The Modern Making of “Ignatian Spirituality”

Though it has early modern roots, contemporary “Ignatian spirituality” represents a reconfiguration of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jesuit spiritual culture. This article offers a genealogical account of a key element in that modern construction: the growing emphasis on Ignatius Loyola as a mystic and the eclipse of earlier, more ascetical understandings of both Ignatius and his Spiritual Exercises. The essay begins by examining key contributions of Jan Philipp Roothaan (1785–1855), the long-serving superior general of the Society of Jesus in the decades following its Restoration. Roothaan’s explicitly non-mystical and decidedly ascetical reading of the Exercises at once reflected and helped shape nineteenth-century Jesuit spiritual culture. The article then traces how this vision came under criticism in the early twentieth century. Renewed Catholic interest in mysticism, and increased attention to Jesuit sources—newly available in critical editions via the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu—fostered a reevaluation of Ignatius as a mystic in his own right. Over time, this shift came to color the interpretation of the Spiritual Exercises. Rather than a school of self-conquest, they came to be understood as a kind of mystical pedagogy. Changes in spiritual theology have had concrete implications for how the Exercises are given, as a concluding case study of the Ignatian Examen helps illustrate.