Ignatius’s first destination was the town of Manresa, below Montserrat, where he initially intended to stay for only a few days. In fact, he ended up staying for about ten months. Manresa was a small industrial town of a few thousand inhabitants. It was then famous for its cotton manufacturing. It was on the way down from the monastery of Montserrat to Manresa that Ignatius first met Iñes Pascual. She owned a shop and thriving business in the centre of Barcelona and would later be a very generous benefactress to him.
On his arrival in Manresa on 25 March 1522, Ignatius asked to be taken in at the hospice of Santa Lucía, where, in return for a roof—in fact, a dark and narrow cell—he would help to look after the house. He attended daily Mass at either the cathedral or the Dominican friary, during which he would read an account of the Passion of Our Lord. In the evenings, he attended sung vespers and compline in the large Gothic basilica. He confessed and went to communion weekly, an unusual practice in those days when people received these sacraments much less frequently; indeed, such regular reception of the Eucharist was discouraged. Ignatius, in contrast, encouraged some women of Manresa to confess and take communion every Sunday, to do good works, and to serve the Lord.15 In imitation of the saints, he himself visited the sick in the hospitals, where he would bathe the infirm. The children of Manresa would sometimes follow him shouting “the holy man” or “the sackcloth man”—a reference to his pilgrim attire. In passing, it is important to note here that in The Autobiography Ignatius always refers to himself as “the pilgrim.” This is how he saw himself, as someone following in the footsteps of his new-found Lord, travelling along the path of discipleship. During Ignatius’s canonisation processes (1582–1606), many witnesses from Manresa came forward to testify that he had arrived in Manresa dressed in sackcloth. They called him “the holy man” because of his penance, continual prayers, and fasting.
During his first four months at Manresa, as Ignatius recounted afterwards, he was in a constant state of happiness but without knowing a thing about the inner working of the spirit: “Up to this time he had always persisted almost in one identical interior state, with largely unvarying happiness.”16 Ignatius started recording his spiritual experiences in a notebook, making notes that would later form the basis of his classic work, The Spiritual Exercises.
Suddenly Ignatius’s mood changed. He began to be tortured by scruples, wondering whether he had confessed properly at the monastery of Montserrat. No one he consulted could rid him of his doubts. Although he kept to seven hours’ prayer during the day, his torments went on for several months. He was even afflicted with the thought of suicide. He passed a whole week without food, breaking his fast only on the order of his confessor. Relief came with a sudden illumination or inspiration, bringing with it a resolve never again to confess his past sins or to allow himself to be troubled by scruples.
Ignatius then began to experience a deep serenity and peace that never left him for the rest of his life. He attached great importance to feelings, especially feelings of deep, inner peace that were not fleeting but lasting. Could it be that such feelings of peace and calm were indications of God’s will in his life, what he would call “the good spirit”? Could it be that their opposite, feelings of inner turmoil, distaste, confusion, uncertainty, were indications of what he would term “the evil spirit”?
In his spiritual life, Ignatius began to understand that God was treating him “in the same way as a schoolmaster deals with a child, teaching him.”17 He wasn’t sure if this was because of his own stupidity or because he had no one to teach him. The saints began to recede into the background, and their place in Ignatius’s thoughts and prayers was taken up more and more by Jesus and the Blessed Trinity.
The Autobiography states that “one day while saying the Office of Our Lady on the steps of the monastery, his understanding began to be elevated so that he saw the Most Holy Trinity in the form of three musical keys. This brought on so many tears and so much sobbing that he could not control himself.” Other matters were “revealed to his understanding” as well in those days, concerning the creation of the world, the Eucharistic presence and the person of Christ. So powerful were these experiences that he believed that “even if there were no scriptures to teach these matters of faith, he would be resolved to die for them, only because of what he had seen.”18
One day, Ignatius sat in prayer above the River Cardoner. Suddenly, “his understanding was opened and though he saw no vision he perceived and understood many things both spiritual and touching matters of faith and learning.”19 He admitted later that he could not put into words what he had been given to understand at that time. It was a total mystical view of the world that he had been given. He saw how all things proceeded from God and returned to their Trinitarian origin and how all the mysteries of the Christian faith were interlocked in that movement. Ignatius said afterwards that whatever he had learned at other times, either by study or personal effort or supernatural light, was less than he had received at that moment.
Diego Laínez, one of Ignatius’s early companions in the Society of Jesus and his eventual successor as superior general, later said that “in one hour Ignatius learned more from God than he could ever have been taught by all the doctors of the world.”20 A second-generation Jesuit, Jerónimo Nadal, who was one of Ignatius’s right-hand men in the early Society, said of Ignatius, “In almost all his decisions [he] customarily cited the outstanding illumination, even when he governed the Society in Rome,” and he did so as though in Manresa “he had seen the reasons for or causes of everything.”21
Ignatius himself never ventured to speak categorically about his mystical experiences but always prefaced his remarks with phrases like “It seemed to him” or “It appeared that.” Intriguingly, Laínez says that Ignatius, despite his limited education, began to write a book on the Trinity at this stage, and his later biographer, Pedro de Ribadeneira, adds that this attempt had reached some eighty pages.22 Unfortunately, no trace of this work has ever been found
It seems that Ignatius lived for much of his time in Manresa in the hospice of Santa Lucía, but he also availed of other accommodation from time to time. After an initial spell in the hospice, he was given a cell on the ground floor of the Dominican priory of St. Peter in April 1522. He seems to have stayed there for only twelve or thirteen days at that stage, returning again the following August when he was struggling with scruples. In the meantime, he spent some time in accommodation offered by the Amigant family, who lived in the main square of Manresa. Ignatius did not, as is often said, live in a cave during his stay in Manresa, and in fact he makes no mention of a cave himself. Yet so many early witnesses recall the “holy cave” that their testimonies deserve to be taken into account. There is a hill with a cave on the outskirts of Manresa, and it appears that Ignatius regularly went to this cave to pray, almost certainly remaining there all night on some occasions. The Church of the Holy Cave was built in 1767, but services were not held there until 1867. The modern would-be pilgrim will be happy to hear that heating was installed in 1990!
During these ten months in Manresa, Ignatius had learned to read or discern his interior moods and movements, to recognise which feelings brought him life and which feelings had the opposite effect. This is the source of the Ignatian practice of the Examen (see chapter 23). We would all do well to pause at the end of each day, as prompted by Ignatius, and ask ourselves two simple questions: “What gave me life today?” and “What drained me of life?” For Ignatius, the answers to these deceptively simple questions would tell him what he believed to be God’s will for him each day. These answers helped Ignatius—and today help those who follow Ignatian spirituality—to “find God in all things.”
As previously mentioned, it was from this period at Manresa that Ignatius formed many of the ideas upon which he based what was later to become his spiritual classic, The Spiritual Exercises. This little book was the fruit of his personal experience of prolonged prayer and illuminations, both at Loyola and, especially, at Manresa. Although he later altered, augmented, and perfected what he wrote at the time, the outline of The Spiritual Exercises was there before he left Manresa for Jerusalem.
The Spiritual Exercises is an unusual book. Even in its final version, from 1541, it was rough and rudimentary in form. Rather than a book to be read, it is a guide for the one who gives the Exercises to another, to be translated into concrete practice according to circumstances. Juan de Polanco writes, “Thus it was in Manresa that he began to give the Exercises to various persons and in this way the Lord visited them with revelations and consolations, blessing them with an admirable taste for spiritual things and an increase of all virtues.”23
During the final months of 1522, and until his departure for Jerusalem, Ignatius felt eager to help other people who came looking for him to discuss their interior lives. He would sometimes give spiritual talks in the little chapel of Santa Lucía to the devout women of Manresa.