FROM EXERCISES TO CONSTITUTIONS—A SPIRIT IN SEARCH OF A BODY

Joseph Veale, S.J.

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The Constitutions and the Exercises form a unity. That is not surprising, considering that both have their origin in the same experience.

The original experience is narrated in the document we sometimes call the ‘autobiography’. There the pilgrim simply names the series of graces that culminate in the illumination by the banks of the Cardoner2.

FIVE UNDERSTANDINGS

First, ‘his understanding began to be elevated so that he saw the Most Holy Trinity…’

Then ‘one time the manner in which God created the world was revealed to his understanding with great spiritual joy . . . ’ Third, ‘what he saw clearly with his understanding was how Jesus Christ our Lord was there in (the) most holy sacrament’.

Fourthly, ‘Often and for a long time, while at prayer, he saw with interior eyes the humanity of Christ’.

Finally, ‘as he was going out of his devotion to a church . . . called St Paul’s . . . the road ran next to the river. . . . he sat down for a little while with his face toward the river, which was running deep. While he was seated there, the eyes of his understanding began to be opened; . . . he understood and knew many things both spiritual things and matters of faith and of learning, and this with so great an enlightenment that everything seemed new to him’.

INCARNATION

The account of the series of five graces is not intended to be taken as chronological. What they tell us is that his mysticism is an experience of the Three Persons seen in relation to the world. And then, the sacramental reality of Christ in the Eucharist and the humanity of Christ.

The sequence is significant: the Three Persons: the created world; sacrament; the humanity of Jesus.

The trinitarian mysticism of St Ignatius is centred in incarnation. The Word is made flesh. Human and material reality now are seen to be sacramental. Spirit, from the beginning, it would seem, seeks to be given a body.

ALL THINGS SEEN NEW

St Ignatius tells us rather little about the fifth experience. He ‘did not see any vision’ but the eyes of his understanding began to be opened and he understood many things, both spiritual things and matters of faith and of learning. And everything, todas tas cocas, the whole of reality ‘seemed new to him’.

We learn something more of the new understanding he was given through what he confided to Laynez, Polanco and Nadal3. Jerome Nadal tells us,

‘The eyes of his understanding were opened by such a fullness and wealth of interior light that in that light he understood and contemplated the mysteries of faith and spiritual things and truths pertaining to natural enquiry

(quaeque ad scientias pertinent). The reality of all things seemed to be manifested to him and a wholly enlightened understanding.

‘Ignatius always set a high store by this gift and as a result of it conceived a profound modesty and humility; from it there began to shine in his countenance a certain spiritual joy and light.

‘Whenever questions were put to him on matters of importance or when something was to be determined regarding the character of the Company’s institute, he would refer to that grace and light, as though he had there seen the guiding principles and causes of all things (quasi rerum omnium ibi sine rationes sive causal vidisset)4.

He gave Nadal to know that the understanding in which the whole of reality looked new was for St Ignatius an insight into rationes et causal, the connections and relations of things; all things, human and divine, take on a shape, a pattern, and are moving toward an end.

The text is so familiar that it can escape us how strange it is that this mysticism should have given him to understand things ‘both spiritual things and matters of . . . learning’. In the one illumination he grasps together something of the things of earth as well as the things of heaven, a conjoining of the human and the divine.

A FOUNDATIONAL EXPERIENCE

Three very different kinds of documents, then, issue from the one experience. The autobiography, the Exercises and the Constitutions: they are three ways of communicating the same experience. They are ways in which an experience that is beyond words is attempted to be embodied in words. The putting into words is a kind of rudimentary incarnation of the communication of the Spirit.

The autobiography does not pretend to give us a complete account of a life. What St Ignatius agreed to do was to recount the way God had dealt with his soul. It is not a simple account of a sequence of happenings. It is experience reflected on, sifted and discerned; it is purposefully selected and shaped s.

Nadal saw the telling and recording of the story as foundationalb. The nature of the narrative and the circumstances of its telling allow us to say that St Ignatius saw it in that way too. When the telling of the story was under way, ‘Father Nadal . . . (was) very pleased that it was begun and bade me urge the Father, telling me many times that the Father could do nothing of greater benefit to the Company than this and that this was truly to found the Company. He himself spoke to the Father many times in this way’ 7. Almost it seems that Nadal, the trusted expounder of the Constitutions throughout the Company in Europe, is saying that the autobiography is of greater value than the Constitutions for the founding and the future well-being of the Company.

It is clear that St Ignatius himself always understood the experiences at Manresa to be foundational. It is Nadal who tells us that when in later years St Ignatius was asked why this or

that was in the Constitutions, he would reply. ‘The explanation will be found in something that happened to me at Manresa’s.

THE EXERCISES AND THE CARDONER

Laynez, Polanco and Nadal are agreed that the Exercises were the fruit of those graces and especially of the Cardoner illumination. They say this expressly of the factors that are peculiar to the Exercises: the meditations on the King and of Two Standards; the process of election, of discernment, of the meaning of the movements of the spirits and of the guidelines for discriminating between the spirits. It is Nadal who suggests the origin in Manresa of what we would tend to see as especially original in the Exercises, namely the shape, the sequence, the structure, that in some measure accounts for their power. It was expressed by Nadal in a striking phrase; he said that St Ignatius was moved by God in spiritu quodam sapientiae architectonico9. A version of that in English would go something like: He was given a kind of spirit of wisdom that was architectonic.

Architectonic? The primary sense comes from building, from architecture. It says something not about exterior ornament or outward shape but about an inner structure, an inner cohesion or coherence that gives proportion and unity to the parts. It is like the inner rhetoric that controls the order, sequence and coherence of an argument and that gives it its force.

We have to speak in metaphors. To capture something of that inner unity of the Exercises we tend nowadays to speak of their dynamic. That adds to the idea of an inner principle of unity the idea of movement. It suggests the image of a living organism whose life is not derived from itself, but whose factors and parts in their relationship and interaction make for movement and growth.

The Constitutions presuppose that we are familiar with the dynamic of the Exercises. The Constitutions continue and prolong that dynamic through the members who make up the body that is the Company.

COMPANIONS IN GRACE

The autobiography tells the story of St Ignatius’s pilgrim years from Manresa to Rome. The narrative ends virtually with his first entry into Rome together with the companions. The story of that experience is the story of a process by which their experience is translated into the Constitutions. Their spirit is given a body.

What united them was the love of God our Lord at work in them. [C. 671] The instrument by which that union was brought about was the Exercises. The Exercises can, of course, stand alone. But the Constitutions do not stand alone. At every point they presuppose the experience of making the Exercises. It can be said that without that experience the Constitutions are dead. It was the same experience the early companions had shared and by which ‘the most kind and loving Lord had united us to one another and brought us together’’.

The Exercises and the Constitutions are Ignatian in that they are not concerned to expound a doctrine; they avoid the abstract and look to concrete living and choice. Just as they both come from an experience, they both lead into an experience. To speak more properly, they both state the conditions in which a particular experience may be given by God.

Seminally it was St Ignatius’s mystical experience at Manresa; his subsequent pilgrim searching alone to discover God’s will as to the particular way of service the Manresa graces entailed; his constant reflection on experience leading to decision; his discovery that the Exercises could dispose others to be given the same kind of experience of God, the same spirit; the experience of companionship in grace in Paris, issuing in the vows of Montmartre; the desire of the friends to go to Jerusalem; the later months in Venice and the northern towns of serving in hospitals and street preaching in poverty; the weeks of fasting and praying together; the decision to go to Rome, to the pope, and then, as Paul III was about to scatter them, the deliberation together in 1539 and the election to form a body.

The decision to form a body was with a view to sharing their way of living with others who might be given the same grace. They expressly wished to pass on to later generations the particular experience they had shared with one another. (F.2; 0.53,82).

FROM INSTITUTE TO INSTITUTION

The only way to do that is to institutionalize. How, otherwise, can you communicate the original spirit? A charism

10. Deliberatio primorum patrum, ConsMHSJ 1, (MHSJ 63), p. 3. John C. Futtrell, Making an Apostolic Community of Love (St Louis, 1970) p. 189.

is not preserved unless it is contained in a body of law. Spirit needs to be incarnated, to be given a local habitation and a name.

‘We think that Constitutions should be written’ is there in the preamble to the Constitutions. [0.134] The Formula describes the manner of living that was the fruit of the spirit they had each been given.

‘They had become companions . . . performing . . . in whatsoever countries they journeyed and each one according to the grace granted him by the Holy Spirit, all the service of charity which pertain to the edification of souls.

‘Therefore our predecessor approved, confirmed and blessed their institute . . . that thus the bond of charity and unity might be preserved both among the companions themselves and among others who would desire to follow the same institute’. [F.2]

The bleak word ‘institute’ is a canonist’s term for what the companions preferred simply to speak of as ‘our way of proceeding’. The text tells us that the institute existed before

the writing of the Formula or of the Constitutions. The writing down is an attempt to put words on a way of living that had already given a body to the spirit.

The part of the Formula that we have just quoted gives us some sense of the way the companions regarded the institution. Because of the fruits of the spirit evident in their labouring for souls, the pope had blessed their way of life ‘ . . . that thus the bond of charity and unity might be preserved . . . ’

The object of the institution is to aid the bond of charity to be preserved. That is what the Formula says. You institutionalize in order to sustain love. The Constitutions are, if you like, a Contemplation for obtaining Love addressed to the whole body of the Company. They are the Contemplation prolonged, opening out into a way of living ‘filled with gratitude for all, in all fhings loving and serving the Divine Majesty’. [E.233]

The bond of love is from above, de arriba. That Ignatian word says what St Ignatius knew to be entirely given, not capable of being the object of human achievement or striving. It is something that is familiar at once to anyone who has been

schooled in the alternation of desolation and consolation in the Exercises ‘ . . . so that we may have an interior knowledge of the fact that it is not in our power to acquire and attain great devotion, intense love, tears, or any other spiritual consolation, but that all 4.s the gift and grace of God our Lord’. [E. 322]

‘THAT SAME LOVE WHICH WILL DESCEND’

The Company is experienced as taking its origin from that sovereignly free initiative of love:

‘The chief bond to cement the union of the members among themselves and with their head is the love of God -our- Lord. For when they are closely united to His Divine ‘and Supreme Goodness, they will very easily be united among themselves, through that same love which will descend from the Divine Goodness and spread to all other ‘nien and particularly into the body of the Company. Thus from both sides.charity will come and in general will come all‘’ goodness and virtues through which one proceeds in conformity with the spirit’. [C. 671]

The companionship and the mission are a participation in the love of the Three Persons, ‘as the rays of light descend from the sunand’as the waters flow from their fountains’. [E. 2371

At all important junctures of the Constitutions the same theme’recurs; the absolute primacy of the divine initiative and activity.’ ‘The Company was hot instituted by human means;

and -‘it is, not ‘through them that it can be preserved and developed, but through the omnipotent hand of Christ . . . ’ [C. 812] The vocation is experienced as being totally contemplative. It is ‘in making the Exercises that primacy and mastery of God’s grace has been tasted and known.