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Christian Mysticism · classical text

The Spiritual Exercises

Ignatius of Loyola's four-week retreat manual for the discernment of the heart

Translator: Elder Mullan, S.J. (1865–1925), 1914.

Source: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, New York

Licence: Public Domain. Father Elder Mullan's translation from the Spanish Autograph (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1914). Strict public domain. Lightly modernised by Soul Spirit Self (archaic verb forms and pronouns updated; substantive translation choices preserved).

Ignatius's four-week retreat manual, the spine of the Jesuit contemplative tradition. The Exercises are not a book to read but a structured month of meditations on creation, sin, the life of Christ, the Passion, and the Resurrection, designed to bring the retreatant to discernment between the consolations and desolations of the spirit.

From the text

The Exercises sit at the edge of this library. Ignatius was no nondual teacher. The Exercises are a structured month of imaginative, devotional prayer, and their frame is dualist throughout, the creature before the Creator. They earn their place by where they lead. The month trains a quality of attention, and a disregard for everything inessential, that generations of retreatants have carried to the same threshold the apophatic mystics write from. The Contemplation to Attain Love that closes the month, with God found labouring in all created things, comes very near that threshold itself.