A Teacher
Ignatius of Loyola
Disciplined imagination and discernment of spirits
The transmission
Ignatius of Loyola (c. 1491-1556), born Inigo Lopez de Onaz y Loyola, was a Basque nobleman and soldier whose conversion during a long convalescence from a battle wound at Pamplona launched one of the most consequential spiritual projects of the Catholic Reformation.
While recovering, he read lives of Christ and the saints and began noticing how different daydreams left him either lastingly consoled or empty - the seed of his lifelong attention to the inner movements of the soul.
In 1540 he and a small group of companions received papal approval to form the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), of which he became the first Superior General, building it into a disciplined, globally mobile order devoted to education, mission, and spiritual direction.
His enduring contribution to the inner-power tradition is the Spiritual Exercises (published 1548), a manual of structured retreat practices refined over decades. Its method trains the practitioner to use the imagination deliberately - “composition of place,” in which one vividly pictures and enters a scene with all the senses - to engage the will and reshape the affections.
Alongside this, Ignatius developed his “discernment of spirits”: a practical psychology for reading the felt movements of consolation and desolation in order to recognize which inner promptings lead toward life and which away from it.
This disciplined, experiential approach to harnessing imagination and reading one’s own interior states makes him a striking premodern precursor to later techniques of guided visualization and self-observation.
What they gave
The Spiritual Exercises: Created a systematic, repeatable program of meditation and contemplation for transforming the will and affections over a structured retreat.
- Imaginative meditation: Developed “composition of place,” using vivid multisensory imagination to enter a scene and engage the whole person - a forerunner of guided visualization.
- Discernment of spirits: Articulated rules for reading consolation and desolation, an applied psychology of inner movements and decision-making.
- Founding the Jesuits: Built a disciplined, mobile order whose schools and missions carried his interior method across the world.
In their words
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my intellect, and all my will — all that I have and possess. Thou gavest it to me: to Thee, Lord, I return it! All is Thine, dispose of it according to all Thy will. Give me Thy love and grace, for this is enough for me.
Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.
For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created.
the first is that love ought to be put more in deeds than in words.
love consists in interchange between the two parties; that is to say in the lover’s giving and communicating to the beloved what he has or out of what he has or can; and so, on the contrary, the beloved to the lover.
I call it consolation when some interior movement in the soul is caused, through which the soul comes to be inflamed with love of its Creator and Lord; and when it can in consequence love no created thing on the face of the earth in itself, but in the Creator of them all.
Finally, I call consolation every increase of hope, faith and charity, and all interior joy which calls and attracts to heavenly things and to the salvation of one’s soul, quieting it and giving it peace in its Creator and Lord.
In time of desolation never to make a change; but to be firm and constant in the resolutions and determination in which one was the day preceding such desolation, or in the determination in which he was in the preceding consolation.
The line they stand in
Ignatius’s conversion reading shaped his whole method: the De Vita Christi (Life of Christ) of Ludolph of Saxony gave him the model of imaginatively entering Gospel scenes, the example of Francis of Assisi and Dominic spurred his resolve, and the devotional classic The Imitation of Christ (attributed to Thomas a Kempis) accompanied his interior life.
From this material he forged the Spiritual Exercises, which became the core formation of the Society of Jesus and, through it, of generations of retreatants and spiritual directors. The Ignatian tradition of imaginative prayer and discernment remains one of the most widely practiced contemplative methods in the world, and it left its mark on contemporaries such as Francis de Sales, whose own meditative method absorbed Ignatian elements through his Jesuit schooling.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- The Spiritual Exercises1548
- Autobiography (The Pilgrim's Testament)1555
- Constitutions of the Society of Jesus1559