III · The Ground

The Presupposition, and the Principle and Foundation

The ground the rest stands on. First the charity that must hold between director and exercitant — save your neighbour's proposition rather than condemn it — then the Principle and Foundation: man is created to praise, reverence and serve, and everything else on the face of the earth is means, to be used or left alone as it helps.

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SPIRITUAL EXERCISES

21to conquer oneself and regulate one’s life without determining oneself through4 any tendency that is disordered

4Without determining oneself through is in the Saint’s hand, the words being inserted between life and tendency, the word without being cancelled.

PRESUPPOSITION

22In order that both he who is giving the Spiritual Exercises, and he who is receiving them, may more help and benefit themselves, let it be presupposed that every good Christian is to be more ready to save his neighbor’s proposition than to condemn it. If he cannot save it, let him inquire how he means it; and if he means it badly, let him correct him with charity. If that is not enough, let him seek all the suitable means to bring him to mean it well, and save himself.

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23PRINCIPLE AND FOUNDATION

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.

And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created.

From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it.

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.

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Mullan’s Notes

4Without determining oneself through is in the Saint’s hand, the words being inserted between life and tendency, the word without being cancelled.

Elder Mullan, S.J., The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, translated from the Autograph (New York, 1914) — public domain.
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