ABSTRACT
Saint Ignatius de Loyola (see chapter 1) wrote his Spiritual Exercises while convalescing in the town of Manresa and they were published with papal approval in 1548. A collection of prayers, meditations and mental exercises designed to be performed over the course of four weeks, Loyola’s work was inspired by earlier devotional works such as the fifteenth-century Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471). In the Exercises, Loyola sought to identify the motivations or “spirits” that moved the soul to espouse certain actions over others and aimed to help Christians to develop their “discernment” between good “spirits” such as love, joy or sorrow that drew the soul to goodness and evil “spirits” such as desolation that drew it towards sin.
