The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William JamesOne should read the letters in which Ignatius Loyola recommendsobedience as the backbone of his order, if one would gain insightinto the full spirit of its cult.188 They are too long to quote; butIgnatius’s belief is so vividly expressed in a couple of sayings reportedby companions that, though they have been so often cited, Iwill ask your permission to copy them once more:—“I ought,” an early biographer reports him as saying, “on enteringreligion, and thereafter, to place myself entirely in the hands of God,and of him who takes His place by His authority. I ought to desirethat my Superior should oblige me to give up my own judgment, andconquer my own mind. I ought to set up no difference between oneSuperior and another, … but recognize them all as equal before God,whose place they fill. For if I distinguish persons, I weaken the spiritof obedience. In the hands of my Superior, I must be a soft wax, athing, from which he is to require whatever pleases him, be it to writeor receive letters, to speak or not to speak to such a person, or the like;and I must put all my fervor in executing zealously and exactly whatI am ordered. I must consider myself as a corpse which has neitherintelligence nor will; be like a mass of matter which without resistancelets itself be placed wherever it may please any one; like a stickin the hand of an old man, who uses it according to his needs andplaces it where it suits him. So must I be under the hands of theOrder, to serve it in the way it judges most useful.“I must never ask of the Superior to be sent to a particular place,to be employed in a particular duty… . I must consider nothing asbelonging to me personally, and as regards the things I use, be like astatue which lets itself be stripped and never opposes resistance.”189The other saying is reported by Rodriguez in the chapter fromwhich I a moment ago made quotations. When speaking of thePope’s authority, Rodriguez writes:—“Saint Ignatius said, when general of his company, that if the HolyFather were to order him to set sail in the first bark which he mightfind in the port of Ostia, near Rome, and to abandon himself to the188 Letters li. and cxx. of the collection translated into French by Bouix,Paris, 1870.189 Bartoli-Michel, ii. 13.283