: Timothy M. Gallagher
: Setting Captives Free Personal Reflections on Ignatian Discernment of Spirits
: Publishdrive
: 9780824599393
: 1
: CHF 25.20
:
: Christentum
: English
: 256
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

In this new volume, Fr. Gallagher explores additional understandings and applications of the Ignatian rules. These personal reflections have arisen from the delight-and the labor-of learning and sharing the rules, witnessing the joy and hope they have given to so many. These Ignatian guidelines set captives free from the discouragement and sadness of spiritual desolation. They offer hope precisely where persons may have felt hope was not possible-and so release new energy for the spiritual journey.

Chapter 1

Sensual Delights and a Stinging Conscience

Don’t you feel Him in your heart, weighing you down, worrying you, never letting you be, and drawing you on at the same time, enticing you with a hope of tranquility and joy?

—Alessandro Manzoni,The Betrothed

The first two rules, like the third and fourth (spiritual consolation—spiritual desolation) and the fifth and sixth (harmful changes in desolation—helpful changes in desolation), form a pair. In them, Ignatius explains how the good spirit and the enemy work in persons in two contrasting situations: those moving decisively away from God and into serious sin (rule 1), and those moving decisively toward God in increasing freedom from sin and growing service of God (rule 2).

These rules are the following:

First Rule. The first rule: Inpersons who are going from mortal sin to mortal sin, theenemy is ordinarily accustomed to propose apparent pleasures to them, leading them to imagine sensual delights and pleasures in order to hold them more and make them grow in their vices and sins. In these persons thegood spirit uses a contrary method, stinging and biting their consciences through their rational power of moral judgment.

Second Rule. The second: Inpersons who are going on intensely purifying their sins and rising from good to better in the service of God our Lord, the method is contrary to that in the first rule. For then it is proper to theevil spirit to bite, sadden, and place obstacles, disquieting with false reasons, so that the person may not go forward. And it is proper to thegood spirit to give courage and strength, consolations, tears, inspirations and quiet, easing and taking away all obstacles, so that the person may go forward in doing good.1

Manuscript evidence suggests that Ignatius added these two rules at a later time, after the rules that now follow them. In the SpanishAutograph, the most authoritative manuscript, the numbers of the subsequent rules are changed twice to accommodate the two new rules.2 Ignatian scholarship generally recognizes in these changes a confirmation that the present first two rules were composed later than the rules that follow.3 Why then did Ignatius add these two rules and place them at the beginning of the series?

Time and experience most likely revealed to Ignatius the need to clarify from the outset that the actions of the good spirit and of the enemy change according