Ex Milite Sancto [From soldier to saint]

Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola

July 31, 2014

FROM SOLDIER TO SAINT – the life of St. Ignatius of Loyola marks the most impactful conversion in the history of the Church after that of St. Paul the Apostle and the Emperor Constantine. The Jesuit order that he founded went on to bring the Word of God to every corner of the world, fulfilling with evangelical zeal the commission of Christ to, “go therefore and make disciples of all nations”.

But whom God chooses to carry his message may sometimes be surprising. For the apostles, the choice of St. Paul was a consternation, as he had spent his life fervently persecuting Christians. Ignatius’s conversion may not have been such an 180-degree turn as St. Paul’s but it was significant that a man of such worldly ambition and deftness of sword should seek to dedicate his life so completely to God and the Church.

In his early life, Íñigo López de Loyola might be described as a typical youngest son in a big family: always desiring attention and more recognition. He luxuriated in the aristocratic life of the court of Castile, taking pleasure in fine clothing, enjoying the attention of the ladies, a little gambling, and participating in occasional thuggery against enemies of his family. All-in-all, not someone his peers would expect to take to the cloth.

But as they saying goes, “God moves in mysterious ways; His wonders to perform”. And a wonder was indeed performed when the 30-year-old Ignatius, now an officer in the Spanish army was spared death when he was hit by a cannon ball, which broke one of his legs and severely injured the other. Near-death experiences are often the catalyst for conversions, but not in the case of Ignatius. While undoubtedly brave in facing numerous operations on his broken leg, including the sawing-off of a protruding knob of bone without anaesthetic, he was far from grateful to God for still being possession of his life. He remarked that to have one leg longer than the other was a fate worse than death because he would no longer be able to wear his tight-fitting pants and because walking with a limp would make him unattractive to his many lady fans. His vanity nearly killed him as he sought to have his shorter leg stretched to its previous length.

It was only by chance that, while he recuperated, his request for some racy romance novels was met, instead, with a copy of De Vita Christi (The Life of Christ) by monk-cum-theologian Ludolph of Saxony. Bored out of his wits, Ignatius began reading the book and so began his page-by-page conversion. One of the most notable points about this conversion is how he felt a sense of calm and fulfilment when reading about the life of Christ and the saints. This sense of peace and satisfaction was in direct contrast to the restlessness and anxiety he felt when pondering his own convoluted life. Eventually he began to be more and more drawn to the peace that only Christ can give and began a journey of spiritual discernment that would lead to his great work, the Spiritual Exercises.

It should be encouraging for us all to see how the conversion of St. Ignatius unfolded, because it happened in stages rather than in a moment of great divine intervention. We can see how he struggled and overcame obstacles through a process that he would call “discretio” or the ability to discern, through contemplation, between spirits that are good and bad and would act on our soul for either the glory of God or for capitulation to Satan. Ignatius came to understand himself and all mankind to be essentially torn between two real and opposing forces, capable of both acts of great goodness and of profound evil; the direction in which man is drawn to action being dependent on his ability to examine his conscience in the grace of God, in order to avert the expression of evil desires. It should, perhaps, not come as a surprise that such a master of battle strategies should come to express his faith in terms of spiritual warfare, and that he would become as sought after in the art of spiritual direction as he had been in the direction of war.

If there was a moment of decisive turning to the Lord for Ignatius, it would have been when he raised his sword for the last time, to lay it down upon the altar of Our Lady of Montserrat, at the Benedictine shrine bearing the same name. He had just witnessed how his own soul had teetered on the brink of damnation when he was tempted to strike down a Moor he met on his journey and who had denied the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Fortunately he was pulled back from the brink by an act of pure chance: he decided to dismount his mule at a fork in the road and kill the Moor if his mule followed him, or spare him if the mule took the alternative route. The mule followed the other path and the Moor’s life was spared, but Ignatius had been a hairsbreadth from committing murder. Whether he had been saved by chance or the intervention of God in directing his mule was irrelevant to Ignatius. The fact he had come so close to the point of no return in his conversion was enough to move him to kneel in vigil before Our Lady’s altar and leave there his weapons and fine clothing – trappings of a lifestyle that he had once loved above all else.

Thankfully, we live in times when the real opportunity and impetus to commit such horrendous crimes as murder do not present themselves for the vast majority of us. Still, the temptation of evils equally malicious, though arguably less deadly, are very real. Just as the human mind is a powerful tool in the hands of Satan, so too is the human conscience a powerful tool for good if accessed prayerfully and in a spirit of humility before our Creator. There are actions, great and small, for which our consciences weep and send out that familiar twinge of regret. Accessing that twinge before thought of sin becomes action is the spirit of discernment that we must try to master in the occasion of all manner of sin, so that our lives may be lived here on earth as we desire them to be lived one day in heaven: for and with God alone.

The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, like his own conversion, is a process of experiencing God, at each stage deeper than the last, until the trajectory of human life itself intersects with the joy of the resurrection and the eternal glory of God. The result is a highly structured and divinely guided journey of a soul towards the true knowledge of redemption, lasting 30 days and arranged as a programme of contemplation and prayer grounded in Holy Scripture, taking each soul on its unique conversion to Christ through acknowledgement of our failed human state; of the gift of God in Christ; of the need for and nature of Christ’s passion and our own acceptance of suffering; to the sharing of the Blessed Virgin’s joy in the glory of her Son’s resurrection. It is a journey through the story of our salvation, undertaken precisely for the salvation of our souls.

No article can do justice to the great gift that the conversion of St. Ignatius of Loyola has given to the world in the four-and-three-quarter centuries since the foundation of the Society of Jesus. No single day of celebration can adequately memorialise the ministry rooted in the charisms of St. Ignatius of Loyola, which have seen the evangelisation of the Gospel of Christ by the Jesuit Fathers to over one hundred countries in every continent bar the frozen one, through the foundation of schools, colleges, universities and seminaries, and through the conversions of millions of souls, all ad maiorem Dei gloriam – for the greater glory of God. 

Though our reading stop here may our living begin in earnest, in St. Ignatius’ spirit of conversion "to conquer oneself and to regulate one's life in such a way that no decision is made under the influence of any inordinate attachment."