The Spiritual
Exercises

The Spiritual Exercises is not a book to be read. It is a set of instructions for putting someone else through a month of prayer — written for the director, not the reader, and most of it is stage directions: how long to pray, in what posture, in what light, what to eat, what to say and, more often, what to leave unsaid. Read straight through, as it is set out here, it can feel like reading a score rather than hearing the music. That is what it is.

Iñigo López de Loyola was a Basque soldier whose leg was shattered by a cannonball at Pamplona in 1521. Convalescing, with nothing to read but a life of Christ and a book of saints, he began noticing that daydreams of chivalry left him dry and daydreams of sanctity left him glad — and that the difference between the two feelings was information. Everything in this book grows out of that observation. He worked the text up at Manresa from about 1522, went on revising it for a quarter of a century, and Paul III approved it in 1548.

It is a kataphatic book — it works by image, scene, and the composition of place, filling the imagination rather than emptying it. That is the exact opposite move from the negative way collected under Mystics, which is why it is kept here and not there. The two traditions are not enemies, but they are not the same road, and it seemed more honest to say so than to shelve them together.

This page is not a study of the Exercises. It is the text, whole, with nothing between the reader and it: every Annotation, all four Weeks, all fifty-one Mysteries, and every set of Rules — including the eighteen on thinking with the Church, which are the most contested pages Ignatius wrote and are printed here without comment, as he wrote them. Any study will come later, and separately.

The architecture is not visible from a table of contents. A “week” is a movement, not seven days — Ignatius says plainly that a week may be shortened or stretched to fit the person. The four are a sequence, and each is meant to be entered only when the one before it has done its work.

Elder Mullan, S.J. (1865–1925) translated from the autograph — the Spanish copy carrying Ignatius’ own handwritten corrections — and published it in New York in 1914. His English is stiff, and deliberately so. Ignatius wrote a soldier’s Spanish, compressed and often ungrammatical, and Mullan resolved to follow it rather than smooth it: no change whatever is made in the wording, he says in his General Note, and where he had to supply anything he set it in italics so the reader could see the seam. The result reads awkwardly because the original is awkward. Forty-two footnotes record where the correcting hand in the manuscript is the saint’s own.

Three other public-domain Englishes exist, each doing a different job: John Morris, S.J. (1908), the older Jesuit version from the autograph; W. H. Longridge (1919), an Anglican reading with a full commentary and a translation of the Directorium; and Seager (1847), made not from the Spanish at all but from Roothaan’s Latin. The translations most quoted today — Louis J. Puhl (1951) and George Ganss, S.J. (1992) — are far easier to read and are both still in copyright, so neither is here.

Almost every citation of the Exercises you will meet is by section number — Exx 23 is the Principle and Foundation, Exx 136 the Two Standards, Exx 234 the Suscipe. Those numbers were applied to the Spanish in the 1928 Marietti edition of Turin, built on the 1919 critical text in the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu. Mullan’s translation is from 1914 and carries none of them. They are apparatus, not text — the Stephanus numbers of the Exercises — so they can be supplied without altering a word, and they are supplied here in the gold margin marks.

Where each one falls, though, is a fact about the book, and this edition does not guess at facts. So they were not placed by eye. They were read off a witness that carries them — the numbered Spanish autograph — and transferred to the English by machine alignment: Ignatius’ own rubrics survive translation as a sequence (1º puncto is First Point, 11ª regla is Eleventh Rule), and each boundary must also leave behind a span of English the right size for the Spanish section it claims to be. Both had to agree for all 370 before anything was published. The full method, and its limits, are in the colophon below.