ABSTRACT
It is often assumed that spirituality took a new direction in the early modern period. The development of spirituality in the Society of Jesus may provide a useful illustration. Ignatius himself is perhaps generally not considered a representative of this new direction, but the generations that followed him certainly are. In 1575, the General Superior of the Society of Jesus, Evrard Mercurian, wrote a letter to all the provincial superiors of the Order concerning books that Jesuits could only read with special permission. This list included several mystical authors, such as Tauler, Ruusbroec and Henry Herp. According to Henri Bremond, this letter is a veritable coup d’état, an extremely meaningful and revealing event: ‘an event [ … ] of a kind that is born in the history of ideas only at distant intervals over the course of centuries’. 2 Obviously, Bremond – who had entered the Jesuit Order in 1882 but was asked to leave in February 1904, 3 and who was an expert on the history of spirituality 4 – was keenly aware of this development. With few exceptions, scholars tend to agree with him, assuming that the spirituality of the Jesuits since then has been characterized primarily by asceticism and, moreover, that it broke with the mystical tradition during this period. In this regard, Jesuit spirituality would be an interesting example of the new mentality of the modern period, which was dominated by the conviction that not only society in general but also the human subject itself could be constructed autonomously:
For years in the history of the Jesuits, it has been a hallowed opinion that the Jesuits saw the advent of an entirely new chapter; namely, they were considered the characteristic representatives of a spirituality aligned with asceticism, of a methodically and systematically conceived prayer life, of a disposition that had broken with medieval mysticism [ … ] Nobody contributed more to the survival of this opinion than Henri Bremond [ … ] Bremond undoubtedly recognized that the mystical element was incontrovertibly present in Ignatius and many of his first followers, and that even in the midst of the seventeenth century mysticism held pride of place for a group of Jesuits, but it was precisely this conviction that marked his further exposition as an all the more stern reproach to the Order: starting with the generalship of Evrard Mercurian (1573–1580) it adopted a reactionary position as a group and was therefore responsible for the anti-mystical ‘asceticism’ that infested spirituality in the seventeenth century, and which abandoned the straight road of abandonment to the will of God for an almost hopeless bendy path. 5
