressions of devotion to the sacrament displayed. The sacred was immanent— available in sacredly charged material culture—the example par excellence of Christ present in the world. Yes, Christ’s body was displayed both inside and outside of church walls. But what of the Corpus Christi consumed? What if we take into account the practice of receiving what was considered Christ incarnate in the form of bread and wine? Placing this intimate ritual as a key item in our inventory, we re-member baroque culture as including the individual who approached and consumed the divine body. This ritual required preparation of body and soul, a readying that entailed making a complete confession. The Jesuits stepped in to make this memory work “easier” and less anxiety producing, asking sinners to focus on that one fault, that single unruly passion that demanded to be controlled. The more frequently one approached the altar to consume, the more frequently one entered into dialogue with both priest and self. The result? We can see the development of narrativity as key to spiritual practices and that early modern Catholics increasingly engaged in the continuous process of shaping and re-shaping selves. Emplacement. Critically, the emplacement of our inventories makes possible the movement of thought. To place Christ’s body consumed in this study is to reconfigure colonial history. David Scott has challenged scholars of colonialism to be more attentive to the inscription of modern power, alert to “the varied forms of its insertion into the lives of the colonized.” Globalization, the continuing circulation of Western forms of subjectivity, and the persistence of religion in the face of secularism—these are current phenomena that make a par ticular demand upon scholars of colonialism to reconsider the way that religion has moved historical “actors.” We need to look anew at European forms of colonial power. Not less Europe, as David Scott noted over ten years ago, but a differently configured Europe. Drawing upon scholarship attuned to transregional connections, movement, and mobility, I have looked to this early colonial moment to explain how embodied interconnection in a religious age can be included in a history of mind-body dualism. My inventory includes concepts (“obedience” and “consolation”) and practices (the “general confession,” the “Eucharist,” and “mental

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prayer”). I have aimed to grasp the complexity of how religious ways of being shaped the emergence of an ever-elusive “modern.” Michel Foucault’s later work has been exceedingly helpful in this regard. In his studies of techniques of the self, Foucault spoke quite candidly about his efforts to provide some balance to his prior work that had, in his view, insisted too much on techniques of domination. The Spiritual Exercises were just such a means of inscription and insertion into the hearts of early modern subjects, in both metropole and colony. Ignatian spiritual practices demanded that Christians forge and overcome selves. I have always admired Ruth Behar’s work on women’s love magic in New Spain—women who, in Behar’s words, “became their own Inquisitors”—for recognizing how deeply ambivalent anything resembling “resistance” might be within a Christian framework that inculcated the struggle to forge and overcome self as a way of being. Was this a Christian demand? An invitation? Yes to both, and yet neither word suffices. Demands can be evaded, invitations refused. Christian devotional practices are embodied. I have insisted that we take note of the techniques that Mexicans self-consciously deployed to shape ethical selves, but also that we must understand how self-formation grew out of a relationship between bodies—what Durkheim once called “contagiousness,” and which affect theory, indebted to Spinoza, denotes as the capacity to affect and be affected. A history of desire as mind-body striving enables us to better imagine the historicity of affective experience and to chart the way in which bodily capacities have rippled through time and space. Thinking this way makes difficult the binary logic of domination/resistance or adoption/rejection that has underwritten the interpretation of Christianity, especially by scholars of colonialism. I have become wary of an overuse of words such as “deploy” and “perform.” While I agree that a “spiritual marketplace” is a fantastic descriptor of the array of devotions and devotional practices on offer, that does not mean that all aspects of Christian culture were “negotiable.” With these words, the rational actor sneaks in the back door, undercutting the often embodied, affective, unconscious, or irrational transmissions of culture, blinding us to a “colonization of consciousness” operative at a very deep level, a form of power that is not easily negotiable. If I have made frequent use of the term “embodied,” it is because I have wanted to re-member the body, to pay attention (when possible) to the sensorium as a fundamental component of all experience, religious and otherwise, and to re-member modernity by crediting bodily capacities once disavowed as “Catholic” or “native.” In this task, both phenomenology and affect theory are great equalizers. From these points of view, to position Catholic (or Protestant) concepts as either embodied or cerebral is to ask a moot question. The most silent, still, contemplative moment emerges from a raucous conflagration of embodied sensorial attention. Whether we categorize the “still body” as Protestant, En-

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lightenment, Catholic, and/or modern, stillness is nonetheless an embodied capacity caught up in an affective nexus that extends beyond any single body. I have drawn upon affect theory to trace the circulation of affective experience (I have largely relied upon Spinoza for this), as well as phenomenology to reflect upon the unreflected process of bringing thought/object/body into being (Merleau-Ponty). If my aim is to call attention to the embodied forms of attention to which we do not have access from this side of consciousness, we nonetheless take up this task as an intellectual exercise. This is what Chakrabarty referred to as “remaining vigilant.” These historical and philosophical exercises, conducted in the realm of thought, can be described as the effort to pay attention to attention. In what follows, I want to think about thinking. That is, I wish to address the notion of “philosophy as a way of life” as discussed in Pierre Hadot’s writing on ancient philosophical spiritual exercises. R E M E M B E R I N G S P I R I T UA L E X E RC I S E S

In sketching the contours of an early modern “Catholic self,” I have touched upon some of the challenges of pulling together a coherent analysis of the multiple strands that informed Jesuit discourse and practices. Hellenistic influences? Yes. Monastic tradition? Yes. Humanistic optimism? Yes. Early modern Augustinian pessimism? A tad. Scripture? Clearly. Experimental moral philosophy and medicine? Those too. I have tried to fold in the various and often contradictory forms of “influence” without allowing any one of them to dictate the multiple forms or avenues that transformation—“change over time”—might take. This is ultimately the historian’s problem and the issue I have faced in taking a cultural-historical approach to writing a more expansive intellectual and religious history. From the beginning, I have recognized the difficulty of writing about affective, embodied action when engaged in archivally based work, and I have already said a few words on the way we can foreground the role of imagination, not as a means of overcoming this difficulty, but rather to make it more apparent. As I hinted in the introduction, the history of these Ignatian Spiritual Exercises demands to be situated within the legacy of spiritual exercises more broadly. Pierre Hadot’s scholarship provides an avenue to do just that. As a historian of philosophy, Pierre Hadot made a critical intervention in the study of ancient philosophy. He pointed out that philosophy was, for the ancients, a way of life. As Hadot described his own intellectual journey, this was for him first and foremost a literary problem: “I did not start out from more or less edifying considerations about philosophy as therapy, and so on. . . . No, it was really a strictly literary problem, which was the following: why do ancient philosophical writings generally give the impression of being incoherent? Why is it so difficult to recognize their plan?”

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Hadot notes how today’s scholars demand that their philosophies be systematic, but once philosophy was a form of lived inquiry. In other words, rather than systematic thought, Hadot wrote, ancient philosophical schools advocated different forms of intellectual spiritual exercise; yet all shared the same goal: “These exercises have as their goal the transformation of our vision of the world, and the metamorphosis of our being. They therefore have not merely moral, but also an existential value. We are not just dealing here with a code of good moral conduct, but with a way of being, in the strongest sense of the term.” Hadot’s general definition of spiritual exercises is useful for understanding the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and how they drew upon, but ultimately differed from, the monastic and Hellenistic traditions that came before. Instructions in the “art of living” tied notions of “self” to a process of understanding of one’s place in the cosmic whole. The emphasis was less on perfect knowledge than on understanding one’s place on a path toward perfection. Within this quest, knowledge of physics, for example, could be considered crucial to practicing philosophy as a way of life because certain knowledge of the lived environment sustained one’s efforts to seek to transcend it. Did Hellenistic currents seep into Christian practices? Hadot would have it the other way around. In his evaluation of Christian spiritual exercises, Hadot characterized the Gospels as ornamental to what was essentially Neoplatonic philosophy. Yet we need only hear Augustine of Hippo compare what Peter Brown has called his first conversion (to Platonism) to his second (to Paul) to understand that the Gospels, especially Paul’s emphasis on love, fundamentally transformed Augustine, and so centuries of Christian spiritual exercises to follow. Who shall deliver him from the body of this death, save the grace of God by Jesus Christ our Lord. . . . The writings of the Platonists contain nothing of all this. Their pages show nothing of the face of that love, the tears of confession, Your sacrifice, an afflicted spirit, a contrite and humbled heart, the salvation of Your people, the espoused city, the promise of the Holy Spirit, the chalice of our redemption. In them no one sings: Shall not my soul be submitted unto God? . . . And we hear no voice calling: Come unto me, all of you that labour. They scorned to learn from Him, because He is meek and humble of heart.

The Ignatian Exercises were a powerful experience precisely due to this combination of studied practice that emphasized reason and wisdom with “love” and “tears of confession.” The Gospel stories functioned as critical tools for grounding and animating meditative practice and were the precise components that made these a “Christian version” of Neoplatonic ascent. Augustine had found the scriptures marvelous: “Marvelously these truths graved themselves in my heart when I read the latest of Your apostles and looked upon Your works and trembled.” Ignatius wrote the Spiritual Exercises so that these same truths would

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“be graved upon” early modern hearts and emphasized the labor entailed in achieving such “marvelous” inspiration. The Exercises were intended as a carefully crafted process, drawing upon the ancients’s legacy of self-vigilance that was then brought to bear directly upon the meditative practices of medieval Christian monastics. We must pause here, because to continue in the vein mined by Hadot is to leave out the density, weight and motility of the active body. As we have seen, the bare outlines of a script were handed to the exercitant who, in making the Ignatian Exercises, would improvise his way toward a discovery of self and then chart a path toward a transformation of that same self. Taking this body as subject, we position the perceiving body that itself emerges as object. The Christian struggle for “self” entailed a vigilance as embodied intention, as body attuned, not merely over body. This state of being was attained through performance of reiterative improvisations. Christian spiritual exercises deployed a heightened reflexivity coupled with continuous struggle to develop acumen in techniques that would evoke and quell the passions. Hadot acknowledged the Christian tradition and pointed to the importance of “attention to oneself—the essence of prosoche—[which] gave rise to a series of techniques of introspection.” Yet he concluded with a cautionary note about its historical significance to the experience of everyday Christians. “We must not, however, exaggerate the importance of this phenomenon. . . . We have said, it manifested itself only in a rather restricted circle: among Christian writers who had received a philosophical education.” But I have argued that the Jesuits monasticized Catholic laity. Techniques of introspection found in the narrative practices promoted in the Spiritual Exercises or in the Jesuit general confession breached the restricted circles of elite philosophers, monastics, and wealthy educated laity. These meditative methods asked the practitioner to circle back upon herself in exercises that re-membered fragments of the past in novel ways. Moreover, she took up these practices as a source of (often anguished) pleasure. The emotive and rational models provided by the Spiritual Exercises harkened to but could no longer be contained within the philosophical and monastic precursors that had provided the very techniques that Ignatius stitched together when he composed the his Exercises. A practice first, then a text. The proliferation of the practice led to the production of more documents, more texts, and more persons in search of self. More, more, more!

Not e s

I N T RO DU C T I O N

1. The citations refer to the paragraph numbers of the Spiritual Exercises (hereinafter “Sp.Ex”), followed by pages numbers that come from both the English translation (marked as “G”) from Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George Ganss (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991), as well as from the Spanish “Autograph” copy of the Spiritual Exercises (marked as “A”) taken from Cándido de Dalmases ed., Exercitia spiritualia Sancti Ignatii de Loyola, Monumenta Ignatiana, Volume 100, Rome, 1969. Accordingly, this quote is from the opening page of Sp.Ex., Paragraph 21, G129/A164. 2. Ignatius’s time at Manresa marked what is often referred to as his “second” conversion. The first conversion took place following a serious injury endured in a battle with French troops. While recuperating, he read Ludolph of Saxony’s Life of Christ and the lives of the saints. He was motivated to change his life. Only when residing at Manresa, however, after having sought spiritual guidance from Benedictine monks at Montserrat, did the essential elements of what came to be called “the Jesuit way of proceeding” come into focus for Ignatius. For a short discussion and bibliography on Ignatius’s life, see John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 23–25. See also Ignatius’s auto or life story , in Ignatius of Loyola. For a fascinating discussion of his autobiography and the rhetorical conventions of early modern piety, see Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Loyola’s Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 3. “Director” is not a term that Ignatius used in the text of the Exercises. He usually referred only to the person “who gives the exercises” or the one who “delivers them over to another.” O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 131. The term “director,” however, while an easier gloss than such awkward phrases, fails to capture the fluidity of the relationship between exercitant and director. See Chapter 3, where I explore how a good director is supposed to be able to adapt to each person’s individualized spiritual journey based on constitutional type. 211

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4. Ibid., 37. 5. Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola, 138. 6. O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 37, 47. 7. Monumental Nadal (MHSJ), as quoted in John O’Malley, “Renaissance Humanism and the First Jesuits,” in Congreso Internacional de Historia, ed. Juan Plazaola (Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto, 1992). 8. Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Dominique Deslandres, Croire et faire croire: Les missions francaises au XVII siècle (Fayard, 2003); Jennifer Selwyn, A Paradise Inhabited by Devils: The Jesuits’ Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples (New York: Ashgate, 2004); Ines Županov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th and 17th Centuries) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 9. Rivka Feldhay, “Knowledge and Salvation in Jesuit Culture,” Science in Context 1, no. 2 (1987): 195–213; Paula Findlen, “Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Athanasius Kircher and the Roman College Museum,” Roma moderna e contemporanea 3, no. 3 (1995): 625–65; Michael John Gorman, “The Angel and the Compass: Athanasius Kircher’s Magnetic Geography,” in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2004); Mordechai Feingold, Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, Transformations: Studies in the HIstory of Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Mordechai Feingold, The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth Century Perspectives (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2010); Steven J. Harris, “Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the Orga nization of Jesuit Science,” Early Science and Medicine 1, no. 3 (1996); Steven J. Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Marcus Hellyer, Catholic Physics: Jesuit Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Florence Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Antonella Romano, La contre-réforme mathématique: Constitution et diffusion d’une culture mathématique jésuite a la Renaissance, 1540–1640 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1999). 10. Luce Giard, “Reflections,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, ed. John W. O’Malley, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 11. Ibid., 709–10. 12. Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Ignace de Loyola: Le lieu de l’image (Paris: VRIN: EHESS, 1992); Anthony Grafton, “Descartes the Dreamer,” Wilson Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1996): 36–46. 13. Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Stephen Gaukroger, ed., The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1998); Christopher Allen, “Painting the Passions: The Passions de l’Ame as a Basis for Pictorial Expression,” in The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (London: Routledge, 1998). 14. But see Clossey. Also, for the inclusion of Latin America in the field of early modern science see Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Cul-

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ture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Daniela Bleichmar, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan, Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Maria M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Neil Safier, Mea suring the New Word: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 15. Karen Melvin, “Charity without Borders: Alms-Giving in New Spain for Captives in North Africa,” Colonial Latin American Review 18, no. 1 (2009): 75–97. 16. J. Michelle Molina, “True Lies: Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata and the Life Story of a Mexican Mystic,” in Findlen, Athanasius Kircher. For Christianity in Japan the classic is C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). Also see Haruko Nawata Ward, Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 17. Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2005). 14. 18. Adriano Prosperi’s Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari, Einaudi, Torino 1996 especially Chapter 28, “Le nostre Indie” (Our Indies). 19. Nicholas Dirks, “Introduction: Colonialism and Culture,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy: The Loss and Recovery of Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Peter Van der Veer, ed., Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity (New York: Routledge, 1996). For critique of how the emphasis on the Protestant Reformation and the European Enlightenment obscures cultures of reform in colonial Latin America, see J. Michelle Molina, “Spirituality and Colonial Governmentality: The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises in Europe and Abroad,” in Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, ed. Patricia Ingham and Michelle Warren (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 20. Michelle Molina and Ulrike Strasser, “Missionary Men and the Global Currency of Female Sanctity,” in Women, Religion and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), ed. Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 21. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550– 1700 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 219. 22. Ibid., 228. 23. Brook Ziporyn, Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism (San Francisco: Open Court, 2004). See especially “The Self: Subject and Object, Punch Line and Setup,” 193–202. 24. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).

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25. 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); John Van Engen, “Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church,” Church History 77, no. 2 (2008): 257–84. 26. Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2–4, and Chapter 1. 27. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 35. 28. This is not a minor difference. I concur with Appadurai that the simultaneity of electronic forms of communication and transactions unleash radically different possibilities for the two different historical global systems. I do nonetheless want to point to some structural similarities of early modern globalization: global networks of communication, imaginative communication not always mediated by nation-states, and the importance of global cities as centers of banking and commerce. 29. For an exploration of the range of postlapsarian possibilities for knowledge of God and nature, see James Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). See also Peter Harrison, “Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 2 (2002): 239–59. 30. The split was problematic for Descartes himself. See James, Passion and Action. 31. Caroline Bynum, “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 1 (1995): 6, 13. 32. Ibid., 18. 33. Martin Jay, “The Senses in History,” American Historical Review, 116, no. 2 (April 2011). 34. Martin Jay, “In the Realm of the Senses: An Introduction (AHR Forum/The Senses in History),” American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (2011): 307. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 309, my emphasis. 37. Elizabeth Harvey’s very fine study opens avenues toward writing about corporeality. Elizabeth D. Harvey, “The Portal of Touch,” American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (2011): 385–400. 38. Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), ix. 39. David Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian Beacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 66. 40. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Here I refer to Csordas’s insistence that “preobjective” is in no way “precultural.” He makes this abundantly clear when he proposes embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology. 41. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Affect theory is deeply indebted to Spinoza (I discuss him explicitly in Chapter 3); Emile Durkheim’s “collective effervescence” also pointed toward intersubjective affect as key to religious-cum-social life.

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42. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001), 17–18. 43. Ibid., 18, emphasis in original. 44. Ibid., 247. 45. See Thomas Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology” in Body/ Meaning/Healing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 46. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002 [1945]), xviii. 47. Instead we attribute qualities to the house that we cannot perceive and then “the house is not the house seen from nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere.” Ibid., 78–83. 48. Ibid., xix. 49. Paul Rabinow, “Introduction: The History of Systems of Thought,” in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), xxvii. 50. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurly (New York: Random House, 1990), 120–21. 51. Yasmin Haskell, Loyola’s Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry, Oxford, 2003. Robert Aleksander Maryks, Saint Cicero and the Jesuits: The Influence of the Liberal Arts on the Adoption of Moral Probabilism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). 52. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Norton, 1966), 58. 53. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurly (New York: Random House, 1990), 120–21. 54. Ibid., 122. 55. Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 53. 56. As Michel de Certeau warned historians: “To establish these coherences (correlation is the instrument of the historian) is to preserve the difference of the past from the seduction of partial resemblances, from generalizations suggested by philosophical impatience, or from continuities postulated by genealogical piety.” Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 9. 57. Michel de Certeau, Possession at Loudun, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 6. 58. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 17. 59. One option is to follow Thomas Csordas’s path. He has married Merleau-Ponty with Pierre Bourdieu, as the latter has also sought to collapse mind-body dualism. Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing. This is a powerful combination, as Bourdieu’s emphasis on social stasis is made more dynamic by Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the emergent. 60. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 61. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 17, my emphasis.

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62. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 162. 63. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perceiption, 95. 64. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomelogy of Perception, 167. 65. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—the Chiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisble, ed. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 135. Merleau-Ponty writes that living creates a flesh that is not body but rather is possibility found in the marrying of subject and object, the horizon that is neither sky nor earth but the merging of the two that plays out, not in time, but as time (ibid., 146–47). “For us the perceptual synthesis is a temporal synthesis, and subjectivity, at the level of perception, is nothing but temporality and this is what enables us to leave to the subject of perception his opacity and historicity.” 66. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 12. 67. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xix. 68. Deborah Harkness, “Nosce Teipsum: Curiosity, the Humoral Body and the Culture of Therapeutics in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century England,” in Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. R. J. W. Evans and Alexander Marr (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 172, n. 3.  . T H E J E S U I T S P I R I T UA L E X E RC I S E S

1. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 1, G121/A140. 2. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995). 3. Jerónimo Nadal, Document 7, “From the Writings of Father Jerónimo Nadal,” 1554, in On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599, ed. Martin E. Palmer (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), 35. Methodological precursors included William of Paris’s Rhetorica Divina (twelft h c.), St. Bonaventure (thirteenth c.), and Raymond Lull’s Art of Contemplation (fourteenth c.). See Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George Ganss (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991), 167–68. A very important and direct influence was Ludolph the Carthusian, whom I discuss briefly below. 4. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 82. 5. Ibid., 139. 6. Pierre Hadot, Jeannie Carlier, and Arnold I. Davidson, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, 2nd ed. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). Hadot discusses his Catholic youth, his break from Catholic practice, and his discovery of philosophy as “a way of life.” 7. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 139. 8. Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 9. Angela of Foligno, “Instruction XIV: True Knowledge of God and Self Is the Basis and Guardian of All Piety,” in Complete Works (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1993), 267. 10. Martha Newman, The Boundaries of Charity: Cistercian Culture and Ecclesiastical Reform, 1098–1180 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Caroline Walker

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Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). 11. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 36 (my emphasis). 12. John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 67– 68. First quote is from the Jesuit Formula of the Institute of the Society of Jesus (the document that formally founded the Society), the second from letters from Nadal. 13. John Van Engen, “Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church,” Church History 77, no. 2 (2008): 257–84. 14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 414, 417 (my emphasis). 15. Bert Roest, “The Discipline of the Heart: Pedagogies of Prayer in Medieval Franciscan Works of Religious Instruction,” in The Medieval Franciscans, ed. T. J. Johnson (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 127. The Society of Jesus was orga nized differently from the mendicants’ system of chapters and the election of officers. Ibid., 133. 16. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 437–38. 17. Elizabeth Rapley, The Lord as Their Portion: The Story of the Religious Orders and How They Shaped Our World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011). 18. This denunciation was launched by Dominican Tomás de Pedroche. Ibid., 461. 19. Ibid. 20. Note that the literal translation of “saben dar a ella” (to her) might also be translated “those who have the capacity for it” (i.e., mental prayer); this original formation notes that this type of prayer is denoted as surrender to the feminine. 21. Rapley, The Lord as Their Portion. 22. Ibid. 23. Fr. Francisco de los Angeles, the head of the Franciscan order, in his instructions to the first missionaries to New Spain. Andrés Martín Melquiades, Recogidos: Nueva visión de la mística española, 1500–1700 (Madrid: Seminario Suárez de la Fundación Universitaria Española, 1975), 25. Karen Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012) characterizes the Dominicans as “off to a slower start” as “vicario general, Fr. Betanzos, preferred that friars live in fewer houses with more friars so the order’s Constitution and monastic discipline could be perfectly followed.” 24. Father Miguel Mora, comendador of the Mercedarians’ Mexico City convent. As quoted in ibid., 119. 25. Monumental Nadal (MHSJ), as quoted in John O’Malley, “Renaissance Humanism and the First Jesuits,” in Congreso Internacional de Historia, ed. Juan Plazaola (Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto, 1992). 26. Richard Kieckhefer, “Major Currents in Late Medieval Devotion,” in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed. Jill Raitt (New York: Crossroad, 1987). 27. Ibid., 86.

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28. Emphasis added. Fray Diego de Goropse (1685), quoted in Melquiades, Recogidos, 84. For less complementary consideration of the Jesuits, Melvin describes the bishop of Puebla, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, “who complained that the Jesuit character was so strange that it belonged neither to the secular nor regular clergy,” 2–50. 29. Document 43, “Official Directory of 1599,” in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises; O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 292. 30. O’Malley, The First Jesuits. See in par ticu lar chapters 2–6. 31. Ignacio Iparraguirre, Historia de la práctica de los Ejercícios de San Ignacio: Evolución en Europa durante el siglo XVII, vol. 3 (Rome: Institutum Historicum SI, 1973). 32. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 4, G122/A144. 33. Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, 3rd ed., trans. William Young (St. Louis: Insitute of Jesuit Sources, 1986 [1964]), 157–59. 34. Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33. 35. Ibid., 13, 16. 36. Philip Endean, “The Spiritual Exercises,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester, 52–67 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 55. 37. Endean, “The Spiritual Exercises,” 58. 38. Ibid., 60. 39. See George E. Ganss, “Introduction,” in Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola, 120. 40. Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli, Noticias memorables de los exercicios espirituales de San Ignacio de Loyola . . . traducidas de italiano en espanol (Salamanca: Eugenio Garcia de Honorato y S. Miguel, 1731), 54. 41. Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola, 124. 42. Ibid. 43. For an excellent general description, see Chapter 2 in Jeff rey Chipps-Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 44. Van Engen has characterized Christian piety in the late Middle Ages as providing “multiple options” for the laity. Perhaps we can say that the Jesuits amplified this, adapting the Spiritual Exercises so that the retreat itself could provide multiple options. Van Engen, “Multiple Options.” 45. De Guibert made a similar analogy, musing about the “color of a locomotive.” De Guibert, p. 167. More accurate is the difference between a “blue-print” (the directives in the Exercises) and “riding” (the experience of making them). Although not De Guibert’s concern, my emphasis on bodies in action aims to evoke precisely this experience of making the Exercises, expanding beyond the Jesuits (De Guibert’s concern) to include the embodied experiences of lay persons. 46. Here I take cues from Thomas Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 47. Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Viking, 1984), 132–34. 48. Document 18, “Short Instruction on Giving the Exercises,” undated, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 101–2.

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49. Ibid. 50. Document 4, “Directory Dictated to Juan Alonso de Vitoria,” in ibid., 19. 51. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 15, G125/A152. 52. Document 17, “Instruction Attributed to Father Paul Hoffaeus,” in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 87. 53. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 20, G128/A160. 54. Distribución que deben observer los Exercitantes en los ocho días de Exercicios de N.P.S Ignacio, arreglada a la que se observera en la Santa Casa de Araceli (Archivo Historico de Provincia Mexicana [AHPM]), IV 263. 55. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 1, G121/A140. 56. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 106. 57. Sp.Ex., Paragraphs 25–26, G130–31/A166–168. Ganss suggests that the “G” indicates the Italian giorno, meaning “day.” 58. Sp.Ex., Paragraphs 238–60, G178–82/A312–324. 59. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 241, A312, 314. 60. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 252, G180/A318. The same exercises can apply to the Hail Mary, the Creed, and other prayers. See Paragraph 253. The method of speaking words aloud seems somewhat similar to the practice of lectio divina, which is a prayerful reading of a text in a low voice. However, the text is absent. 61. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 258, G181/A322. 62. Document 18, “Short Instruction on Giving the Exercises, Probably by Father Everard Mercurian,” in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 111. 63. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 175. 64. Ibid., 175–76. 65. See Sp.Ex., Paragraphs 210–17, G172–73/A294–298. 66. See Autobiography, in Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola, 80, also 78. 67. Francis Bacon, “Of Regiment of Health,” in Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 404. A more concise version is found in “Essays (1597),” also printed in ibid., 86. 68. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 214, G172–73/A296. 69. Document 4, in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 17. 70. Rosignoli, Noticias memorables, 60. 71. Distribución que deben observer los Exercitantes, IX 263. 72. Document 20, “Directory of Juan Alfonso de Polanco,” in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 120. 73. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 43. 74. Ibid., 67. 75. Ibid., 52. 76. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 182, 237. 77. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 234, G176/A308, my emphasis. 78. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992 [1930]), 119, 20–21.

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79. Foligno, Complete Works, 267. 80. Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation, trans. Jeremy Moiser (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977); Jean Pierre Dedieu, “ ‘Christianization’ in New Castile: Catechism, Communion, Mass and Confi rmation in the Toledo Archbishopric, 1540–1650,” in Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, ed. Anne Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 81. For an argument about monastic values informing late medieval and early modern social control and self-control, see Robert James Bast, Honor Your Fathers: Catechisms and the Emergence of Patriarchal Ideology in Germany, 1400–1600, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions (Leiden: Brill Academic, 1997), especially Chapter 1. 82. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 22–23. 83. de Guibert, The Jesuits, 154. 84. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, 260. Many Jesuit-sponsored paintings were produced to facilitate the composition of place. Paintings favored by Jesuits included the Life of Christ and natural landscapes. Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 45. 85. Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola, 158. 86. Sp.Ex., Paragraphs 53 and 54, G138/A192. 87. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 56, G139/A192–194. 88. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 17. 89. Document 9, Excerpt from “Spiritual Directory of the Mixed Life,” in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 43. Written by either Polanco or Laínez. 90. Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996), 17. 91. Sp.Ex., Paragraphs 103, 106, and 107, G148–49/A224–226. 92. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 141, G150/A244–246 (my emphasis). 93. Sp.Ex., Paragraphs 143, 145, 146, G155/A246–248. 94. O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 55. Indipitae article. 95. de Guibert, The Jesuits, 157. 96. O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 73. 97. Terence O’Reilly, “The Spiritual Exercises and the Crisis of Medieval Piety,” The Way Supplement 70 (1991), 101–113.  . WO M E N ’ S D E VO T I O N A L L A B O R

1. Hugo Rahner, Saint Ignatius Loyola: Letters to Women (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1956), 353. 2. Ignacio Iparraguirre, Historia de la práctica de los Ejercícios de San Ignacio: Evolución en Europa durante el siglo XVII, vol. 3 (Rome: Institutum Historicum SI, 1973), 529; Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 128–30. 3. Iparraguirre, Historia, 3: 530. 4. Ibid., 536. See Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three SeventeenthCentury Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). The cloister was not

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necessarily an obstacle to women’s sense of “mission.” Dominique Deslandres, “In the Shadow of the Cloister: Representations of Female Holiness in New France,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: Routledge, 2003). 5. Elizabeth Rhodes, “Luisa de Carvajal’s Counter-Reformation Journey to Selfhood (1566–1614),” Renaissance Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1998): 896. 6. Marina Caffiero, “A New Religious Congregation for Women: The Model of Maestre Pie during the 17th and 18th Centuries,” in Gender and Religion/Genre et religion, ed. Kari Elisabeth Borresen, Sara Cabibbo, and Edith Specht (Rome: Carocci, 2001), 297, 300. 7. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 18, G126/A156–158. 8. Document 17, “Instruction Attributed to Father Paul Hoffaeus,” in On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599, ed. Martin E. Palmer (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), 87. 9. Ibid., 88. 10. Document 18, “Short Instruction on Giving the Exercises, Probably by Father Everard Mercurian,” ibid., 108. 11. Ibid., 109. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Document 7, “From the Writings of Jerónimo Nadal,” ibid., 39. 15. Document 18, “Short Instruction on Giving the Exercises, Probably by Father Everard Mercurian,” ibid., 109. 16. Document 7, “From the Writings of Jerónimo Nadal,” ibid., 39. 17. Document 12, “Summary of an Anonymous Instruction,” ibid., 69. 18. Rahner, Letters to Women. 19. Document 5, “Directives and Instructions of Saint Ignatius,” in Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises. 20. Loyola’s memorandum, as quoted in Rahner, Letters to Women, 308. 21. Carolyn Valone, “Piety and Patronage: Women and the Early Jesuits,” in Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, ed. Ann Matter and John Coakley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 22. Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 23. Rahner, Letters to Women, 254. 24. See ibid., 251–93. 25. Ibid., 257. 26. Letter to Jesuits in Portugal, 1556, as quoted in ibid., 12. Emphasis added. 27. As quoted in Michael W. Maher, “Reforming Rome: The Society of Jesus and Its Congregations” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1997), 148 n. 37. 28. Susan Eileen Dinan, “Confraternities as a Venue for Female Activism during the Catholic Reformation,” in Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France and Spain, ed. John Patrick Donnelly and Michael W. Maher (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999). 29. Letter to Isabel Roser, October 1, 1546, in Rahner, Letters to Women, 289.

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30. See, for example, ibid., 324. 31. Father Araoz to Ignatius, March 3, 1545, ibid., 311. 32. Letter to Ignatius from Isabel Roser, April 20, 1554, ibid., 294. For women’s support of Jesuit Missions see Kino, Letters to the Duchess; see letters to Mariana mission in Philippines (C.R. Boxer in Philippine Studies); Davis, Women on the Margins (French Jesuits); Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire and Beyond (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 33. Rahner, Letters to Women, 299. Rahner comments patronizingly that the exercises in their entirety were “simply too much for the good lady.” 34. Ibid., 300–1. This case came to the attention of Ignatius because Father Mirón wrote to him, seeking approval of his actions. 35. Bilinkoff, Related Lives. 36. Sebastiana Exarch to Ignatius, June 16, 1545, in Rahner, Letters to Women, 301, emphasis added. 37. Ibid., 303. 38. Ibid., June 16, 1545. 39. Ibid., 309. 40. Gabriella Zarri, “Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 235. 41. Gabriella Zarri, “From Prophecy to Discipline, 1450–1650,” in Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, ed. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 88. 42. Rahner, Letters to Women, 310. 43. Father Araoz to Ignatius, March 3, 1545, ibid., 311. 44. Jacoba Pallovicino to Ignatius, Cremona, June 2, 1553, ibid., 319. 45. Pallavicino, December 10, 1550, ibid., 317. 46. Ignatius to Rejedella, June 18, 1536, ibid., my emphasis. 47. Ignatius to Rejedella, June 18, 1536, ibid., 337. 48. Ibid., 374. 49. Teresa Rejedella to Ignatius, April 3, 1549, ibid. 50. Ignatius to Teresa Rejedella, April 5, 1549, ibid., 355–56. 51. André Vauchez, “Lay People’s Sancitity in Western Europe: Evolution of a Pattern,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 28. 52. Zarri, “Living Saints,” 254. 53. Ibid., 251. 54. Originally published in 1685 in Milan as Notizie memorabilia degli esercizi spirituali di Sant’Ignazio. I consulted Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli, Noticias memorables de los Exercicios Espirituales de San Ignacio de Loyola . . . traducidas de Italiano en Espanol (Salamanca: Eugenio Garcia de Honorato y S. Miguel, 1731), 109. 55. Ibid., 71–77. 56. Chatellier links this history to intensified missionary activity in the face of Protestant inroads. Louis Chatellier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the

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Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500–c.1800, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Louis Chatellier, Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 57. The Diccionario-Histórico de la Compañía de Jesus touts Huby as the founder of the first retreat house for laity to make the exercises. The diocesan priest, Louis de Kerlivio, is also mentioned under the “Huby” entry. Catherine de Francheville was not mentioned, although the history of the founding of the retreat house published in Nantes in 1698 is titled La vie des fondateurs des maisons de retraite: M. de Kerlivio, le Pere Vincent Huby, Mlle. De Francheville. 58. Ibid., 36. 59. Ibid., 37. 60. Ibid., 37–39. 61. Founded by Angela Merici in Italy in the 1530s as the Company of St. Ursula, single women and widows lived in community and served the poor, ill, and orphans. Eventually, their primary ministry was the education of girls. Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 196–97. They were drawn primarily from artisan or mercantile families and required only a very small dowry to join a community. The movement began in Italy and spread to France, where the Ursulines adopted Jesuit rules and more aristocratic patrons, but, in so doing, increasingly became subject to social pressure for enclosure. See R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 36–37. 62. Iparraguirre does not indicate whether this happened in de Francheville’s lifetime. Iparraguirre, Historia, 3: 39. 63. Ibid., 21. 64. As quoted in Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 200. 65. Iparraguirre, Historia, 3: 13–17. 66. Ibid., 3: 44. 67. Ibid., 3: 520. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 3: 524. 70. Ibid., 3: 521; Enrique del Portillo, “Obligación y práctica en españa de los ejercícios espirituales durante el segundo tercio del siglo XVIII (1732–1765),” Manresa 14 (1942): 148. 71. Iparraguirre, Historia, 3: 522. 72. Portillo, “Obligación y práctica,” 153. 73. Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 210; Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 74. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 17. 75. Rachel Fulton offers a cogent cautionary note: “We must be able to see not only the presence but also the absence of apparent gender distinctions in the construction and use

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of religious images, and to ask why men and women were able to share, as well as to contest, such images in their social and spiritual lives.” Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 168. . C O N S O L AT I O N P H I L O S O P H Y

1. From Philip Larkin, “Love” (1962) from Collected Poems, Faber and Faber 2003.) 2. Augustine, “Exposition of Psalm 41,” in Exposition of the Psalms, 33–50, ed. John Roteller (New York: New City Press, 2002), 254. 3. Andrea Nightingale, Once Out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 69. 4. Ibid., my emphasis. 5. To be certain, the impact of Augustinian theology waxed and waned throughout medieval history, but the Renaissance witnessed a rebirth of Augustine and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw to the publication of critical editions of his writings. The full body of Augustine’s original texts that had been recovered were now considered superior to medieval proof texts. But it is also worth noting a new “humanized” Augustine who emerged on stage, not only a theologian to be read but also a historical actor, a fallible human, whose own transformations over his lifetime were important to the understanding the nature of human experience. William J. Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” in Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of Its European Transformations, ed. Heiko Oberman and Thomas Brady (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 45; but also Peter Harrison, “Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 2 (2002): 239–59. 6. The leading proponent of this view is Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990 [1983]). For the way in which the quest for certitude underwrote theology and literature of the age, see Susan Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 7. Ignatius of Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George E. Ganss (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991), 39. As Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle points out, this claim to chase a puppy is Loyola’s jab at the Dominicans, “the dogs of the Lord,” who have failed to guide him. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Loyola’s Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 77. 8. Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola. 9. Boyle, Loyola’s Acts, 3. 10. Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli, Noticias memorables de los Exercicios Espirituales de San Ignacio de Loyola . . . traducidas de Italiano en Espanol (Salamanca: Eugenio Garcia de Honorato y S. Miguel, 1731), 153. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 155. 13. Letter from Ignatius to Teresa Rejedella, June 18, 1536, in Hugo Rahner, Saint Ignatius Loyola: Letters to Women (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1956), 333; Rosignoli, Noticias memorables.

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14. Ibid. Letters to Women 15. Ibid., 333–34. 16. “Hay también en la oración otra cosa que es de Dios y el puramente lo da; que es una consolación, una alegría interior, una quietación del entendimiento, un gusto, una luz, un pasar adelante mejor, un entender mejor las cosas: todo esto es par ticu lar gracia de la oración y que anima a ir por delante, y da reliquias para ayudarse en el camino.” Jerónimo Nadal, Pláticas espirituales del P. Jerónimo Nadal, SJ, en Coimbra (Granada: Facultad Teológicas de la Compañía de Jesus, 1945 [1561]), 191. Jean Leclercq described consolation for the twelft h-century Cistercians as “an inner song, a slight murmur, a silent word” and insisted that this momentary “adhesion of the spirit [was] not the result of striving: it is a taste, a relish, a wisdom, and not a science.” Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 39, 42. 17. The 1945 published book (Nadal, Pláticas espirituales) indicates that in the manuscript, the word reliquias was written as arreliquias—which seems to imply “making a relic of”—in other words, to offer tangible access to the sacred, as would a saint’s relics. 18. Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 120. Clossey answers this question typologically, charting the range between care of one’s soul and the care of another’s soul. As this chapter makes clear, my approach is quite different in that I argue care of self required action on behalf of another. 19. Rosignoli, Noticias memorables, 57. “P. Pedro Fabro, de la Compañía de Jesus, a cuyo cargo suponen muchas almas, a las quales ilustra con ciertos Exercicios Espirituales, por ser de tanta eficacia, y virtud, que en breve epacio las hazen llegar al verdadero conocimiento de sus mismas, y de sus pecados, con un dón de lagrimas, de una tan sincera, como animosa, conversion. Crecen in virtud, y gozan un secreto familiaridad y una estrecha union de amor con Dios: y es cierto, que Tesoro tan grande se debiera andar buscando, aunque fuera hasta las Indias.” This quote is from a letter from a Carthusian monk, who had written about the “spirited conversion” that causes one “to grow in virtue and enjoy a secret familiarity and close union with God: it is certain that with treasure so great, one ought to wander in search of it, even if unto the Indies.” 20. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001), 19. 21. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 21, G129/A164. 22. Fernando Vidal, The Sciences of the Soul: The Early Modern Origins of Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 25. 23. Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 24. Ibid., 4. 25. Zarri, “Living Saints,”,, 224 26. Richard Kieckhefer, “Holiness and the Culture of Devotion: Remarks on Some Late Medieval Male Saints,” in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell, eds., Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 289 27. Rosignoli, Noticias memorables, 88. 28. Ibid., 63.

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29. Ibid., 64. 30. Ibid., 8. 31. Ibid., 56. 32. Ignatius to Rejadella, September 11, 1536, in Rahner, Letters to Women, 337, my emphasis. 33. Ibid. 34. Rosignoli, Noticias memorables, 110. 35. Ibid., 54. 36. “Cosme de Torres,” in Charles E. O’Neill and Joaquín Maria Dominguez, Diccionario histórico de la Compañia de Jesús: biográfico-temático (Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Institutum Historicum, 2001), 3819–20. See Josephus Wicki, Documenta Indica I (1540–1549) (Rome: Monumenta Historica, 1948), 470–81, for Cosme de Torres’s 1549 letter from which Rosignoli no doubt drew his account. 37. And this is why Bourdieu is useful, as he is concerned to explain social replication. His social actors seek to retain status within limited and bounded fields. Yet given that he theorizes stasis, he is less handy for explaining transformative motion. 38. See in par ticu lar Spinoza’s Ethics III, Prop. 53: “When the mind regards its own self and its power of activity, it feels pleasure, and the more so the more distinctly it imagines itself and its power of activity.” And the proof that follows: “Man knows himself only through the affections of his body and their ideas (prs.19 and 23, II). When therefore it happens that the mind can regard its own self, by that very fact it is assumed to pass to a state of greater perfection, that is, (Sch.Pr.11,III), to be affected with pleasure and the more so the more distinctly it is able to imagine itself and its power of activity.” Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Seymour Feldman, ed. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011). 39. Larkin, “Love.” 40. Rosignoli, Noticias memorables, 180. 41. Emily Michael, “Renaissance Theories of Body, Soul and Mind,” in Psyche and Soma in the History of Western Medicine and Philosophy, ed. J. N. Wright and P. Potter (Oxford: Oxford University Pess, 2003). 42. Rosignoli, Noticias memorables, 179. 43. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 22, G129/A164. 44. Claudio Acquaviva, Industriae ad curandos animae morbos (Therapy for the Illness of Souls), trans. Sister Mary Patrick (1601), 1. 45. Ibid., 2. 46. Constitutions, paragraph 547. 47. Acquaviva, Industriae. 5. 48. Ibid., 9–10. See parallel in Bacon: “Physicians are some of them so pleasing and conformable to the humour of the patient, as they press not the true cure of the disease; and some other are so regular in proceeding according to art for the disease, as they respect not sufficiently the condition of the patient.” Francis Bacon, “Of Regiment of Health,” in Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 405. 49. Acquaviva, Industriae, 7. 50. Ibid., 5.

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51. Ibid., 33–34. 52. Ibid., 36. 53. Ibid., 44. 54. Ibid., 8. 55. Ibid., 75. 56. Ibid., 13. 57. Ibid., 16. 58. Ibid., 13. 59. Ibid., 10. 60. Ibid., 18. 61. Ibid., 10. 62. Ibid., 4. 63. Ibid., 19. 64. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, ed. Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 114–20. 65. Acquaviva, Industriae, 3. 66. Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), ix. 67. Ibid., 124–-25. Spiritual and medical healing were conjoined, as recent literature on spirit possession and the history of madness have touched upon; yet an appreciation of the shared features of medical and spiritual therapeutics among laity is unclear because this scholarship has taken madness and spirit possession as its subject. These are not everyday events; thus the emphasis has been largely on the rare, unusual, aberrant, etc. Michel de Certeau, Possession at Loudon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Shuvlosvsky. David Lederer,’s Madness, Religion and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) is an exception, but his discussion of Jesuits as purveyors of consolation moves too swift ly to institutionalization and madness. 68. Acquaviva, Industriae, 10. 69. Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Jorge René González, Sexo y confesión: La iglesia y la penitencia en los siglos XVIII y XIX en la Nueva España (Mexico City: CONACULTAINAH, 2002). 70. Phenomenological understandings of speech open a window to consider “talk” itself as a form of touch. Merleau-Ponty pointed us toward the dimensionality of speech when he wrote that we are possessed by speech: “Man can speak as the electric lamp can become incandescent.” He can be usefully applied to think through a notion of talk as touch in early modern therapeutic culture. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002 [1945]), 203, 209, 212. 71. Acquaviva, Industriae, 50. 72. Ibid., 6. 73. Ibid., 32, my emphasis. 74. Ibid., 1. 75. Ibid.

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76. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 34. 77. See Lila Abu-Lughod, “Against Universals: The Dialects of (Women’s) Human Rights and Human Capabilities,” in Rethinking the Human, ed. J. Michelle Molina and Donald Swearer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 78. John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 79. John T. McNeill, A History of the Cure of Souls (New York: Harper, 1951). 80. Acquaviva, Industriae, 21. 81. Robert Aleksander Maryks, Saint Cicero and the Jesuits: The Influence of the Liberal Arts on the Adoption of Moral Probabilism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). Angus Gowland has referred to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy as an “eclectic exploration of ancient, medieval and esoteric texts.” Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 139. Notably, Acquaviva says about melancholy: “So many useful treatises concerning this disorder have been written by many masters of the spiritual life that it is unnecessary to say more.” Acquaviva, Industriae, 99. 82. Bouwsma, “Two Faces,” 22. 83. Ibid. John O’Malley, “Renaissance Humanism and the First Jesuits,” in Congreso Internacional de Historia, ed. Juan Plazaola (Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto, 1992). 84. Guy Stroumsa, “Caro salutis cardo: Shaping the Person in Early Christian Thought,” History of Religions 30 (1990): 49. But intersubjectivity was a by-product, not a goal, of Augustinian love of God. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1929]). 85. Stanley W. Jackson, “The Use of the Passions in Psychological Healing,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 45 (1990): 154. 86. Nightingale, Once Out of Nature, 86, esp. Chapter 2, “Scattered in Time.” 87. Mimesis is at the heart of the metanarrative of Christian conversion, where Augustine’s conversion in the garden is immediately mimicked by Alypius. 88. Genevieve Lloyd, Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 24. 89. Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 118. The Jesuit was hymn writer Friedrich Spee. 90. Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola, 175. 91. Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 199. 92. For the affective relationship between readers and texts see Sara Ritchey, “Manual Thinking: John Mombaer’s Meditations, the Neuroscience of the Imagination, and the Future of the Humanities,” Postmedieval 3 (2012): 341–54. 93. My emphasis. 94. Philip Endean, “The Spiritual Exercises,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 60. 95. Nightingale, Once Out of Nature, 44.

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96. Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola, 176, my emphasis. 97. Ibid., 177. 98. Ibid., n. 110, 418–19. 99. James Bono, Word of God and Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). 100. Martin E. Palmer, ed., On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599 (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), 343. 101. Doña Juana de Cardona to Ignatius, 1546, in Rahner, Letters to Women, 310. 102. Ines Županov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th and 17th Centuries) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 123. 103. Ibid., 115. 104. Martha Newman, The Boundaries of Charity: Cistercian Culture and Ecclesiastical Reform, 1098–1180 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 64–65. 105. To Antonio Gomes (Kagoshima, Nov. 5, 1549), Francis Xavier, Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier, trans. M. Joseph Costelloe (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992). 106. Newman, The Boundaries of Charity, 89. 107. Leclercq, Love of Learning, 38. 108. Newman, The Boundaries of Charity, 83. 109. Leclercq, Love of Learning, 36. 110. Županov, Missionary Tropics, 39–40. 111. ARSI, Goa 7, “Valignano’s Summario,” Manuscript, Capitulo 17. See also Josef Franz Schutte, Valignano’s Mission Principles for Japan: Vol. I. From His Appointment as Visitor until His First Departure from Japan. Part I: The Problem (1573–1580), trans. John J. Coyne (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1980), 170–72, for Valignano’s division of the Portuguese dominions into the white nations of Japan and China and the black nations of India and Africa, or the Japa nese as “not intemperate in eating.” Ibid., 61. 112. Xavier, Letters and Instructions, 300–1. 113. Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 117. 114. Acquaviva, Industriae, 41–42. 115. Xavier, Letters and Instructions, Instruction 11, my emphasis. 116. Ibid., 300–303. 117. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “New Worlds, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650,” American Historical Review 104 (February 1999): 33–68. Carlos López Beltrán, “Hippocratic Bodies, Temperament and Castas in Spanish America (1570–1820),” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2007): 253–89. 118. Gail Kern Paster, “Ner vous Tension,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Carla Mazzio and David Hillman (New York: Routledge, 1997), 107–28. 119. Schutte, Valignano’s Mission, 59. 120. Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (hereafter ARSI), Goa 7, Valignano’s Summario, Manuscript, Capitulo 25, f53 (1579).

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121. Ibid. See also Jennifer Selwyn, A Paradise Inhabited by Devils: The Jesuits’ Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples (New York: Ashgate, 2004), 119–21, for emphasis on recruiting as missionaries Jesuits who were deemed vigorous and healthy enough to survive the journey and the tough conditions of life “in the Indies.” 122. Schutte, Valignano’s Mission, 143. 123. Rahner, Letters to Women, 336, 337. 124. Acquaviva, Industriae, 31. 125. Schutte, Valignano’s Mission, 166–67. 126. Ibid., 128. 127. Ibid., 332. 128. Ibid., 167–68. 129. Ibid., 301. 130. Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 96. As Mexican Dominican historian Dávila Padilla (1562–1604) explained, “God was slowing down the eschatological clock, allowing time for the preaching of the gospel in every corner of the world.” 131. Acquaviva is insistent upon this point: “No Jesuit can be admitted to the priesthood and the religious profession definitivamente without understanding the indigenous languages and being practiced in ministry to the natives.” Félix Zubillaga, Monumenta Mexicana (Rome: Monumenta Historica Soc. Iesu, 1956), 8, Doc. 26 ß6. 132. Pérez de Ribas, Andrés, Corónica y historia religiosa de la Provincia de la Compañía de Jesús de México en Nueva España (Mexico, 1896) 163–164. 133. As quoted in O’Malley, The First Jesuits 6, 67–68. First quote is from the Jesuit Formula, the second from letters from Nadal. 134. Pérez de Ribas, 1896 #44@169. 135. Ibid. 136. Charles W. Polzer, Rules and Precepts of the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976). 137. Laura Alarcón, Education y evangelio en Sinaloa: Siglos XVI–XVII (Sinaloa: COBAES, 1996), 95. She is quoting the Annual Letter of 1624.  . E VA N G E L I Z AT I O N A N D C O N S O L AT I O N

1. Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 189. 2. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), xix. 3. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 434–36. With “habitus” and “doxa,” Bourdieu refi nes the notion of repetitive, ritualized activity conferring a taken-for-granted quality on shared ideas and practices. Pierre Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986). 4. John W. O’Malley, “Was Ignatius a Church Reformer? How to Look at Early Modern Catholicism,” Catholic Historical Review 77, no. 2 (1991): 183.

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5. He insists that early modern Catholicism should not be understood only through the lens of Catholic Reformation. “They cannot be understood without each other, but they are not precisely the same thing.” The Jesuits, he argues, belong under the rubric of early modern Catholicism. One of the main proofs for O’Malley was Jesuit interest in overseas missions, largely outside the religious politics of Reformation Eu rope. Ibid., 185. 6. Louis Chatellier, Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Louis Chatellier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500–c. 1800, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Jennifer Selwyn, A Paradise Inhabited by Devils: The Jesuits’ Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples (New York: Ashgate, 2004). 7. Miguel Venegas, Vida y virtudes del V.P. Juan Bautista Zappa de la Compañía de Jesus (Barcelona: Pablo Nadal, 1754), 76. 8. Quite different in Jesuit missions in northern European regions, when blatant coercion was used in efforts to convert Protestants. See Chatellier, Religion of the Poor, 48–59. 9. “Indulgences,” Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org /ca then/07783a.htm 10. For the growing importance of purgatory as a sign of increased indigenous adoption of a Christian worldview, as well as demographic and institutional stabilization in New Spain, see Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2005), 99–140, or on the “consolidation of a Mexican Christianity” see ibid., 159–77. 11. Venegas, Vida y virtudes, 77. The Jesuits seemed to prefer the carrot to the stick, but “persuasion” still often had coercive elements; for example, in their attempts to promote frequent communion among prison inmates, the Jesuit congregant members offered a hearty meal only to those who confessed and received communion. Michael W. Maher, “How the Jesuits Used Their Congregations to Promote Frequent Communion,” in Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France and Spain, ed. John Patrick Donnelly and Michael W. Maher (St. Louis, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999), 87. 12. In one mission report, the author lauded an alcalde mayor who “was not content with attendance and went from house to house to determine for himself who had left without attending the doctrina (catechism lesson) and without confessing.” “Relación de la Mission que los Padres Juan Perez y Juan Baptista Zapa hizieron en los tres partidos de Tulanzinco Sultepeq y Tenanzino y en sus haciendas y pueblos comarcanos desde el año de 1685 hasta el de 1687,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.529v. 13. For excellent accounts of these, see Louise M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989); Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 14. Joel Robbins makes a compelling case that anthropologists of Christianity in colonial contexts have considered Christianity a “foreign intrusion” long after Christian

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practices were adopted, and thus scholars have discounted conversion as inauthentic. Joel Robbins, “Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christianity: Belief, Time and the Anthropology of Christianity,” Current Anthropology 48, no. 1 (2008): 5–38. For an understanding of how Christianity introduced radical shifts in subjectivity, see Jorge Klor de Alva, “Colonizing Souls: The Failure of the Indian Inquisition and the Rise of Penitential Discipline,” in Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, ed. Anne Cruz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). For a story of Christianization that takes into account transformations in native Christian practice across the entire colonial period, see Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 15. Venegas, Vida y virtudes, 11. 16. Ibid., 15. 17. Born in Florida in 1620, the Jesuit Francisco Florencia wrote Historia de la Compañía de Jesus en Nueva España, which was published in Mexico in 1694, but is best remembered for his apologetic investigation of the history of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe in La Estrella del Norte de Mexico (1688). 18. Luisa Elena Alcalá, “The Jesuits and the Visual Arts in New Spain, 1670–1767” (PhD diss., New York University, 1998). 19. Venegas, Vida y virtudes, 30. 20. Ibid., 15. 21. Juan Bautista Zappa, Copia di vintisei lettere scritte dal Padre Gio. Battista Zappa della Compagnia di Giesu al Sig. Ambrosio Zappa, suo padre. Da che e entrato nella Religione sino al presente (Milan: Ramellati, 1690?), 21. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 22. 24. Ibid., 30. 25. Venegas, Vida y virtudes, 53–54. He sent the painting to the Princess Widow Doña Violante Lomelina Doria, mother of Prince Don Andres. 26. Ibid., 56. 27. Ibid., 57. 28. Zappa, Vintisei lettere, 69. 29. August 20, 1684, ibid., 86. 30. Letter dated January 20, 1678, ibid., 61. 31. January 20, 1678, ibid., 62. 32. June 10, 1681, ibid., 69. As written in the Jesuit Constitutions, Jesuits were forbidden to serve as parish priests as this limited their mobility, a stance that proved difficult to maintain in the New World, where the large numbers of Indians required conversion but also, it was thought, supervision. Doctrina was a term meaning parish for Indians, the implication being that Indian neophytes required instruction. The development of both itinerant missions and permanent mission stations was the resulting compromise, with the notion that missions would become full-fledged parishes and turned over to secular clergy over time. For a discussion of debates over the matter in Peru, see Claudio Burgaleta, Jose de Acosta, S.J. (1540–1600): His Life and Thought (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1999), 35–36.

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33. Alexander Murray, “Counselling in Medieval Confession,” in Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (York: York Medieval Press, 1998), 74; Peter Biller, “Confession in the Middle Ages: Introduction,” in Biller and Minnis, Handling Sin, 4. 34. Chatellier, Religion of the Poor, 13; Selwyn, A Paradise Inhabited by Devils. 35. Maher, “How the Jesuits Used Their Congregations.” 36. Further, this was key to Jesuit missionary philosophy since the days of Francis Xavier: “Remember,” Xavier admonished his brothers toward the close of an instruction that was later redistributed as general missionary principles, “that you will find nothing better to do than to have them make a general confession of their sins, making some meditations from the First Week of the Exercises so that they obtain contrition, sorrow, tears and grief at the sight of their perversity.” Francis Xavier, Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier, trans. M. Joseph Costelloe (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992), Instruction 32. 37. “Breve relación de la mision que dieron los PP. Juan Baptista Zapa y Antonio Ramirez en diferentes pueblos en esta Nueva Espana el año mil seicientos ochenta i siete, asta el mil seicientos y ochenta y ocho. 1687 a 1688,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.543v. 38. Perla Chinchilla Pawling, “Predicación y miedo,” in Una historia de los usos del miedo, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Anne Staples, and Valentina Torres Septién (Mexico City: El Colegio de México/Universidad Iberoamericana, 2009), 206. 39. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.529v. 40. “Relación de algunos casos memorables que se ha dignado N. Sr. obrar por medio de la doctrina y actos de contrición. Comienza el 1655 y termina por el mes de Oct de 1663. El ultima parte es de Padre Jose Vidal,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.294. 41. Ibid., f.290. 42. Ibid., f.297. 43. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.532v. 44. “Relación, 1687–88,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.543v. 45. The Dieguinos were an order of the Descalced Franciscans. On another note, this area that Zappa referred to as “Minas de Sultepeque” was later named S. Juan Bautista Zultepec, but it is unclear at what date. See Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain, rev. ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 268. 46. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.533v–f.34. 47. Ibid., f.534. 48. The Jesuits were much devoted to this par ticu lar Marian cult. The Holy House of Loreto was said to be the last house that Mary lived in before ascending to heaven. According to legend, angels lifted the house and carried it to Italy in 1295. Karin Vélez, “Resolved to Fly: The Virgin of Loreto, the Jesuits and the Miracle of Portable Catholicism in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Alcalá, “The Jesuits and the Visual Arts in New Spain.” 49. Alcalá, “The Jesuits and the Visual Arts in New Spain,” 179–80. 50. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.529v. A personal favorite of Father Zappa, he founded the Casa de Loreto at the Jesuit school for native Indian boys, El Colegio de San Gregorio, and commissioned a statue that was sent to New Spain from Italy. He also

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established a Casa de Loreto in Tepotzotlán, the fi rst stone laid in 1679, with a dedication on August 10, 1680, to celebrate the Jubilee of the Missions. In 1681, the church at San Gregorio was rebuilt and Zappa ensured prominence of the Casa de Loreto in the church. Velez, “Resolved to Fly.” See also Gerard Decorme, La obra de los Jesuitas Mexicanos durante la época colonial, 1572–1767 (Mexico: Antigua Libreria Rebredo de Jose Porrua e Hijos, 1941), 92–93. 51. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 1. 52. Zappa promoted the cult of St. Francis Xavier (1506–52, canonized in 1622), who was intended to serve as a powerful motivator to pious living. Xavier was the patron saint of missionaries and was also a role model for many Jesuits who aspired to the life of a missionary. In a letter to his father, Zappa wrote of his desire to be a “true apostle” modeled on the life of Xavier. As part of the campaign to promote the Jesuit saint, Father Zappa distributed small booklets called “The Novena of the Glorious Saint” and guided the laity in making a novena to St. Francis Xavier leading up to the nine days before his feast day (December 3). See Zappa, Vintisei lettere, 21. 53. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.542v. 54. “Relacion de las misiones que hizo la Compania de Jesus en el Reino de Nueva Galicia desde al ano de 1678–1683,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.407v. 55. Pedro Calatayud, Misiones y sermones del P. Pedro de Calatayud, maestro de teología, y misionero apostólico de la Compañía de Jesus, de la provincia de Castilla, vol. 3 (Madrid), 260.1796 56. Ibid., 261. 57. Ibid., 262. 58. Michael Maher, “Reforming Rome: The Society of Jesus and Its Congregations” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1997), 185. The history of the practice is vague. The existence of a technique called a “general confession” that entailed a very complete examination of conscience began to appear in the early sixteenth century. We know, for example, that Ignatius made a general confession during his year at Montserrat in 1522 and thereafter incorporated it into the Spiritual Exercises. This penitential practice was distinct from the “general confession” that was a rote prayer recited at the beginning of the Catholic Mass. John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, 135–37. 59. Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996), 14, 17. 60. Calatayud, Misiones y sermones, 264. 61. Murray, “Counselling in Medieval Confession,” 74. 62. Biller, “Confession in the Middle Ages,” 11; Robert James Bast, Honor Your Fathers: Catechisms and the Emergence of Patriarchal Ideology in Germany, 1400–1600, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 6. 63. Calatayud was active in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, so we can see that wave upon wave of reform efforts had indeed made the Decalogue a baseline of moral reference, even if these efforts took hundreds of years (counting from the emergence of the Ten Commandments as a key part of Christian catechism in the early fif-

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teenth century). See Bast, Honor Your Fathers, esp. Ch. 1, “The Ten Commandments and Late-Medieval Catechesis.” 64. Calatayud, Misiones y sermones, 268. 65. Frankfurt reformer Johannes Wolff (approx. 1452–68). As quoted in Bast, Honor Your Fathers, 23–25. 66. Calatayud, Misiones y sermones, 269. 67. Margaret Somers, “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working Class Formation,” Social Science History 16, no. 4 (1992): 601. 68. Maher, “Reforming Rome,” 158. 69. Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Ramo Inquisition 690, Exp. 5, fs 124v 70. The full quote from the Psalms reads “Anima mea in manibus meis semper, et legem tuam non sum oblitus.” Though I constantly take my soul into my own hands, I will not forget your law.” Yet the latter phrase is not included in the engraving. Is the emphasis on self-shaping to the detriment of following God’s law? This was at the heart of the controversies surrounding Jesuit “accommodation” in the Chinese Rites. 71. Calatayud, Misiones y sermones, 262. He then suggests naming some sins and throwing out some very large numbers so they will feel comfortable saying, “Oh no Father, not 200 animals, it was much less,” ibid., 263. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. “El P. J. B. de Zappa al P.B. de Soto: Relación de las misiones que con el P. J. Pérez ha dado desde Oct. de 1688 a Feb 1689,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.564d, my emphasis. 75. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 9. 76. Calatayud, Misiones y sermones, 268. 77. Ibid., 272. 78. Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 137. 79. Calatayud, Misiones y sermones, 274. 80. Ibid., 275. 81. Letter to his father dated June 10, 1681, Zappa, Vintisei lettere, 72. 82. Calatayud, Misiones y sermones, 267. 83. The popu lar mission records refer several times to the exemplo of the Princess of England. I have not yet seen a concrete example of what such an exemplary story might entail. 84. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.539. 85. “Relación, 1688–89,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.564. 86. “Breve relación del Jubileo de las doctrinas que se publicó en esta Ciudad de México, 19 de Marzo 1662,” [Hernando Cabero], ARSI, Mex 17, 545. 87. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.539. 88. “Relación de algunos casos memorables,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.290. 89. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.530v. 90. Ibid., f.535.

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91. Ibid., f.540v. 92. In the Spanish, “slothfulness” is torpeza, a word that has connotations of moral or sexual depravity. 93. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.541v. 94. Ibid., f.538v. 95. Gerhard, Guide to Historical Geography of New Spain, 335–37. 96. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.530. 97. Ibid., f.536v. 98. Ibid., r–v. A screen offered a semblance of anonymity to the penitent, but otherwise the confession generally took place in the church within public view. William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 241. 99. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.532. 100. Ibid., f.539. 101. Ibid., f532r–v. 102. Ibid., f.530. 103. Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th– 18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990 [1983]), 168–85; Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Thomas Nelson, 1964); David Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian Beacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 104. Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State, 66. 105. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.539v. 106. Ibid., f.540. 107. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002 [1945]), xii. 108. Implicitly, I rely upon Bourdieu’s notion of habitus—his structuring structures that structure certainly provide a dynamic model and an important one given that Bourdieu is concerned to avoid mind-body dualism. Yet Bourdieu aims to explain stasis—how are structures reproduced? I am concerned with mapping transformation or conversion. I reach for Merleau-Ponty because he offers an interpretation that focuses on intersubjective dynamics that open out to other possible futures, interpretations, and modes of being, and is thus helpful to thinking about how transformations over time might have happened, how to understand, in this case, the cumulative effects of reiterative conversion processes. 109. Ibid., 160–61 110. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 111. “Piety became more personal while retaining its communal character.” Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: a Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999). 96.

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. FAC T S

1. Ignacio Iparraguirre, Historia de la practica de los Ejercicios de San Ignacio: Evolución en Europa durante el siglo XVII, vol. 3 (Rome: Institutum Historicum SI, 1973), 106. 2. Ibid., 107, 119–20. 3. Luis de La Palma, Camino espiritual de la manera que lo enseña el bienaventurada Padre San Ignacio, en su libro de los exercicios (Alcalá: Juan de Orduña, 1626). 4. Iparraguirre, Historia de la práctica, 191. 5. Ibid., 183. 6. Ibid., 177. 7. Ibid., 188. Iparraguirre characterized the “open exercises” as similar to popu lar missions in their use of pageantry to encourage adoption of spiritual practices. 8. Ibid., 193–94. 9. ARSI, Mex 16, “Carta Annua Nueva Espana,” in ARSI (Rome, 1582). 10. Bartolomeo Perez, “Carta Annua,” in ARSI (Rome, 1596), 145. He wrote that 200 persons gathered for the reunion; if these reunions followed the Spanish example, we can assume that all persons gathered made the exercises. 11. Gerard Decorme, La obra de los Jesuitas Mexicanos durante la epoca colonial, 1572– 1767 (Mexico: Antigua Libreria Rebredo de Jose Porrua e Hijos, 1941), 121. 12. Gaceta de México, February 1728 13. Ibid., 122. 14. Ibid. 15. Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de México de la Compañia de Jesús (hereafter AHPM). Casa de ejercicios de Araceli, 1751–1767 [No. 254] IV 263. 16. Sebastian Izquierdo, Práctica de los exercicios espirituales de nuestro Padre San Ignacio por El. P. Sebastian Izquierdo, de la Compañía de Jesus (reprint, Mexico City: Imprenta de la Biliotheca Mexicana, 1756). I looked at three copies of the Mexican imprint at the Biblioteca Kino in Mexico City. They include illustrations by Antonio Moreno, which appear to be copied from Jerome Nadal’s illustrated guide. The copy marked “Casa de Ejercicios” may have been part of the collection of the Casa de Araceli. Another of the copies contained a little slip of paper with a printed note: “Comulgó en esta Santa Iglesia Catedral de México, año de mil ochocientos veinte y siete” (see Acervo 17834). There are also two Roman imprints held in the Biblioteca Kino, also in Spanish (Rome: El Martii, 1724). These copies have the same illustrations, but the Mexican illustrations have very slight modifications; for example, the image is titled Docente magistra religionis (the image of Mary inspiring Ignatius to write the exercises) and the book in Ignatius’s hand reads “Exercicios Espirituales” and has a sun (the Jesuit motto) drawn on the facing page. In the Roman copy, that engraving shows the facing page as blank, with just “Excreitiae” written on the opposite page. 17. P. Ignacio Thomay, La soledad Christiana, en que a la luz del cielo se consideran las eternas verdades, segun la idea do los Exercicios Espirituales de mi Santo Padre IGNACIO, para los que dessean por ocho dias retirarse a ellos. Dispuesta por el P. Ignacio Thomay, de la Compañía de Jesus. Impresso de la Viuda D. Joseph Bernardo de Hogal. Año 1752. One of the copies I consulted at the Biblioteca Kino was marked with two nuns’ names, Sor María Theresa and Sor María Xaviera.

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18. Thomay, 8. of Preparation 19. Izquierdo, Práctica de los exercicios espirituales, 4–5. 20. Ibid., 4. 21. Jean Croiset, Retiro spiritual para un día de cada mes (Mexico: Colegio de S. Indefonso, 1757). This is the Spanish translation from the French Retraite spirituelle pour un jour de chaque moi originally published in Lyon, France, in 1694. 22. Ibid., 20. 23. Ibid., 16. 24. Ibid., 17. 25. Ibid., 17–18, my emphasis. 26. Ibid., 231. 27. Ibid., 19. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 20. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 38. 32. Ibid., 39. 33. Ibid., 44. Richard Strier reads the attention to “one’s own status” in the Exercises as an indication of the way in which Ignatian spirituality underwrote bourgeoisie culture. See “Sanctifying the Bourgeoisie,” in The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 34. Ibid., 58. 35. Ibid., 59. 36. Ibid., 61–62. 37. AGN, Ramo Inquisition 690, Exp. 5, f.115 38. Ibid., Exp. 5, 117v. 39. Mercederians had a reputation for a kind of confessional laxity that was differently configured than Jesuit laxity. See, for example, the discussion of a painting in which a Mercedarian confessor claimed to “absolve everything” discussed in Karen Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 131. 40. Council of Trent, 14, 4, p. 98 (from Hanover site). 41. AGN, Ramo Inquisition 690, Exp. 5, 119. “Contrition” was configured differently in various mendicant orders’ understanding of best confessional practices; see Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, 130. 42. Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, 112–13. 43. AGN, Ramo Inquisition 690, Exp. 5, f.119v. 44. Ibid., f.120. 45. Ibid., f. 120v. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., f.121. For other cases in which devotional practices in the home were deemed suspicious largely on the account that music and festivity were central aspects, see Gabriela Sánchez Reyes, “Oratorios domésticos: Piedad y oración privada,” In Historia de la

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vida cotidiana en México: El siglo XVIII, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2005), 545–48. 48. AGN, Ramo Inquisition 690, Exp. 5, f.118. 49. Ibid., f. 125. For a different kind of case of devotion that exceeded the boundaries of seventeenth-century conventions of piety, see Zeb Tortorici, “Masturbation, Salvation and Desire: Connecting Sexuality and Religiosity in Colonial Mexico,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 3 (2007). 50. AGN, Ramo Inquisition 690, Exp. 5, f.126v. For the Adamites, see Richard Lerner, Heresy of the Free Spirit in the later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California, 1972). 51. AGN, Ramo Inquisition 690, Exp. 5, ff.126–127. 52. Pedro Calatayud, Modo práctica y fácil hacer confesión general (1740?). Calatayud’s modo remained popu lar even after the expulsion of the Jesuits. For example, I have seen chunks of Calatayud’s works interspersed in nineteenth-century collections compiled as instructions for priests (see Arrillaga at Biblioteca Kino). 53. Baird, 9. Never published in Molinos’s lifetime. 54. Tirso González, to P. Prov. Juan de Palacios, Rome, July 28, 1696, in Bio-Biografía, 137. 55. Tirso González, to P. Prov. Palacios, May 1699. In ibid. 56. Ibid. There is some sense (not fully delineated) that he disapproved of P. Diego de Almonacir’s decision to dismiss Davi so publicly, but I have not seen the correspondence between Almonacir and Tirso González. 57. This brings me to an unrelated reflection: Barreling along on a mission to gather “facts” about the reception and practice of Ignatian Exercises, I have stumbled over this textual dead body. What kind of fact is Davi’s execution? Suddenly I find it difficult to bring this discussion to a graceful close. A brutal death, spiritually motivated. Tirso González does not rely upon a discourse of martyrdom to describe this death; he only expresses worries about what this could mean for the Society. As for me, I have only been reading a text; I do not see any body, yet I am worried—has my tone been too light? Can I sidestep the body, or will I be judged for not showing proper penitential virtue? In the spirit of evasion, I write a footnote. . COLON I A L I N DIFFER ENCE?

1. For another view of Indian devotional life, see David Tavarez, The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline and Dissent in Colonial Mexico, Matthew O’Hara, A Flock Divided. 2. I cite much of the new indigenous history in this chapter; here I only list some recent monographs. I review the literature on women in Chapter 6. 3. Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8. For our efforts to remedy this for two different Jesuit missionaries, one German, one Spanish, who wrote about the same Mexican mystic, see Michelle Molina and Ulrike Strasser, “Missionary Men and the Global Currency of

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Female Sanctity,” in Women, Religion and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), ed. Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, 156–79 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 4. Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 117. 5. This characterization as “neophyte” meant that they were newly converted, but also implied that they remained under instruction. As a category, “Indians” were partially formed Christians and remained so throughout the colonial period, which is one of the reasons why “Indians” were never subject to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. 6. Native persons were not lone targets of reforms pertaining to superstition. The use of magic, certain healing practices, and love witchcraft ran across caste lines and were perceived as persistent folk practices that drew on a wide repertoire of remedies with no clear demarcation between those that were “native,” African, or Euro-Christian superstitions. See Martha Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Ruth Behar, “Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Dev il in Late-Colonial Mexico,” American Ethnologist (1987): 34–54; William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth- Century Mexico (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). In an account of the urban mission made in Mexico City, for example, the Jesuit Cabero noted a man tormented by his inability to confess the sin that “for many years he had made use of some of the ceremonies known to be used by the Indians.” Th is was a non-Indian man making use of “Indian” practices. “Breve relacion del jubileo de las doctrinas que se publico en esta Ciudad de Mexico, 19 de Marzo 1662,” Hernando Cabero, ARSI, Mex 17, f.293. 7. Concepts of limpieza or purity of blood lineage applied to and were deployed by Indians who could claim noble ancestry. María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Peter B. Villella, “ ‘Pure and Noble Indians, Untainted by Inferior Idolatrous Races’: Native Elites and the Discourse of Blood Purity in Late Colonial Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 91, no. 4 (2011): 633–63. 8. As the Jesuit Provincial Avellaneda wrote to the king in 1592: “The goal is to form these sons of caciques and principles with total institution of policía and Christianity, so that later they can govern and rule their pueblos and be an example and a lesson to all, as such fruit has already been our experience.” Quoted in Gerard Decorme, La obra de los Jesuitas Mexicanos durante la Época Colonial, 1572–1767 (Mexico City: Antigua Libreria Rebredo de Jose Porrua e Hijos, 1941), 51. 9. Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 435. 10. Behar, “Sex and Sin.” For a discussion of indigenous understandings of Satan that spans from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, see Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 11. Satanic epic was a staple of the Christian world, both Protestant and Catholic. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006), 48–50.

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12. Celsa Carmen García Valdés, “La conquísta espíritual del Japón: Comedia Jesuítica Javeriana y la perspectiva Paulina de la evangelización,” in San Francisco Javier entre dos continentes, Conquista espiritual del Japón (Madrid: Universidad de Navarra/iberoamericana, 2007), 35–58. 13. Louis Chatellier, Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500–c. 1800, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 162; Charles C. Noel, “Missionary Preachers in Spain: Teaching Social Virtue in the Eighteenth Century,” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985). 14. “Breve Relación, 1662,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.291v. 15. Juan Bautista Zappa, “Relación de la misíon que los padres Juan Perez y Juan Baptista Zapa hizieron en los tres partidos de Tulanzinco Sultepeq y Tenanzino y en sus haciendas y pueblos comarcanos desde el año de 1685 hasta el de 1687,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.534. 16. “Breve Relación, 1662,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.290. 17. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, 534. 18. Ibid., f.534v. The Jesuit Pérez de Ribas described the Dev il as “enraged” when he baptized Indians in the northern Mexican mission. See Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors, 92. 19. Miguel Venegas, the biographer, identifies “a nanita a nanita” as a Spanish corruption of the Nahuatl nantli, which means “mother,” and as the colloquial word with which children call their mothers. Miguel Venegas, “Templo Mystico de la gracia dedicado a Marai . . . en la vida admirable y virtudes hoericas del venerable P. Juan Bautista Zappa de la Compania de Jesus, Apostolico Missionero de esta provincia de nueva Espana” (Manuscript, APHM, n.d.). 20. “Carta del P. Juan Bautista Zappa al P. Bernabe de Soto, provincial desta provincia de la nueva Espana,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.544v. 21. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.534v. 22. See Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives, for examples of physical deformity understood by contemporaries as a public sign of one’s sins. See especially Chapter 3, “Magical Violence and the Body,” 42–68. 23. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.537v–38. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Venegas, “Templo mystico,” 594–95. 27. “Relación, 1685–87,” ARSI, Mex 17, f.537v. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., f.537. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., f.534v. 33. For haciendas as centers of devotion in nonurban settings, see Gabriela Sánchez Reyes, “Oratorios domésticos: Piedad y oración privada,” in Historia de la vida cotidiana en México: El siglo XVIII, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2005), 537.

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34. Matthew D. O’Hara, A Flock Divided: Race, Religion and Politics in Mexico, 1749– 1857 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 26, 36. O’Hara also explores how these lines were blurred. 35. Venegas, “Templo mystico,” 375. 36. February 20, 1679, in Juan Bautista Zappa, Copia di vintisei lettere scritte dal Padre Gio: Battista Zappa della Compagnia di Giesu al Sig. Ambrosio Zappa, suo padre. Da che e entrato nella religione sino al presente (Milan: Ramellati, 1690[?]), 66. 37. Ibid. 38. Zappa’s categories of distinction are all problematic, especially given his absolute blindness to the existence of the castas. Douglas Cope has argued that quotidian life and social mobility hinged upon patron-client relations more than one’s caste identity. “Race,” Cope asserts, “was not the only dividing line in colonial Mexico. Nor was it the only principle of social orga nization. Mexican society was riven with fissures, not the least of which was the immense gap between the rich and the poor.” R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 6. Reframed in terms of patron-client relations, one can imagine Zappa as the patron, handing out Our Lady of Loreto medallions or paper images that could be utilized as tokens of prestige, symbolic capital in a spiritual economy. Edward W. Osowski, “Carriers of Saints: Traveling Alms Collectors and Nahua Gender Roles,” in Local Religion in Colonial Mexico, ed. Martin Austin Nesvig (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006). 39. June 10, 1681, in Zappa, Vintisei lettere, 67. 40. June 10, 1681, in ibid., 70. 41. Ibid., 71. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 70. 44. Ibid., 71. 45. Ibid. 46. August 20, 1684, in ibid., 83. 47. George Ganss, “Introduction,” in Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991), 62. 48. O’Hara, A Flock Divided, 25. For Jesuit/mendicant cross-town competitiveness in Europe, see Craig Harline, Miracles at the Jesus Oak: Histories of the Supernatural in Reformation Europe (New York: Doubleday, 2003), especially the chapter on Maria Abundant. 49. Robert Kendrick, “ ‘Honore a Dio, e allegrezza alli santi, e consolazione alli putti: The Musical Projection of Litanies in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Sanctorum 6 (2009). 50. Constantino Bayle, “La Comunion entre los Indios Americanos,” Revista de Indias 4, no. 12 (1943): 208. 51. August 20, 1684, in Zappa, Vintisei lettere, 82. 52. Ileana Schmidt-Diaz de Leon, “El Colegio Seminario de Indios de San Gregorio y el desarrollo de la Indianidad en el Valle de Mexico, 1586–1856” (PhD diss., Tulane University, 2001), 29. 53. Ibid., 24.

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54. Lecciones espirituales para las tandas de ejercicios de S. Ignacio, dadas a los indios en el idioma Mexicana (Puebla: Imprenta Antigua en el Portal de Las Flores, 1841). “The instruction of the Indians is not only the domain of their Parishes, . . . but also one of the works of greatest charity for all who in any manner can contribute to it.” The guide was for parish priests, but also for the fathers of families “who in privacy wish to read it to their children, or some other who wishes to undertake this work of mercy.” 55. The manuscript was likely prepared by P. Antonio Herdoñana, SJ, as this was his pet project. 56. “Fundación de las inditas de S. Gregorio: Methodo del Collegio o casa de recogimiento para Indias doncellas de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe” manuscript, APHM, 1679. 57. August 20, 1684, in Zappa, Vintisei lettere, 84. 58. “Fundación de las inditas de S. Gregorio.” 59. June 10, 1681, in Zappa, Vintisei lettere. 60. Ibid., 71. 61. December 9, 1681, in ibid., 78. 62. August 20, 1684, in ibid., 84. 63. Miguel Venegas, El apóstol Mariano representado en la vida del V.P. Juan María de Salvatierra, de la Compañía de Jesús (Mexico City: Doña María de Rivera, 1754), 19–20. 64. According to Clossey, the persecution of Japa nese Christians was “devastating” to the recuitment of missionaries to Mexico. Efforts were made to convince potential missionaries that “New Spain offered equally attractive opportunities for martyrdom.” Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 125. Manuel Solórzano was decribed by Venegas as a martyr, but the Diccionario Histórico lists him as “a victim of violence.” The Diccionario mentions that Solórzano traveled to New Spain on the same boat as Salvatierra and Ortiz de la Foronda, but omits mention of Manuel Sánchez and Juan Bautista Zappa. Entry “Ortiz de (la) Foronda,” in Charles M. O’Neill and Joaquin M. Dominguez, Diccionario histórico de la Compañia de Jesús: biográfico-temático (Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas), 2927–28. 65. Venegas, El apóstol Mariano, 38. 66. August 20, 1684, in Zappa, Vintisei lettere, 85. 67. Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 68–89. 68. June 10, 1681, in Zappa, Vintisei lettere, 72. 69. June 10, 1681, in ibid. 70. Ibid., 73. 71. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “New Worlds, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650,” American Historical Review 104 (February 1999): 33–68. 72. June 10, 1681, in Zappa, Vintisei lettere, 73. 73. Ibid., 73–74. 74. Zappa, Vintisei lettere, 74. In many of his letters, Zappa asked his father specifically for medallions and paper images of Our Lady of Loreto, claiming that it was what both his “children” and his patrons most demanded. According to legend, the Casa de Loreto was the original house that Mary had lived in when she was assumed body and

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soul into heaven. The house was transported by angels to Italy in 1295. It was an important site of pilgrimage for the Jesuits. The definitive work on this topic is Karin Vélez, Resolved to Fly: The Virgin of Loreto, the Jesuits and the Miracle of Portable Catholicism in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Venegas says Zappa did visit Loreto, alongside his friend and fellow novice Salvatierra. He claimed that Zappa had silent confirmation from the Virgin that he would be sent on a mission to New Spain. Miguel Venegas, Vida y virtudes del V.P. Juan Bautista Zappa de la Compania de Jesus (Barcelona: Pablo Nadal, 1754), 31. 75. “Juan María Salvatierra,” in O’Neill and Dominguez, Diccionario histórico, 3479–80. 76. Probably most notable in this regard are the historians Eugene Bolton, as well as Ernest J. Burrus, SJ. 77. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Chatterjee pointed to a spiritual zone of the domestic sphere, where notions of Indian (South Asian) authenticity were produced and preserved. 78. The definitive study of Spanish and New Spanish concerns with blood and lineage is Maria Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions. David Tavárez captures the fluidity succinctly when he writes that during the colonial period casta categories were wielded “according to the eye of the beholder and the context of the identification.” David Tavárez, “Legally Indian: Inquisitorial Readings of Indigenous Identity in New Spain,” in Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, ed. Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 81. One’s caste category could change within his or her lifetime. Titles in the Imperial Subjects collection of essays make this clear in the use of phrases such as “Conjuring Identities,” “Purchasing Whiteness,” and “A Market of Identities.” Matthew O’Hara calls “ ‘Indianness’ a contested religious category” (my emphasis) that over time was associated with the mendicant doctrinas (Indian parishes). O’Hara, A Flock Divided. 79. O’Hara, A Flock Divided, 42. 80. Ibid., 41. 81. See “The Missionary Motivation” in Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 125–27. 82. Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination; and the description of Mexico City, especially the chapter “Drinking,” in William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979); Stephanie Merrim, The Spectacular City: Mexico and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010); Antonio Rubial García, La ciudad barroca (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2005). 83. Carlos M. N. Eire, “The Concept of Popu lar Religion,” in Local Religion in Colonial Mexico, ed. Martin Austin Nesvig (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006); William B. Taylor, “Between Nativitas and Mexico City: An Eighteenth-Century Pastor’s Local Religion,” in Nesvig, Local Religion in Colonial Mexico. 84. See Chapter 4. Letter dated January 20, 1678, in Zappa, Vintisei lettere, 61. 85. Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization, trans. Deke Dusinberre (New York: Routledge, 2002), 8.

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. A H E A R T S H A P E D WO R L D

1. Born in Madrid, P. Márquez died on December 9, 1768, in Puerto Santa María en route to Spain after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. 2. Asuncion Lavrín, “Espiritualidad en el claustro novohispano del siglo XVII,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 4 (1995): 156. 3. Jean Franco’s Plotting Women posits the sexual division of labor between raw material (the mystical and religious experiences of women) and production (the published works of male clergy). See Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 4. Aside from some work on women’s last wills and testaments (see Frank Saloman, “Indian Women of Colonial Quito as Seen through Their Testaments,” Americas 44, no. 3 [1988]: 325–41) and the vast literature surrounding poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, most discussions of women’s writing are about female religious autobiographies. See Franco, Plotting Women; Kathryn Joy McKnight, The Mystic of Tunja (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); Ronald Morgan, Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600–1810 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002); Kathleen A. Myers, “The Mystic Triad in Colonial Mexican Nuns’ Discourse: Divine Author, Visionary Scribe and Clerical Mediator,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 6, no. 4 (1997): 479–524; and Kathleen A. Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 5. McKnight, The Mystic of Tunja, 7. For a new and alternative interpretation positing that hagiography was produced in collaborative relationships between nuns and their confessors, see Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Bilinkoff ’s earlier studies of women in Avila, Spain, attempt to put the brakes on runaway interpretations of the compulsory nature of religious practice. Contending that recent studies have placed too heavy an emphasis on “coercive gendered power relations,” Bilinkoff pays attention to the relationship that puts confessor and penitent on more equal footing than earlier studies have allowed. 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. Diefendor and Carla Hesse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); and Jodi Bilinkoff, “The Many ‘Lives’ of Pedro de Ribadeneyra,” Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 1 (1999): 180–96. The latter is important as she argues that religious men also grappled with the issue of “obedience.” 6. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). The argument is summarized in Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 202–36. 7. Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment and the Docile Agent,” 203. 8. Ignatius of Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George E. Ganss (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991), 129.

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9. I refer to any and all who expect tearful and detailed revelations of transgressions when watching television talk shows. 10. AGN, Jesuitas II-25, Expediente (Exp.) 82. 11. Ibid., Exp. 172, Philipa de la Sanitisima Trinidad de Peña Flor to Márquez. 12. Ibid., Exp. 171, María Josepha Rodriguez (different from María Josepha of the Holy Trinity). 13. Darcy Donohue, “Writing Lives: Nuns and Confessors as Auto/Biographers in Early Modern Spain,” Journal of Hispanic Philology 13, no. 3 (1989): 238. 14. AGN Jesuitas II-25, Exp. 1, untitled and unsigned; however, the writing clearly belongs to María Josepha of the Holy Trinity. 15. Asuncion Lavrín, “La vida femenina como experiencia religiosa: Biografia y hagiografia en Hispanoamerica colonial,” Colonial Latin American Review 2, no. 1–2 (1993): 39. 16. See Myers, “The Mystic Triad,” 498–500; Jesuitas II-25, Exp. 1. 17. Jean Pierre Caussade, A Treatise on Prayer from the Heart: A Christian Mystical Tradition Recovered for All (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1998), 104. Caussade was director of the Spiritual Exercises at the retreat house in Nancy, France, and served as spiritual director to Visitation nuns in the same city. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 88, my emphasis. 20. Rebecca Lester, Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 18. 21. Luis de la Puente, Guía espiritual en que se trata de la oración, meditación y contemplación (1609), as quoted in Maria Dolores Bravo Arriaga, El discurso de la espiritualidad dirigida: Antonio Nunez de Miranda, Confesor de Sor Juana (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 2001, 245. 22. Sp.Ex., Section 185, G164–165/A274. 23. Caussade, Treatise on Prayer from the Heart, 127, my emphasis. 24. Tanya M. Luhrman, “The Ugly Goddess: Reflections on the Role of Violent Images in Religious Experience,” History of Religions 41, no. 2 (2001): 133–34. 25. Women’s reticence to write biographically was not limited to the early modern period. For example, in her study of Caroline Angebert’s correspondence with psychologist Victor Cousin, Jan Goldstein noticed in Angebert’s letters a reticence to reveal details about her life story. She suggests that “the absence from the letters of more detailed biographical information conveys Angebert’s desire to commune with Cousin as one disembodied intellect to another.” See Jan Goldstein, “Saying ‘I’: Victor Cousin, Caroline Angebert and the Politics of Selfhood in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics and the Psyche, ed. Michael S. Roth (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 325. 26. AGN Jesuitas II-25, Exp. 13, Letter B. 27. Ibid., Exp. 75, Letter A. 28. Steve J. Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 99. 29. Lavrín, “La vida femenina como experiencia religiosa,” 30.

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30. AGN Jesuitas II-25, Exp. 201, Letter B. 31. Ibid., Exp. 201, Letter D. 32. Phyllis Mack, “Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency: Reflections on Eighteenth-Century Quakerism,” Signs 29, no. 1 (2003): 153–54. 33. Lavrín, “Espiritualidad en el claustro,” 162. 34. Ibid. 35. AGN Jesuitas II-25, Exp. 201, Letter C. 36. Ibid., Exp. 207, Letter H. 37. Are these love letters? As Rebecca Earle has demonstrated, a new emphasis on affectionate language in marriage emerged in eighteenth-century Latin American letter writing, with spouses referring to each other as hija (daughter) or hijo (son). Strikingly, eighteenth-century Mexico witnessed a staggering inflation in the use of the term corazón (heart). “References to hearts,” Earle states, “became almost obligatory in the eighteenth century.” Rebecca Earle, “Letters and Love in Colonial Spanish America,” Americas 62 (2005). Is this an instance of devotional language colonizing the language of love? 38. Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 45. 39. Peter Comestor, Sermo de libro vitae (Paris, ca. twelft h century), as quoted in ibid., 52. 40. Ibid., xx. 41. Ibid., 114. 42. The Doctrine of the Heart, quoted in ibid., 107. 43. Ibid., 60–61. 44. Ibid., 135. 45. Ibid., xix. 46. He modeled the bequest of his heart on the similar endowment made by St. Francis de Sales to his spiritual daughter, St. Jane Chantal. St. Francis de Sales was himself very influenced by the Jesuits, being a student and remaining a Jesuit “spiritual son” (i.e., he had Jesuit confessors). 47. Miruna Achim, “Mysteries of the Heart: The Gift of Bishop Fernandez de Santa Cruz to the Nuns of Santa Monica,” Colonial Latin American Review 14, no. 1 (2005): 87. 48. AGN Jesuitas II-25, Exp. 207, Letter H. 49. Ibid., Exp. 207, Letter G. Importantly, “language of the heart” was not gendered female. For example, a man named Fray Francisco wrote to Márquez and signed his letter, “Your humble son whose heart loves you.” See ibid., Exp. 60. 50. Ibid., Exp. 207, Letter C. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., Letter G. 53. Ibid., Letter H. 54. For body as site of enculturation in religious experience, see Amy Hollywood, “Inside Out: Beatrice of Nazareth and Her Hagiographer,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 78. 55. In the late sixteenth century, the Vatican issued a briefing recognizing the right of women in convents to choose their own confessors. Teresa of Avila had been a strong

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advocate of “learned men” as counselors; otherwise, “not being enlightened himself, he cannot enlighten others, even if he tries.” Quoted in Patricia Ranft , “A Key to Counter Reformation Women’s Activism: The Confessor-Spiritual Director,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 10, no. 2 (1994): 17. 56. AGN Jesuitas II-25, Exp. 167. 57. Ibid., Exp. 207, Letter G. 58. Ibid., Letter C. 59. Ibid., Exp. 19. 60. Ibid., Exp. 207, Letter H. 61. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase and edited by Arnold Davidson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995): 210–11. 62. James Fernandez, Apology to Apostrophe: Autobiography and the Rhetoric of SelfRepresentation in Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 29. 63. Jager, The Book of the Heart, xix. 64. Jon L. Seydl, “The Sacred Heart of Jesus: Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Italy” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2003), 394. He dates the print to the 1750s. 65. Pre-Colombian Aztec heart iconography was not anatomically correct. There has been some discussion about whether pre-Colombian heart sacrifice played a significant role in the widespread popularity of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Kilroy ably demonstrates that heart sacrifice was a sixteenth-century postconquest Spanish obsession. In Aztec visual culture, heart iconography did not refer to sacrificial practices; the one exception is the Borgia codex. Kilroy, 2009 74–82. 66. Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, 3rd ed., trans. William Young (St. Louis, MO: Insitute of Jesuit Sources, 1986 [1964]): 398. 67. Seydl, “The Sacred Heart of Jesus,” 58. 68. The Mass and the “Oficio de Corazón de Jesús” was limited to Poland, to the Order of the Visitation, and to the Archconfraternity of the Sacred Heart in Rome. James M. Hayes, John W. Padberg, and John M. Staudenmaier, Symbols, Devotions and Jesuits, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits (St. Louis, MO: Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality, 1987), 19. 69. On the mobility of a similarly sized Italian painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus by Batoni, see Seydl, “The Sacred Heart of Jesus,” 64–68. On procurement of art from Europe for New Spain, see Luisa Elena Alcalá, “The Jesuits and the Visual Arts in New Spain, 1670–1767” (PhD diss., New York University, 1998). On the Jesuit procurator as a key figure in the global Jesuit network, see J. Gabriel Martínez-Serna, “Procurators and the Making of the Jesuits’ Atlantic Network,” in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 70. Jesuits smuggled small copper plate paintings into Japan after they were exiled. Grace Vlam, “The Portrait of Francis Xavier in Kobe,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 42 (2008): 48–60. 71. Clara Bargellini, “Painting on Copper in Spanish America,” in Copper as Canvas: Two Centuries of Masterpiece Paintings on Copper, 1575–1775, ed. Phoenix Art Museum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 35.

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72. Ibid., 41. 73. The first book on anatomy published in New Spain (1685) was by Don Diego de Osorio y Peralta. He wrote the scholarly parts of the book in Latin, but wrote parts in Spanish for surgeons who were not Latinists. Maria Luisa Rodriguez-Sala, “Diego Osorio de Peralta, hombre del barroco, autor del primer libro novohispano de anatomia como texto docente,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 16 (1996): 72. He wrote in Spanish about the “infirmity of St. Lazarus,” a reference that blurred the categories of medicine and religion, for Christ was a healer and called upon his disciples to heal the sick. 74. Juan Antonio Mora was born in Puebla de los Angeles in 1666. Two of his brothers were also Jesuits. Another died shortly after entering the novitiate at Tepotzotlán. Juan Antonio translated the book while he was assigned as rector of the Colegio de San Andrés in Mexico City, the Jesuit college that later became a Casa de Ejercicios for laypersons. 75. Juan Antonio de Mora, Devoto culto que debe dar el Christiano a el sagrado corazón de Christo Dios y hombre. Sacado de el libro que de este argumento escribió en Roma y dedicó a nuestro muy santo P. Benedicto Décimo tercio el R.P. Joseph Gallifet de la Compañía de JESÚS, Assistente de las Provincias de Francia (Mexico City: Joseph Bernardo de Hogal, 1732). 76. Gallifet was a student of Claudio La Colombiere, who was a spiritual director to Alacoque shortly after her revelations. While at Lyon, Colombiere inspired the novice Gallifet as well as Croiset, his fellow novice who was also a spiritual advisor to Alacoque. Croiset’s publication La dévotion au Sacré Coeur de Notre Seigneur Jesus-Christ (1689, 1691, 1694) was suppressed in 1704 among doubts about this “new” devotion; later to be removed from the Index in 1710. See “Corazón de Jesús” in Charles M. O’Neill and Joaquin M. Dominguez, Diccionario histórico de la Compañia de Jesús: biográfico-temático (Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas), 944–48. 77. “Gallifet,” in ibid., 1560. 78. Ana Isabel Pérez Gavilán, “El corazón expuesto: Del Sagrado Corazón al corazón en Jesús” (paper presented at the V Seminario de emblemática Filipo Picinelli, 2004). 79. Martha Mel Edmunds, “French Sources for Pompeo Batoni’s ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus’ in the Jesuit Church in Rome,” Burlington Magazine 149 (2007): 785. The images were dropped from later editions and translations. 80. Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart (Berkeley: University of California, 2000), 16, 26. 81. Gallifet (1743) noted 700 confraternities in all parts of the world. “Corazón de Jesus,” in O’Neill and Dominguez, Diccionario histórico. 82. Práctica y modo de prepararse a celebrar el Sacro-Santo Corazón de Jesus el viernes despues de la Octava de Corpus Christi; Dirigada a las Señoras Religiosas y Almas devotas que desean exercitar con fervor esta tiernissima devoción. Por un sacerdote devoto del mismo Sacro-Santo Corazón. 1749. 83. Novena proprissima del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. En ella se promueve el fín principalismo de Dios nuestro Señor revelo a M. Margarita Alacoque esta tiernissima devoción. Lleva añido un devote exercicio para el primer Viernes del mes y otra para los tres días de Carnestolendas. Por un padre de la Compañía de Jesús. Reimpressa en México, en la Imprenta de Biblioteca Mexicana, 1757. This novena follows the “Languer” thread, as the inside page quotes M. M. Alacoque from Languer’s Historia. He uses her words to refer to

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“this Sacred Image” which, given that the image is Mora’s, is different from the image that M. M. Alacoque drew. 84. Devoción al Sagrado Corazón de Jesús en el SSmo Sacramento, Sacada de los Libros septimo y dezimo de su Historia, en la vida de la VM Margarita Maria Religiosa de la Visitación de Santa Maria del Monasterrio de Paray. Escrita en Frances por el illustrissimo Senor Don Juan Joseph Languer, Obispo de Soiffons de la Academia Francesa. Traducida en nuestra idioma por el padre Juan de Loyola de la Sagrada Compañía de Jesus. Emprenta en Salamanca, Antonio Joseph Villargordo, 1738. Y por su original en Puebla, por la Viuda de Miguel Ortega, año de 1745. 85. Día feliz en obsequio del amoroso Corazón de Jesus sacramentado, que dedica principalmente a las Señoras religiosas de la Puebla de los Angeles quien desea servirles con todos sus afectos. Reimpressa en la Puebla por la viuda de Miguel de Ortega. Año de 1752. 86. Estaciones del via crucis en que el devoto Corazon del Christiano debe acompañar al corazón crucificado de Jesús: conforme instituyo la V.M. Maria de la Antigua. Dispuestas por un religioso de N. Serafico P. San Francisco. En estas se guarden el mismo orden que en las otras del Calvario. Reimpressas en México por la viuda de D. Joseph de hogal, año de 1747. 87. Práctica y modo de prepararse a celebrar el Sacro-Santo Corazón de Jesus. 88. See Amy Hollywood’s discussion of Angela Foligno, in Amy Hollywood, “That Glorious Slit,” in Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Harvey and Theresa Krier (New York: Routledge, 2004), 107. 89. Jeff rey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 90. This Italian Carmelite was canonized in 1669 and painted by Correa in the late 1600s. Arte y mistica del barroco: Colegio de San Ildefonso, marzo–junio, 1994 (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994), 288–90. 91. Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1975), 156. 92. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, ed. Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). 93. Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 141. 94. Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli, Noticias memorables de los Exercicios Espirituales de San Ignacio de Loyola . . . traducidas de Italiano en Espanol (Salamanca: Eugenio Garcia de Honorato y S. Miguel, 1731), 5. 95. Indeed, in natural philosophy as early as the sixteenth century, as noted in Chapter 2, signs of the soul’s movement was intended to have effects that could be discerned in the body as part of physics, and it became particularly “canonical” after the Lateran Council of 1513 when Pope Leo X decreed that natural phi losophers should find proof of the soul’s immortality using natural reason. 96. Hollywood, “That Glorious Slit,” 121. 97. As quoted in Edmunds, “French Sources for Pompeo Batoni’s ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus,’ ” 787. 98. Mindy Nancarrow Taggard, “Luisa Roldan’s ‘Jesus of Nazareth’: The Artist as Spiritual Medium,” Woman’s Art Journal 19, no. 1 (1998): 9.

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99. Mora, Devoto culto, 23. 100. Mora referenced Chapter 3 of S. Bernard’s Treatise on the Passion, when Bernard contemplated Christ’s side wound. 101. Mora, Devoto culto, 37, my emphasis. 102. Mora referenced Book 3 of her Life, Chapters 25 and 28. He set up the occasion of this par ticu lar mystical experience as occurring when she was having problems with prayer, “unable to pray with fervor” due to “some thoughts like those that are part and parcel of our human frailty.” Ibid., 38. When Jesus asked her to look at his heart, he called it “the organ of the Holy Trinity.” Ibid., 39. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 105. “El amante Corazon de mi JESUS, que es mi camino, verdad y vida!” 106. Mora, Devoto culto, 40. 107. Ibid., 38. 108. The emphasis on the risen Christ was unique to the Jesuits and, as Clara Bargellini’s scholarship on the art of Jesuit frontier missions demonstrates, the resurrection was “a very frequent subject at the mission churches, which is a point to be further explored, since this is not the case in the parish churches of [New] Spanish towns.” Bargellini, “Painting on Copper in Spanish America,” 117. “At the Center on the Frontier: the Jesuit Tarahumara Missions of New Spain.” 109. For the definitive study on Nadal and the Jesuit notion of “composition of place,” see Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Ignace de Loyola: Le lieu de l’image (Paris: VRIN; EHESS, 1992). 110. Jerome Nadal, The Illustrated Spiritual Exercises (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2001), 134. But see also a fifteenth-century example, Vecchietta’s Resurrection, a bronze that depicts Christ’s body surrounded by angels. 111. Henrik von Achen, “Human heart and Sacred Heart: reining in religious individualism. The heart figure in 17 th century devotional piety and the emergence of the cult of the Sacred Heart,” Categories of Sacredness in Europe, 1500–1800 (ed. Arne B. Amundsen and Henning Laugerud, University of Oslo, 2003.” Von Achen makes an argument that the devotion was a tactical instrument of ecclesiastical control, but this really underplays the grassroots elements of the devotion. See, for instance, Chatellier’s discussion of the popularity of the Sacred Heart imagery among lay persons prior to and immediately after Alacoque’s visions. Louis Chatellier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500–c. 1800, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 120–23. CONCLUSION

1. Sp.Ex., Paragraph 22, G129/A164. 2. AGN, Instituciones Coloniales, Indiferente Virreinal, Caja 1069, Exp 047 (Arzobispos y Objispos Caja 1069). 3. AGN, Instituciones Coloniales, Indiferente Virreinal, Caja 2322, 1774. 4. Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 24.

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5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 29. 7. Ibid., 53. 8. Robert Orsi develops the notion of “abundant history” to allow historians to account for religious experience. “The question I want to pursue is how it is possible to study abundant events without translating them immediately into the safe categories of modernist historiography and without yielding to the understandable frustration and despair that there is no way to think outside the modernist historical categories.” Orsi, “Abundant History,” 14. My discussion below of Carruther’s concept of “re-membering” offers a way out of this dichotomy. 9. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 44. 10. Ibid., 40. 11. Here I am paraphrasing the language Chakrabarty uses to discuss khadi, the white suit that once signaled hopes for reform now, absent Gandhi, a symbol of political corruption. 12. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 13. Sebastian Izquierdo, Práctica de los exercicios espirituales de nuestro Padre S. Ignacio (Mexico City: La Imprenta de la Bibliotheca Mexicana, 1756), 5. 14. Carruthers, 80. 15. Voekel begins the substance of her investigation in 1767—the date the Jesuits were expelled from Latin America. Pamela Voekel, Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 16. Brian Larkin, The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 3. 17. Brian Larkin’s important study of late eighteenth-century devotional reforms characterizes baroque piety as “largely performative religious culture,” although he is careful to note that it was not “an empty” or “mechanical” practice. Ibid.; Brian R. Larkin, “Liturgy, Devotion and Religious Reform in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City,” Americas 60, no. 4 (2004): 494, 496. Voekel argues that earlier Catholic practices were external and communal. Voekel, Alone before God. In her study of Spanish confraternities, Maureen Flynn, “Baroque Piety and Spanish Confraternities,” in Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France and Spain, ed. Michael Maher and John Patrick Donnelly (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999), 245, has argued, “Form dominated content in Spanish piety during the baroque age as clearly as content dominated form in contemporary Protestantism,” an odd statement coming from Flynn, whose work on emotional “selfunderstanding” in early modern Spain clearly points to the interiorizing effects of spiritual self-scrutiny. Maureen Flynn, “Taming Anger’s Daughters: New Treatment for Emotional Problems in Renaissance Spain,” Renaissance Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1998): 864–86. 18. See Jeff rey Chipps-Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). This is a recent study of Jesuit art and architecture in early modern Germany that successfully marries baroque art with Jesuit spirituality.

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19. D. A. Brading, “Tridentine Catholicism and Enlightened Despotism in Bourbon Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies 15, no. 1 (1983): 19–20. Brading contrasts the “Enlightened” clerics of Bourbon Mexico with the enduring legacy of Franciscan missionary doctrine emphasizing spectacle as a primary means of teaching the “mysteries” of the Catholic faith. 20. So here we have another example of what Kenneth Mills said over a decade ago, that “stages” and “typological classifications encourage unidirectional and unvarying way[s] of thinking about not only religious change but colonial history in general.” Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 5. 21. Robert Fastiggi and José Pereira, The Mystical Theology of the Catholic Reformation: An Overview of Baroque Spirituality (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006), my emphasis. 22. Ibid., ix–x. 23. Ramón Kuri Camacho, El barroco jesuita novohispano, la forja de un México posible (Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 2011), 26. 24. Michael W. Maher, “How the Jesuits Used Their Congregations to Promote Frequent Communion,” in Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France and Spain, ed. John Patrick Donnelly and Michael W. Maher, 75–96 (St. Louis, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999). 25. Linda A. Curcio-Nagy, “Giants and Gypsies: Corpus Christi in Colonial Mexico City,” in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, ed. William H. Beezley and Cheryl English Martin (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994). Curcio-Nagy argues that Corpus Christi “served as a mirror of the society.” 26. See his chapter “Sacred Immanence” in Larkin, The Very Nature of God, 28–50. 27. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 26, his emphasis. 28. For an insightful critique of the way in which scholars of colonialism have written about Christianity, see Joel Robbins, “Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christianity: Belief, Time and the Anthropology of Christianity,” Current Anthropology 48, no. 1 (2008): 5–38. 29. Pierre Hadot, Jeannie Carlier, and Arnold Davidson, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, 2nd ed. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 59. 30. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, ed. Arnold Davidson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 127. See pp. 86–87 for descriptions of the very different spiritual exercises of the Stoics and the Epicureans. 31. Notions of “self” were quite different in Hellenistic thought and should not be conflated with the modern “I.” In contrast to a Cartesian or Augustinian self, the ancient self was comprehended more in terms of a “he” than an “I.” Arnold 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), 74. 32. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 83. 33. Ibid., 87.

254 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Notes Ibid., 139. Augustine, Confessions (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), book 7, XXI, 125. Ibid. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 131. Ibid., 139.

Bi bl io gr a ph y

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I n de x

absolution, 119, 122; withholding of, 116, 122–23 Acosta, José de, 150 Acquaviva, Claudio, 21, 37, 64, 71, 78–86, 93, 96–98, 100–101, 102 actant, 12, 14, 21 action, 12–15, 20–21, 71–73, 87–88; balance and tension with contemplation, 26–31, 57–59, 61, 94–95, 193–94; Jesuit orientation towards, 23, 45, 52, 66, 70–71, 75, 88–89, 92–103, 193–94, 197; passions and, 71–73; prayer as, 87–88. See also “contemplatives in action” Act of Contrition, 112–13, 154–55 affect theory, 9, 10, 12, 14, 206–7 agency, 12, 21, 92; women’s, 23, 57, 60, 66, 172, 176. See also actant Alacoque, Marguerite-Marie de, 51, 187–88 Almonacir, Diego de, 147 alterity, 6, 166 alumbrados, 28–29, 143–44, 147 Alvarez, Baltasar, 29 Annotations to the Exercises, 36 Appadurai, Arjun, 8 Areford, David, 192 art (paintings): baroque, 192, 204; inventory of (in retreat house), 198–99; naturalism in, 195; of purgatory, 114; Páez, José de, 185–86, 189, 191, 194–95; of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, 185–86; Santa Maria Magdalena de Pazzi,

189; Santa María Maggiore, 102; Virgin of Modesty, 109. See also composition of place Asad, Talal, 172 asceticism, 16, 31, 41, 45, 144, 204. See also mortification Augustine, 31, 67–68, 70, 75, 86, 91, 203, 208, 224n5 autobiography, 2, 172, 180, 184; of Ignatius of Loyola, 41, 68–69; women’s, 54, 171–73, 177. See also confession: general; narrative (of the sins) of one’s life; women: autobiographical letter writing Avellaneda, Diego de, 28 Bacon, Francis, 41 baroque, 18, 191, 202–5 Barthes, Roland, 43, 115 Bartoli, Daniello, 147 Behar, Ruth, 152, 206 Bennett, Jane, 12 Berlant, Lauren, 12–13 Bible, 25, 33–36, 46, 208 Bilinkoff, Jodi, 151 bodies in motion, 3, 9, 88 body/bodies, 3, 9–15, 19–20, 34, 43–44, 71–73, 78, 82, 85–88, 94, 97, 115, 122, 145, 195, 205–7, 209. See also bodies in motion; Cartesian dualism; embodied experience; embodiment; habit-body; perception; health, import of

271

272

Index

Borja, Francisco de, 28 Bouwsma, William, 85–86 Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke, 69 Brading, David, 203 Brown, Peter, 208 Buonaventuri, Sor Maria, 61–62, 64–65 Bynum, Caroline, 11, 44, 65–66 Calatayud, Pedro, 107, 116–24, 146 calidad. See status: social California, 109, 166 Calvanezi, Carlos, 160 Calvi, Domenico Maria, 186 Calvin(ism), 45, 203 Canada, 62, 188 Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, 6–7, 153 Cardona, Juana de, 57–58, 61, 65, 92 Carruthers, Mary, 8, 33–34, 40, 45, 47, 69, 199–200, 202, 204 Cartesian cogito, 7, 10, 14 Cartesian dualism, 3, 11–13, 43, 87, 205 Carthusian, Ludolph the, 46 Carvajal, Luisa de, 51 Casa de Araceli. See retreat houses: Casa de Araceli Cassian, 85 caste. See status: social Castro, Ildefonso de, 100 Caussade, Jean, 176–77 Certeau, Michel de, 18 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 200–201, 207 Chantal, Jeanne de, 189 chastity, 17, 37, 175 Chatterjee, Partha, 166 Christ: body of, 110, 191–92, 195, 205; feminine conceptualizations of, 82, 191; humanity of, 46, 186, 192; imitation of, 20, 26–27, 31, 41, 192; in Jesuit meditations, 41–42, 46–47, 113, 197; passion and death of, 26, 30–31, 34–35, 47, 90–91, 113, 185, 192, 204; resurrection of, 31, 35, 90–92, 103, 185, 192, 194; wounds of, 31, 61, 82, 189, 192. See also Sacred Heart of Jesus Cicero, 16, 85 Cistercians, 82, 94 Clairvaux, Bernard of, 82, 85, 94, 97, 193 Clossey, Luke, 71, 151 colleges of the Society of Jesus, 1, 28, 63–64, 85, 99, 101–3, 132–34, 160–61; Colegio de Espíritu Santo de la Compañía de Jesus, 134–35; Indians as students in, 142–43, 158,

161; as nodal points, 99–100, 103, 110, 160 (see also networks). See also San Andres; San Gregorio, church and college of colonial difference, 109, 151–52, 159–60, 165–67, 169 colonial racial/ethnic categorization. See race, colonial conceptions of Comacho, Ramón Kuri, 204 communion. See Eucharist composition of place, 8, 34, 90, 137, 194, 220n84. See also art (paintings) compunction, 69, 95, 143 confession, 2, 16–17, 32, 52–54, 68–69, 106–8, 110–12, 115, 143, 160, 181–82; auricular, 116–19; general, 48, 106, 112, 115–20, 120fig., 121–29, 136–37, 140, 143, 145–46, 153–56, 160, 174, 205, 234n58. See also absolution: withholding of conscience, examination(s) of, 24, 39, 48, 52, 116, 118–19, 120fig., 141 consciousness, 5, 10, 13, 15, 20, 38 consolation, 2, 21, 25, 30, 33–34, 38, 41, 51, 67–103, 104, 123, 126, 164, 169, 183, 197–98, 205 Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, 29, 32, 49, 54, 79 Contemplation to Attain Love, 52, 89, 90fig., 91, 194 “contemplatives in action,” 3, 9, 23, 33, 71, 88–89, 94, 100, 147, 204 conversion, 89, 94–96, 99, 102, 114–15, 117, 156–57, 165 Córdoba, Argentina, 131 Corpus Christi, 160, 189, 205 Correa, Juan, 189 Council at Trent. See Tridentine reforms Croiset, Jean, 139–41, 146, 149, 186, 198 Davi, Francisco, 142–45, 147–48 Davidson, Arnold, 17 Dávila, Gil Gonzales, 29 Decalogue, 39, 117–18 Deleuze, Gilles, 13, 72, 80 Derrida, Jacques, 168 Descartes, Rene, 7, 10 dev il. See Satan devotional guides, 131–32, 146, 161, 189, 195–96, 198. See also devotional guides for heart-centered spirituality; devotional guides for performing the Spiritual Exercises

Index devotional guides for heart-centered spirituality, 180, 188–90; Alma Victoriosa, 190, 190fig.; Devoción al Sagrado Corazón de Jesús en el SSmo Sacramento, 188; Día felíz en obsequio deo amoroso Corazón de Jesus Sacramentado, 189; Práctica y modo de prepararse a celebrar el Sacro-Santo Corazón de Jesus, 188 devotional guides for performing the Spiritual Exercises, 65, 91, 131–33, 137–40, 146–47, 176, 194–96, 198; Año Christiano (by Croiset ), 139, 146; La soledad Christiana (by Thomay), 137; Maná del Alma (by Segneri), 146; Modo práctica y facil de hacer confesión general (by Calatayud), 146; Practice of the Spiritual Exercises of Our Father S. Ignacio (by Iziquierdo), 137; The Religious Woman in Solitude (by Pinamonte), 65; Retiro spiritual para un día de cada mes (by Croiset ), 139; Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Accommodated to the State and Profession of Religious Women (by Nuñez de Miranda), 65; Spiritual Guide (by Molinos), 147. See also Notizie Memorabili; practice of the Spiritual Exercises discernment. See spiritual discernment disembodiment, 3, 7, 20, 28, 156–57 Divine Office, 27–28, 32 Dominicans, 27, 31–32, 58, 64–65. See also mendicant orders Donohue, Darcy, 175 Durán, Diego, 150 Durkheim, Emile, 104, 206 Eires, Carlos, 168 embodied experience, 20–21, 24, 39, 42, 44, 88, 115. See also senses and sensory experience embodiment, 3, 7–15, 19–21, 31, 38–39, 45, 66, 73–75, 82, 105, 110–11, 115, 129, 203–7, 209; of sin as pain, 123, 127–28. See also body/ bodies; disembodiment emotion, 34, 41–42, 88–89, 107, 114, 138, 204. See also emotive models; passions emotive models, 73–75; Mary as, 90–91 emplotment, 118–19, 121 Endean, Philip, 34–35, 91 Enlightenment, 191, 202–3 Estrada, Diego de, 142 ethnicity. See race, colonial conceptions of

273

Eucharist, 52, 56–57, 110–11, 120–22, 128, 136, 139, 141–43, 148, 154, 158–59, 166, 169, 182–83, 186–87, 203–5 evangelism, 49, 72–73, 68, 104–30, 132; Evangelización del Japón (play), 153. See also missions, itinerant examination(s) of conscience. See conscience, examination(s) of Exarch, Sebastiana, 56–58, 65 exemplo of the Princess of England, 123, 125, 235n83 exterior(ity), 75, 98, 147, 159, 182, 202. See also interior(ity) Fastiggi, Robert, 204 fasting, 41, 144. See also food feast days, 28, 159–60, 186 Fernandez, James, 184 Fernandez, Martín, 100 Figueroa, Francisco de, 142 Florencia, Francisco, 108 Foligno, Angela of, 26, 45 food, 41–44, 136, 145, 157. See also fasting Foronda, Juan Ortiz de, 163 Foucault, Michel, 14, 16–18, 22, 206 Fourth Lateran Council, 116, 160 France, 62–63, 132–33, 188 Francheville, Catherine de, 62–65, 132 Franciscans, 27–28, 30–32, 56, 58, 144, 189. See also mendicant orders Fulton, Rachel, 26, 90 Gaceta de México, 134–35 Gallifet, Joseph, 186–89, 191 Ganss, George, 160 Gay, Peter, 16 gender. See obedience: gendered aspects of; women Giard, Luce, 4 globalization, 4–6, 8–9, 15, 18–19, 25, 50, 109, 165, 205 global nature and orientation of Jesuit missions, 1, 5–6, 29–30, 62, 97–100, 160, 188 Goa Province, 97–100 God: knowledge of, 26, 68–69, 88, 93, 176–77; knowledge/discovery of God’s will, 24, 36, 38–39, 65, 77, 80–81, 86, 172, 184, 197; unity with, 29, 45, 68, 75–76, 146, 151, 160, 164, 189, 198 Gomes, Antonio, 94 González, Tirso, 64, 147–48, 187

274

Index

governance, 78–83, 99–101; Acquaviva on, 100–101; link with consolation, 100, 148; of oneself, 41, 99, 166. See also Foucault, Michel; Scott, David; self: techniques of; Valignano, Alessandro governmentality. See governance Greenblatt, Stephen, 121 Gregory, St., 27, 81–82, 85, 92, 95 Gruzinski, Serge, 169 habit-body, 14, 19, 43–44, 115 habitus, 38 Hadot, Pierre, 25–26, 183, 207–9 hagiography, 73, 172, 179 Hail Mary. See prayer: Hail Mary Harkness, Deborah, 21 Harris, Steven, 103 Harvey, William, 195 health, import of, 98, 145. See also medicine, spiritual heart, 23, 184, 186, 188–89, 192, 194–95 heart-centered spirituality, 23, 179–81, 184–95. See also compunction; devotional guides for heart-centered spirituality; Sacred Heart of Jesus Hollywood, Amy, 191 Huby, Vincent, 62, 64, 132–33 humanism, 85–86 humility, 67, 81, 94–97, 175–77 iconography, 47, 102, 109, 113–14, 119, 194–95; of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, 23, 184, 186, 188–89, 192, 194–95. See also material culture; Sacred Heart of Jesus identity, corporate: of Indians, 166; of the Society of Jesus, 9, 26, 28, 32, 69, 78, 87, 101 imagination, 5–6, 8–9, 15, 20, 33, 35, 41, 44–47, 56, 58, 62, 69, 103, 177 imitation of Christ. See Christ: imitation of India, 97–100 Indians, 22, 100, 125–27, 150–70, 203; colonial defi nitions of, 22, 100, 152, 165–69; women, 161 “Indies,” 6, 25–26, 56, 58, 68, 71, 73, 99–101, 109, 124, 151, 162–63, 165, 192, 197; “distant lands [that] had wounded my heart,” 96; obedience and humility required in, 97 indigenous peoples. See Indians indulgence, 106, 112, 188 Industriae pro Superioribus Societatis Jesu as curandos animae morbos, 21, 78–86,

96, 98–101, 103. See also practice of the Spiritual Exercises: guides for administering Inquisition, 22, 28, 119, 131, 142–48, 198 Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 51 Institutes (foundational documents of the Society of Jesus), 79, 100 Instructions for giving the Spiritual Exercises (1599 publication), 55, 92 intention(ality), 12, 19, 34, 209 interior(ity), 2, 20, 26, 45, 70, 75, 96, 98–99, 105, 111, 128–29, 159, 202–3. See also exterior(ity); interior movement of the soul interior movement of the soul, 1, 32, 71, 138 intersubjectivity, 3, 15, 72–73, 78, 80, 86, 111, 127, 133, 171, 197 Iparraguirre, Ignacio, 63–64, 133 itinerant missions. See missions, itinerant Izquierdo, Sebastián, 137–39, 201–2 Jager, Eric, 180 James, Susan, 72–73 Jay, Martin, 11 Jerusalem, 49 Jesus. See Christ Jonas, Raymond, 188 Josepha, Sor María, 173–80, 182, 184, 189 Kempis, Thomas à, 26, 141 Kieckhefer, Richard, 73 La Cruz, Juana Ines de, 179 laity, 2–3, 5, 8, 21–22, 26–28, 31–32, 34, 37, 40, 45, 56, 61–62, 64, 103, 105–6, 110, 114, 132–35, 143–46, 148, 180, 209 Lanciloto, Nicolao, 76 Langenfeld, Friedrich Spee von, 96 language, indigenous, use of by Jesuit missionaries, 99, 152; Nahuatl, 101–2, 154, 156, 161; Otomí, 101–2, 125 Languer, Jean Joseph, 188–89 La Palma, Luís de, 132–33 La Puente, Luís de, 176 Larkin, Brian, 202, 205 Latour, Bruno, 201 Lavrín, Asuncion, 171 Lazarists (Order of the Missions), 63 Leclerq, Jean, 95 Lederer, David, 78 Lester, Rebecca, 176 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 18

Index Life of Christ (work by Ludolph the Carthusian), 46 l’Incarnacion, Marie de, 51, 194 Lomnitz, Claudio, 5 Lord’s Prayer. See prayer: Our Father Loreto, Holy House of, 113, 165, 223n48; Our Lady of (see Mary: Our Lady of Loreto) love: as inflaming passions, 74, 89, 93, 179, 194; Augustinian, 80, 86, 208; between confessor and penitent, 181; of Christ, 90–92, 140; of God, 26, 58, 60, 70, 80, 86, 160; God’s, 31, 34, 60, 74, 86, 92, 189, 194; maternal, 57, 82, 85; paternal, 82; role in action, 92, 94–95, 194–95 (see also “contemplatives in action”); role in heart-centered spirituality, 89, 194–95; of self, 80, 92, 175–76; spiritual director as conduit of God’s love, 81–83. See also Contemplation to Attain Love Loyola, Ignatius of, 1–2, 26–31, 33, 41, 49, 54–55, 68–70, 185fig., 203, 211n2; attitudes towards moderation, 41, 44, 91, 145 (see also moderation); attitudes towards women, 50–51, 53–61, 198; scruples, 68–69. See also autobiography: of Ignatius of Loyola; women: correspondences with Ignatius of Loyola Loyola, Juan de, 188–89 Luhrmann, Tanya, 177 Luther(anism), 22, 28, 143, 203 MacCormack, Sabine, 152 Maestre Pie, 51 Mahmood, Saba, 172 Márquez, Augustín Antonio, 135, 171–74, 178–84 Martín, Melquiades Andés, 28, 30 martyr(dom), 5, 9, 22, 51, 163–64, 167, 169 Mary, 35, 55, 90–91, 127; Our Lady of Guadalupe, 108–9, 126; Our Lady of Loreto, 113–14, 160, 169; Our Lady of Sorrows, 113, 119 material culture, 113–14, 153, 166, 186, 195–96, 198–99. See also iconography McKnight, Kathryn, 172 medicine, spiritual, 12, 21, 75, 78–87, 97–98, 111, 122, 138, 227n67. See also health, import of meditation, 8, 13–15, 31, 33, 36, 38–41, 45, 52, 58, 63, 87, 92, 98, 132–33, 136–40, 147, 176–77, 195, 201, 208–9. See also prayer Meditation on the Two Standards, 35, 48, 92, 153 Melvin, Karen, 204

275

memory, 7, 33–34, 38, 45, 117, 180, 199–202; role of in Jesuit meditation, 8, 15, 33–34, 40–42, 44–47, 69, 105, 117, 173–74 mendicant orders, 27–30, 32, 144, 167. See also Dominicans; Franciscans mental prayer. See prayer: mental Mercedarians, 30–31 Mercurian, Everard, 28, 36–37, 97 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 14–16, 18–20, 129, 207, 236n108 Mexican Council, 166–67 Mexico City. See under New Spain Michael, Emily, 78 Middle Ages, 7, 26–27, 40 Midelfort, Eric, 12 Miller, Jonathan, 195 Minas de Sultepeque, 113, 154, 157 mind, 12, 45, 75, 87, 105, 175 mind-body dualism. See Cartesian dualism Miranda, Antonio Nuñez de, 65 Mirón, Diego, 56–57 missionary desire for travel & remoteness, 3, 13, 22, 30, 48–51, 54, 58, 68, 76, 89, 95–96, 110, 163–65, 169–70; rural missions, 6, 63, 132, 162, 169. See also “contemplatives in action”; Indies missions, itinerant, 22, 63, 105–7, 110–14, 116–17, 128–29, 132, 164, 232n32 mobility, 5, 23, 30, 71, 167, 186, 205; importance of for Jesuits, 4, 22, 50, 95–96, 103, 110, 232n32 moderation, 41–44, 91, 98, 136, 145 modernity, 7–8, 16–17, 200–202, 206 Molinos, Miguel de, 144, 147 monasticism, 7–8, 16, 20, 26–27, 30, 33, 40, 43, 45, 85, 94–95; monastic metaphors (“labor” and “fruit”), 78, 94–95 Mora, Juan Antonio, 186–89, 192–94 mortification, 29, 44, 113, 134, 144–45, 148. See also asceticism motility, 19, 115, 129, 209 mysticism, 28, 189, 195. See also alumbrados Nadal, Jerónimo, 3, 25, 28–30, 33, 53, 60, 70, 91, 194 Nahuatl. See under language, indigenous, use of by Jesuit missionaries narrative (of the sins) of one’s life, 2, 47–48, 93, 118–19, 121, 126, 128, 173–74, 177, 209. See also confession: general; emplotment; self: narrative sense of

276

Index

naturales. See Indians: colonial defi nitions of neo-Galensim, 85–86, 97. See also medicine, spiritual neo-Platonism, 86, 208 neo-Stoicism, 85–86 networks, 8, 37, 62; exchange of information, 9, 37, 104, 196; letter exchange as, 109–10. See also colleges of the Society of Jesus: as nodal points Newman, Martha, 94 New Spain: Mexico City, 5, 22, 101, 107, 109–10, 135, 142, 167, 198 (see also Zappa, Juan Bautista); Puebla de Los Angeles, 101, 131, 134, 163; Tepotzotlán, 101 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 111–12, 129 Nightingale, Andrea, 68 Notizie Memorabili, 64, 71, 73–76, 78 nuns. See under women Nussbaum, Martha, 85 obedience, 23, 54, 56, 61, 97, 103, 138, 148, 172, 176, 179, 184, 198, 205; gendered dynamics of, 60, 65–66, 171–72, 178–79, 181, 184, 197; Jesuit obedience to superiors, 79–81; letter writing as, 94; monastic roots of, 94–95 Official directory of 1599, 32, 37, 97. See also practice of the Spiritual Exercises: guides for administering O’Hara, Matthew, 160, 167 Oliva, Giovanni-Paolo, 63–64, 147 O’Malley, John, 1, 106 “other,” 5, 7, 9, 16, 31, 50, 62, 68, 71, 77, 86–88, 167, 176–77, 179, 197. See also colonial difference; self Otomí. See under language, indigenous, use of by Jesuit missionaries Ottolini, Domenico, 147 Oviedo, Antonio de, 135 Padilla, Francisco Diego de, 144 Páez, José de, 185–86, 189, 191, 194–95 pain, 91, 126, 143, 179; sin embodied as pain, 123, 127–28 Palacios, Juan de, 148 Pallovicino, Jacoba, 59 passions, 13, 20–21, 71, 73, 77, 81, 85, 89, 93; and action, 71–73; animating, 61, 75, 89, 194; control of and overcoming, 4, 9, 29, 38, 58–59, 61, 72–73, 75, 86, 89, 98, 111, 119, 138, 194, 209; effect of climate on, 4–5, 97–99; and virtue, 75. See also emotion

Paul, Vincent de, 63, 133 Paz, Diego Alvarez de, 29 penitence/penance, 17, 61, 105–6, 110–11, 114, 117, 128, 138, 144 ; joy in place of, 91. See also confession; conscience, examination(s) of perception, 8, 10–11, 14–15, 75, 111, 129 Pereira, José, 204 Perez, Ventura, 181–82 personhood, 11–12, 97 phenomenology, 10, 14–15, 115, 206–7 philosophy, 3, 14, 16, 22, 25, 208; ancient, 4, 85, 203, 207–8; Hellenistic, 8, 16, 85–86; moral, 12, 72, 82, 194, 207; natural, 12, 72, 78, 82, 84, 88, 194–95, “philosophy as a way of life,” 207–9. See also Cicero; Deleuze, Gilles; Hadot, Pierre; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice; phenomenology; Spinoza, Baruch Pinamonti, Giovanni Pietro, 65 Poggi, Padre, 108 Polanco, Juan Alfonso de, 28, 43 postcolonial studies, 5–6, 166, 205–6; “colonization of consciousness,” 206 practice of the Spiritual Exercises: adaptability to individual needs, 21, 24, 35–38, 41, 52, 81, 105, 133, 141, 198; first week of, 33–35, 43, 46–48, 52, 56, 75, 89, 117, 204; fourth week of, 31, 35, 89–93, 145, 194, 204; full (30 day) version, 33, 51, 132; guides for administering, 21, 37, 79, 92, 107, 116, 146 (see also Industriae pro Superioribus Societatis Jesu as curandos animae morbos; Notizie Memorabili; Official directory of 1599); popularity of, 20, 36, 46, 64, 133–34; second week of, 34, 177; self-administered, 22, 132–33, 139–42, 146, 149; shortened (8–12 day) versions, 33, 62, 64, 102, 134–39, 141; third week of, 33, 35. See also confession: general; narrative (of the sins) of one’s life; retreat; women: practice of the Spiritual Exercises prayer, 1, 13–15, 24, 28–29, 33–34, 39–40, 56, 58, 70, 73, 87, 147; as action, 87–88; Hail Mary, 39; as medicine, 84; mental, 24, 28, 137–38, 142–44, 159–60, 168, 204–6; Our Father, 39–40, 47; posture during, 40; Rosary, 32, 102, 112, 136; vocal, 24, 137–38. See also meditation processions, 106, 112–14, 154, 159 prosoche, 25, 209. See also self: techniques of Protestant Ethic, 7, 45 Protestantism, 7, 45, 206. See also Luther(anism); Calvin(ism)

Index psychology. See therapeutics Purgatory, 107, 188 Quinzani, Stefana, 58 Rabinow, Paul, 16 race, colonial conceptions of, 22, 96, 100, 152, 165–69 Rahner, Hugo, 51, 53, 61 Rapley, Elizabeth, 27 rationality. See reason reason, 4, 7, 9, 20, 38–39, 72, 75, 81, 88–89, 155, 194, 200, 203 recogimiento, 28–30, 132, 138, 140, 147 Rejedella, Teresa, 60–61, 65, 70 relationship between confessor and penitent, 57, 116, 118, 122, 174, 178, 180–82, 184 relationship between exercitant and spiritual director, 2, 9, 21, 77–78, 80–84, 103, 133, 197 relics, 70, 153 resistance: colonial, 154, 158, 166; women’s, 171–72, 178, 206 resurrection of Christ, 92, 189, 251n108; of the heart of Christ, 185, 192, 194 (see also heart-centered spirituality); role in action, 31, 90, 194; in the Spiritual Exercises, 31, 35, 91–92, 103, 194, 204 (see also practice of the Spiritual Exercises: fourth week of) retreat, 2–3, 32–33, 35, 37–38, 42, 51–52, 62, 65, 106, 132, 134–39, 141, 144, 171, 173, 197. See also practice of the Spiritual Exercises; retreat houses retreat houses, 3, 22, 44, 131–36, 142, 198; Casa de Araceli, 135–38, 171, 198; in Puebla, 134–36; at San Andres, 134–35, 198; for women, 62–64, 135 Ribas, Pérez de, 101–02 ritual(ization), 3, 20, 32, 43, 104, 105, 107, 110–12, 115, 128, 169, 184, 202, 205. See also confession; Divine Office; Eucharist; prayer; processions; Rosary; Via Crucis Roest, Bert, 27 Rosary, praying of. See prayer: Rosary Roser, Isabel, 54–57 Rosignoli, Carlo Gregorio, 61, 64, 69, 71, 73–76, 78, 191 Sacred Heart of Jesus, 23, 133, 184–95; anatomical depiction of, 23, 185, 185fig., 186–87, 187fig., 189–90, 190fig., 191, 194–95, 248n65. See also devotional guides for

277

heart-centered spirituality; heart-centered spirituality Sahagun, Bernardino, 150 Sales, Francis de, 176, 189 Salinas, Lopez de, 28 Salvatierra, Juan María de, 162–64, 166, 197 salvation, 49, 68, 71, 105, 111, 118, 130, 141, 143–44, 168–69, 173, 184, 192, 197–98; and globalization, 4–5, 9; ordering one’s life around, 24, 38; salvation narratives, 74 San Andres, 134–35, 171, 198–99 Sanchez, Manuel, 163 San Gabriel, Petra de, 179–84 San Gregorio, church and college of, 110, 143, 152, 158, 160–61, 165, 167, 169, 203 Santa Cruz, Fernandez de, 180 Satan, 30, 48, 57, 92, 112, 146, 151–57 Scott, David, 205 seclusion. See recogimiento self, 1–23, 31, 62, 87, 92, 105, 129–30, 172–73, 178, 184, 197–200, 204, 206–8, 253n31; control, 81, 97, 203; discovery, 17, 69, 122, 128; examination, 1, 25, 33, 41, 48, 51, 68, 71, 84, 86, 115, 117–19, 123, 128, 176, 194; formation, 2–3, 6, 8–10, 17, 21, 41, 86, 88, 104, 107, 121, 171, 173, 178, 181–84, 197, 202, 205–06; interiority of, 3, 104, 129; knowledge of, 3, 26, 37, 41, 50, 69, 75, 77–78, 80–83, 86, 88, 91–93, 96–97, 106, 129, 161, 176–77, 195, 197–98; narrative sense of, 8–9, 69, 117, 129, 158, 173, 197–98, 205; negation of, 21, 82, 103, 184, 197; objectification of, 2, 11, 14, 36, 43, 176, 179; in other, 32; scattered sense of, 68, 75, 87, 170; science of, 4, 37; sense of, 5, 18, 21, 32–33, 75, 111, 178, 197; sinless, 31; sinning, 5, 9, 12, 47, 60, 69, 80, 95, 173, 183; techniques of, 2–3, 5, 8–9, 14, 16–17, 22–23, 45, 85, 173, 184, 202, 206; transcending, 2–4, 7, 37, 173, 176, 178–79, 206; transformation and reform, 33, 58, 73, 81, 117, 128, 173, 198, 209; Western notion of, 3, 5, 7, 10, 200. See also other senses and sensory experience, 11–12, 15, 104, 113, 159, 206. See also embodied experience; perception; touch sexuality, 16–17 sin, 2, 12, 22, 33–35, 39, 44, 46, 47, 69, 75, 89, 91, 105, 117–18, 121–28; embodied as pain, 123, 127–28; shame of, 107, 121, 124–25, 128–29. See also narrative (of the sins) of one’s life; self: sinning

278

Index

Siraisi, Nancy, 83 Solorzano, Manual, 163 Somers, Margaret, 118 soul, 2–3, 5–6, 9, 12, 19, 29, 38, 41, 44, 49–50, 57, 70–72, 75, 78, 84–85, 94, 104, 110, 112, 119, 150, 152–53, 181, 188–89, 193. See also interior movement of the soul space, 14–15, 132, 202, 206 Spain, 6, 28, 30, 64, 133, 143 Spinoza, Baruch, 12–13, 21, 71–72, 87–89, 98, 206–7; conatus, 88; desire as mind-body striving, 93 spiritual consolation. See consolation spiritual director, 1–3, 12, 14, 21, 36–38, 47, 51–52, 57, 59, 75, 77–78, 80–81, 83–85, 87, 103, 116, 133, 138–39, 142, 211n3; self-negation of, 80–81. See also practice of the Spiritual Exercises; relationship between exercitant and spiritual director spiritual discernment, 9, 39, 75, 84, 88, 173, 175 Spiritual Exercises (as a book), 1–2; Hellenistic influence on, 20, 25, 44, 207–8; Life of Christ influence on, 46; monastic influence on, 20, 25, 33, 43–44, 203, 207–8. See also practice of the Spiritual Exercises Stations of the Cross. See Via Crucis status: social, 22, 42, 47, 55, 62–63, 105, 132, 141–43, 145–46, 148–49, 158, 161, 166–68, 198, 203, 242n38; spiritual: 73, 145–46, 149 Stern, Steve, 178 Stock, Brian, 48 Stroumsa, Guy, 86 subjectivity, 3–5, 7, 10, 14, 129, 200, 205 Ten Commandments. See Decalogue tertiary orders, 58 therapeutics, 9, 12, 21, 78–79, 83–86, 102, 227n67 Thomay, Ignacio, 137–38 Th ree Methods of Prayer, 39–40 time, 2, 14, 18, 38, 139, 197, 206 “to overcome oneself,” 1–2, 36, 72, 78, 174 Torres, Cosme de, 76 Torres, Miguel de, 29, 180 touch, 83, 113–14, 118, 126, 146, 192; talk as touch, 114–18, 227n70. See also senses and sensory experience Tridentine reforms, 45, 58, 61, 63, 106, 110, 142–43, 203

Ursulines, 51, 63, 193, 223n61 Valignano, Alessandro, 96–100 Vannes, France, 62–63 Venegas, Miguel, 108–9, 158, 160, 162–63, 166 Via Crucis, 32, 159, 189 Vidal, Fernando, 72 Villacreceans, 28 virginity. See chastity Virgin of Guadalupe. See Mary: Our Lady of Guadalupe virtue, 45, 61, 64, 73–74, 80, 83, 98, 141, 173–75; passion as, 74–75, 77. See also martyr(dom); mobility; obedience Vitelleschi, Mutio, 64 Vitoria, Alfonso de, 37, 42 Voekel, Pamela, 202 Ward, Mary, 51 Weber, Max, 7, 17, 45 Western intellectual & philosophical tradition, 3–5, 10, 86–87 women, 36, 40, 50–66, 113, 141–42, 144–46, 148, 161–62, 171–84, 193, 198, 206; admission into the Society of Jesus, 50–51, 53–54, 56–61, 66, 198; autobiographical letter writing, 173–84; correspondences with Ignatius of Loyola, 51, 53, 56–57, 60–61, 65, 70; fi nancial patronage from, 54–56, 59, 62; Indian women, 161; nuns, 22–23, 44, 53–54, 56, 60–61, 63–64, 134, 148, 171–76, 180–82, 187–88, 193; practice of the Spiritual Exercises, 21, 50–66, 145, 173–74; as spiritual “daughters,” 55–57, 65, 179, 180, 182; as spiritual “mothers,” 55–56, 198. See also agency: women’s; autobiography: women’s; obedience: gendered dynamics of; resistance: women’s; retreat houses: for women Xavier, Francis, 30, 76, 94–98, 114, 151, 153, 158, 167, 233n36, 234n52 Zappa, Juan Bautista (Giovanni Battista Zappa), 107–15, 119–21, 123–29, 131, 150–70, 197, 203, 234n52; correspondence with father, 109–10, 151–52, 158, 161–62, 164–65, 169; relaciónes, 151–52, 155, 157, 169 Zarri, Gabriella, 61, 73 Zûpanov, Ines, 93–94, 98