Terence O'Reilly has been one of the leading scholars of Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises for decades, and this new volume from Brill collects the most important articles from his prolific career. It is especially useful for newcomers to the serious study of the Exercises, who will find a distillation of the scholarly findings and debates of the last hundred years.
Although O'Reilly covers a great deal of ground over the course of twelve chapters, he is primarily concerned with the origin and reception of the Spiritual Exercises. The author carefully traces the debates about the influence of Ignatius's reading on the composition of his famous retreat manual. His effort to imitate Christ, according to what he had learned from Ludolph the Carthusian, Jacob of Voragine, and Thomas à Kempis, was the source of the rules for the discernment of spirits and much else. O'Reilly helpfully correlates their writings with specific passages from the Exercises.
One of O'Reilly's greatest strengths as a scholar is his encyclopedic knowledge of Christian spiritual writings, especially of the sixteenth century. This allows him to overcome a common weakness of Jesuit historiography: a tendency to view the early members of the order in isolation from their historical context, and to overemphasize their distinctiveness. O'Reilly avoids the caricatures and generalizations that often plague discussions of Ignatius's relationship to alumbrados and Erasmianism, observing that the man from Loyola neither fully embraced nor altogether opposed the teachings of the Dutch humanist and his followers. For example, Ignatius's exegetical approach, which highlighted the moral sense, was “closer to the Erasmianism of his contemporaries in Spain” (121) than it was to Ludolph of Saxony's.
His vast knowledge of the sources also allows O'Reilly to compare the Jesuit spiritual tradition with others, notably the Carmelite. He shows how Teresa of Ávila's Jesuit confessors aided her in a time of spiritual crisis with teachings from the Exercises, and contrasts the nuptial and courtly imagery that is characteristic of John of the Cross and Ignatius, respectively. This comparative approach touches upon the important issue of mysticism and asceticism in the Exercises, a topic O'Reilly treats with characteristic nuance. He is sympathetic to the mystical turn of much twentieth-century scholarship, particularly the pioneering work of Joseph Veale, while observing that even in the late sixteenth century, Jesuit generals sought a compromise between mystical and ascetical approaches.
O'Reilly has helped revise the Counter-Reformation image of Ignatius promoted by his earliest biographers, like Pedro de Ribadeneyra and Gian Piero Maffei. Whereas these authors saw Ignatius as having arisen providentially to gather and lead a new band of reformed priests against Martin Luther and other enemies of the Catholic Church, O'Reilly contends that Ignatius showed hardly any concern for Protestantism until the 1540s. Even then, he proposed fairly moderate means for facing this challenge, and the affairs of the Holy Land and the Christian East remained dearer to his heart, just as they had been in the 1520s.
Ignatius's understanding of the papacy was an issue closely related to the Counter-Reformation image of the saint. Ribadeneyra presented the defense of the pope as a crucial plank of the antiheretical campaign. O'Reilly describes Loyola's view of the papacy as more restrained than this, and more associated with an impulse to “serve Christ throughout the world, rather than a particular desire to defend the papal office in schism-torn Europe” (20). He calls attention to the numerous conflicts between him and the successors of Peter, as when Ignatius employed every means at his disposal to thwart multiple popes from appointing Jesuits as bishops and cardinals.
Spiritual Exercises is dedicated to “my friends in the Society of Jesus,” and O'Reilly clearly manifests personal warmth towards them without losing his edge. This is evident in his treatment of the early Dominican critics of the order, whom O'Reilly thinks have been dismissed too readily by previous Jesuit historians. He shows how the works of Melchor Cano and Thomas Pedroche fit within the internal Catholic struggles of the mid-sixteenth century, and represented a serious school of thought rather than merely animus or misunderstanding towards the new Jesuit order.
