Two
The Ascetic

The family was the initial context in which religious desire was manifested. The vocation then broadened to the streets of the village or city, the road of pilgrimage, the monastery, or even to civil and ecclesiastical palaces.^[1] From on his feet in the fortress to on his back in the castle Loyola secures a new place and position: "on a mule."^[2] Loyola begins his pilgrimage humanly half-erect astride this symbolic beast. Most pilgrims walked on foot, from devotion or from penury, with the aid of a staff. Only the rich afforded horses or mules or, through perilous regions of banditry, enclosed carriages^[3] —an inequitable practice about which moralists complained as a pretense of devotion.^[4] The posture of Loyola as Jerusalem-bound mimics the triumphal entry of Jesus into that city. It was an elected sign of humility, as in the scriptural prophecy, "'Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on an ass'" (Matt. 21:1–11).

Gentlemen in the sixteenth century did not ride mules. This was a definite social disgrace in Il libro del cortegiano , although Castiglione's dislike of the beast may have derived from his only experience of the wounds of war. A mule once fell on his foot, he reported, and "made me see stars by daylight."^[5] The ascendancy of the mule over the horse in the sixteenth century was strongly opposed by governments to save the breeding of the horse as a military weapon. Mules were agricultural animals used for ploughing and transport. Although they were numerous in Spain, about 100,000 strong,^[6] especially in those kingdoms gentlemen did not ride mules. Alfonso X forbid the Order of the Knights

of the Band, or Scarf, to ride a mule at the fine of a silver mark, as preserved in the historical romance of Antonio de Guevara, Libro aureo de Marco aurelio . Even later in the sixteenth century Montaigne would repeat these items, adding that the exceptions to the rule were the Abyssinians. The nobler they were, the more proudly they rode mules in imitation of their master Prester John.^[7] And so Loyola begins his pilgrimage, a little like Jesus the Savior, a little like Prester John the adventurer, and a lot like the mule on which he rides. As Erasmus explained the simile, "The mule, sprung from horse and ass, is neither one nor the other, like some people who try to be both courtiers and churchmen and are neither."^[8]

Loyola is accompanied by his other brother, a prototype of the virtuous companions he will seek on the road of pilgrimage as the Society of Jesus. En route they keep a chivalric vigil at the shrine of Our Lady of Arançuz (Aránzazu), where he prays for fresh energies for the journey.^[9] In the sixteenth century shrines were essential institutions of local religion, establishing the sacred in the Spanish landscape. They commemorated the supernatural signs of the saints, especially Mary, whose images supplanted the popularity of the bodies or relics of martyrs and hermits as healing sites. She became protectress of a community. She was notably "Our Lady of this place," whether of this tree or this spring. There were annual feasts and processions organized around shrines, guardians of the sites, registers of their history and miracles, and even shrines on geographical maps. Since Marian shrines in sixteenth-century Spain were most renowned for the cure of cripples,^[10] Loyola's visit is unlikely a disinterested piety. The shrine at Aránzazu commemorated a shepherd's discovery of a resplendent image of the Madonna with a large cowbell at her side in a verdant hawthorn in the remote mountains. The history compared the shepherd to Moses on Horeb before the burning bush. The site was named etiologically from the Cantabrian Basque aranza , or "thorn," and the diction çu , or "wonderment,"^[11] to express pious amazement that an image of the Madonna should appear in such a wild place. The location of the statue in a hawthorn (espino ) derived from Mount Sinai, which medieval guidebooks for pilgrims interpreted as meaning "bramble."^[12]

This local devotion replicated a common anthropological pattern. That was the discovery of images, either statues or paintings, by a male herder in a wild locale. Herders, as the wildest of men, who ventured into uncultivated places, were the intermediaries between society and nature. The image was typically located at apertures to the numinous:

caves and springs as openings to the underworld, or trees and mountaintops to the sky as at Aránzazu in a shrub in the mountains. Such findings, which were popularly considered miraculous, mediated through the images between the local populace and the forces of nature, particularly the weather. It was consistent that the inaugural miracle through the intercession of Our Lady of Aránzazu was to bring rain to the region. An image of the Madonna, the mother with child, symbolized natural creativity.^[13] It was also religiously consistent that shepherds should be its discoverers, for they had first sought and adored that living image at the Nativity (Luke 2:8–20).^[14]

The archetype of this site was announced in the preface by the dating of the conversation in the garden between Gonçalves da Câmara and Loyola as "the fourth of August, the vigil of the feast of Our Lady of the Snows."^[15] This time is a rhetorical place. Our Lady of the Snows was not venerated explicitly in the universal liturgical calendar. The medieval feast was and still is celebrated among Spaniards in a mountainous locale at Espinosa de los Monteros, about 100 kilometers north of Burgos^[16] and the same distance from Loyola's native seat near Azpeitia in Guizpúcoa. The celebration seems to have been in the sixteenth century more rowdy than religious. The diocesan synod of Burgos in 1511 denounced parochial pilgrimages to such shrines, for they produced pitched battles between the local people and the mass procession. Pilgrims were forbidden to move with arms, hurdy-gurdies, or drums.^[17]

That local feast of Our Lady of the Snows is a celebration by shepherds in the roles of the principal performers. They praise the Madonna of nature, who sends rain miraculously to melt the snows on Monte Esquilino (Sheep-shearing) and to cause grasses to grow in the pasturages to the content of the highlanders. The municipality of Espinosa de los Monteros, because of the pure-blooded nobility of its populace, had a claim as the home of its eponymous monteros . Those were originally the medieval masters of the royal hunt; later under Alonso VII, the guards of the king's private chambers. Of anthropological interest are the regional highlanders, who were granted by the Crown extensive grazing privileges and whose major permanently settled center is at the convergence of four rivers, Las Machorras.^[18] It was legendarily to such a shepherd that there appeared in the summer pasturages, or variously in a hawthorn, a large image of the Madonna.^[19] On the eve of the feast, the date of the seminal conversation in the garden between Gonçalves da Câmara and Loyola, the performers hold a general rehearsal, and the village youths plant in the plaza before the church the maypole, a tall

tree trunk festooned with a banner.^[20] The feast is celebrated with a pilgrimage of about 6 kilometers to the hermitage of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves at Las Machorras. Its custom is the public recital of couplets, some improvised to entertain the natives, others traditional to honor the Madonna.^[21]

These couplets define the boundaries of her cult as within the compass of a few miles from the site.^[22] Puns on the grandeur of her apparition argue, however, that this is but a local version of a universal devotion. One couplet proclaims: "The best (la mejor ) of your miracles was your holy apparition the fifth of August with a burning sun." Another: "Of all the miracles which cause wonder in the churches of the world, this is the greatest (el mayor )." Still another couplet betrays the Madonna's identity from her Roman provenance: "From the banks of the Tiber, crossing immense plains, you came to establish your throne in these grand heights."^[23] She is the mother of God, in whose honor the basilica of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome was rebuilt by Pope Sixtus III as a "trophy" of her definition by the Council of Ephesus. That was the principal and perhaps most ancient church dedicated solemnly to the cult of the Virgin, one of the five patriarchal basilicas and seven principal churches of the city. Almost every historical discussion of it began with its legendary foundation, the miracle of the snow. On the night between the fourth and fifth of August, ca. 352 A.D. , the Virgin appeared in a vision to Pope Liberius and instructed him to erect a church in her honor on the site where snow would cover the ground in the morning. The Virgin similarly appeared to a Roman patrician and his infertile wife to direct their investment of money in the church. In collaboration the pope marked at the snowy spot on the Esquiline the designated plan of the church. The Marian selection of the site and the miracle of the snow, depicted on an elaborate mosaic in the church, made it the focal point of the Western cult of the mother of God.^[24]

Monte Esquilino, which she favors with sun rather than snow, is the local version of the Esquiline hill in Rome on which that church was erected. Spanish devotion translated her cult from the polluted snow of that city to the pristine snow of mountain peaks and rural solitudes, because the spotless snow of remote locales was deemed the most expressive symbol of the purity of the Virgin immaculate. Hundreds of appellations throughout Spain of church, chapel, altar, or statue are to Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, with five sites of her cult in Loyola's native Guizpúcoa.^[25] St. Mary Major (Santa María la Mayor), feted at Las Machorras, is the patronal saint of the archdiocese of Burgos and of its

cathedral, which displays centrally in the retable of the main altar her sumptuous, bejeweled silver statue.^[26] The association of the Society of Jesus with the archdiocese was definite. The Jesuits settled in Burgos for apostolic activity in the autumn of 1550; and in 1553, the year of the conversation between Gonçalves da Câmara and Loyola, there arrived to inaugurate worship in that residence none other personage than the namer of the garden in Rome in which they spoke, Francis Borgia. The Society of Jesus had just been invited to settle in Burgos by the cardinal archbishop; its residence there was secured by a canon of the cathedral; and when Borgia inaugurated worship in that house the chapter of the cathedral lent its best ornaments for the solemnity.^[27]

The iconography of this regional cult of the Virgin "with a burning sun," legendarily appearing in a hawthorn, specifies a privilege that was to secure its most effective promoters in the Jesuits.^[28] Its types are the Virgin in the sun, developed from the apocalyptic woman (Rev. 12:1–6), and the Virgin in the burning bush, developed from the hierophany to Moses (Ex. 3:1–6). These types were appropriated as versions of the theologically controversial Virgin immaculate.^[29] The Virgin in the sun was especially popular as a private image for devotion, owing to its indulgence of eleven thousand years instituted by Pope Sixtus IV, who established two offices for the new, much debated feast of the immaculate conception.^[30] The modern commemorative statue of Our Lady of the Snows at Espinosa de los Monteros^[31] is consistent with this iconography. It is of the type of the Virgin with playing child derived from a Byzantine icon,^[32] which by late in the fifteenth century merged with the Virgin in the sun to become an image of the Virgin immaculate.^[33] Her appellation in the local festal couplet as "white dove" is also consistently symbolic.^[34] The conflation of Mary Major with the Virgin immaculate is coherent, since it was in anticipation of her role as mother of God that she was argued to have been created immaculate, singularly preserved from the effects of original sin.

The honor of the Virgin immaculate, conceived without original sin, is the epideictic antithesis to the blame of Gonçalves da Câmara as he confesses to Loyola in the garden on her vigil. The moral nature of the text is particularly revealed by the popular feature of that feast, the regional dancing. The festival is conducted by eleven dancers supervised by the principals, two gallant youths as chief shepherds and a boy fool. To the sound of flageolet and tamboril they perform during Mass before the Madonna's altar, in a nearby field, and in the processional to the hermitage. While their instrument in church is a large

wooden sheepshears, the outstanding dances outdoors are all performed with sticks. As commonly performed in Spain at summer festivals, these rustic dances are defined in their movements as warlike. A simpler version of the sword dance, they are of primitive origin, perhaps in the diversion of soldiers during their brief periods of rest. Executed only at religious festivals, the dances with sticks are believed to symbolize the conflict between good and evil.^[35]

When at the climax of the text Loyola will discern his alluring apparition as the devil in disguise, he will reject it with the bordón he usually carries.^[36] This is no common stick picked off the ground but a pilgrim's staff. It also names the stick with which is performed this military dance during summer religious festivals in many parts of Spain, the danza de bordones , or in his Guizpúcoa, the pordon-dantza . This dance is still the activity of the males of the province on the feast of St. John the Baptist on 24 June to commemorate the victory of the Guizpúcoans over the Navarrese in the fourteenth-century battle of Beobíbar. Twenty-four youths perform, at their head four who carry halberds and a crier who bears an unsheathed sword covered with carnations and roses. The festival is not only in its solar, vegetal, and aquatic associations for preservation against evils, but also a bellicose recounting of armed force with a danced review of soldiers.^[37] It is on this very feast that Loyola in the castle makes his confession on the verge of death.^[38]

The movements of this stick dance as mimetic of war provide a cultural context for his ultimate moral struggle between good and evil. In medieval art the Virgin herself was frequently depicted as chasing the devil with a whip, scourge, sword, scepter, club, or stick (Virgo , "virgin," and virga , "rod"), an attribute adopted by the promoters of her cause as the immaculate.^[39] Her association in this act with the dance is coherent. In sixteenth-century Spain national unification promoted a tremendous resurgence of robust and ebullient folk dancing, from a pride in customs that swept across social barriers. Popular dancing extraordinarily influenced all other forms, especially from its constant employment in religious plays, pageants, and processionals. In a contemporaneous auto sacramentale Mary and Jesus dance a duet in anger at the preference of the crowd at a fairground for the seven deadly sins, then drive them offstage with whips.^[40] Loyola's motion toward the devil with the stick shares the military origin of the regional religious dances; yet it implies a certain grace, a bodily grace that intimates a spiritual grace, much like the issue of Gonçalves da Câmara's comportment of the eyes. As a renaissance treatise on dancing explained, "The virtue of dancing

is as an action demonstrative of spiritual movement."^[41] Thus is intimated in the dating of the seminal conversation for this recital as "the fourth of August, the vigil of Our Lady of the Snows"^[42] a plot centered on the moral contest between good and evil, as if danced with a militant grace.

Pilgrims commonly made an itinerary of devotions by visiting the sanctuaries along the route to their final destination.^[43] The initial place of Loyola's pilgrimage after his ascetic conversion, the mountainous shrine of Our Lady of Arançuz, reveals the primitive origins of his religious experience. Despite all the intellectual knowledge that a master of arts in philosophy from the University of Paris, or the cultural sophistication of an institution in renaissance Rome, may imply, Loyola's recital will conclude as it began: with a powerful image from nature. It was at that Marian shrine that Jesuit tradition has located his vow of chastity.^[44] Although there is no evidence for this attribution, there is plausibility, for Marian shrines in cathedrals and monasteries, then in rural chapels, became centers of devotion based on vows.^[45] The notoriety of Marian shrines in Spain for the cure of cripples suggests the rhetorical coherence of a vow of chastity against leggy lust.

Loyola parts at Oñate with his brother, who was to visit there the home of a sister.^[46] This is a mnemonic marker, for the town is a place for the veneration of Our Lady of the Snows. In the cloister of the parish church in a vaulted niche is a statue with the Basque title of Our White Lady, while on the predella of the major retable and on a panel in relief is depicted the legendary apparition of St. Mary of the Snows.^[47] Loyola's separation from familial affections is a choice of Hercules on the road. Proceeding to Navarrete, he collects some money owed him by the duke and disperses it between personal obligations and the adornment of a statue of the Virgin.^[48] This transition from the Marian shrine to the ducal treasury, from piety to money, is also culturally coherent. Well-tended shrines with the promise of miracles meant to a region more business for its merchants, more construction for its laborers, Masses for its priests, and documents for its notaries. It was as if there were a contractual relationship of clientele and patronage between a social group and a sacred protector.^[49] The Iberian economy depended on wool for the principal export of raw material from Castile and for the principal industry of textile weaving in Catalonia,^[50] so that the supposed miraculous findings of shepherds were scarcely negligible. Manresa, the place of Loyola's supreme enlightenment, was one of the most important provincial centers of woolen manufacture. The Church benefitted from the expansion of the industry, since the demand for wool meant an increase

in flocks, and the need for pasturage meant returns in ecclesiastical grazing land.^[51] A blessing of the Virgin on a shepherd in a pasturage portended for the populace material prosperity, not only spiritual blessing. It was thus coherent to invest money in return on the decoration of her image. Yet Loyola is still absorbed in appearances, in how the embellished image of the Virgin will reflect on his own reputation as a donor.^[52]

Here he relinquishes, however, the last vestiges of social status, as he bids farewell to his two servants and departs from Navarrete toward Montserrat "alone on the mule."^[53] Since roads were uncertain and unsafe, pilgrims avoided traveling alone.^[54] There were criminal codes and ecclesiastical censures against the molestation of travelers, and a papal bull In coena Domini anathematized the molestation of pilgrims. Yet pilgrims were fair game for the unscrupulous, and Basque villagers were notorious for robbing them on the road to Compostela.^[55] Loyola's fool-hardiness in solo adventure involves him in serious temptation. As he travels there overtakes him a Moor, a soldier also on a mule. Conversing they begin to speak of the Virgin.^[56] The common greeting in Spanish streets was "Hail, Mary, most pure," with the response "Conceived without sin."^[57] Their conversational subject develops into a complicated argument about her perpetual virginity, which the Moor disbelieves, while the Christian believes. Unpersuaded by Loyola's piety, the Moor spurs his beast to high speed until he is lost from sight. Reflecting on their argument, Loyola is visited by inclinations that make him discontent in soul, for it seems to him that in his tolerance of the Moor's speech he has failed to do his duty. These inclinations also cause him to feel indignant toward the Moor and obliged to restore the Virgin's "honor." Desires penetrate him to seek out the Moor and poniard him.^[58]

Dishonor to women, which ranged from insult to rape, always cast aspersions on sexual conduct or condition, for that was the singular basis of female honor in the Spanish kingdoms. Inaccessibility as chastity established their honor. Sexual slander demeaned women socially by blackening their name, compromising dignity and self-esteem, and destroying reputation. An ugly insult such as "whore" to a woman of repute legally required the payment of damages and the retraction of the affront.^[59] A woman's sexual status also defined the social status of her male relations. She was part of their patrimony in her control of the lineage, as the bearer of the sons who made the family viable economically and politically.^[60] An insult to her dishonored her protectors in the eyes of others by the ancient norm "what people will say." If sexual purity was the role of women of honor, the duty of its defense was the

role of men. An unavenged affront to a woman—mother, wife, daughter, sister—desecrated male honor and was the equivalent of cowardice. Honor was susceptible to defilement or stain that required purification.^[61] Although penalties were imposed for insults, and lawsuits were instigated, it was common among those who prided themselves on their worth to take justice into their own hands without recourse to law. This was frequently done with the assistance of lineage or kin. It was sufficient in tense situations for an insulted, outraged, or affronted man, especially in Basque territory, to holler for family—"Loyola! Loyola!"—so that they would rush to arm in defense.^[62] The Moor's argument that the Madonna was defiled or stained sexually is culturally the archetypal affront to women and it requires Loyola's vengeance of his celestial mother's "honor."

Yet pursuit with intent to wound was also an "outrage," legally an action dishonoring a person without plausible reason.^[63] The "natural reasons" the Moor presses in argumentation^[64] are stereotypical of Islamic logic. The question of the perpetual virginity of Mary was not conciliarly defined, only theologically debated. It did not establish the Christian norm of orthodoxy nor provide a license for stabbing. Since the Quran denies the divinity of Christ, it disallows Mary the title "mother of God." It does teach her virginity, however, although Muslims in the sixteenth century disagreed about whether that virginity was perpetual.^[65]

The epithet with which Loyola dubs his antagonist is socially shameful. This "Moor" (Moro ) is a Christian. Historically there were no Moors in Spain at this date. Ordinances beginning in 1501 enforced the baptism or expulsion of all Muslims from Spain following national reunification. The converts, usually termed Moriscos , were also known derogatorily as Moros, Muhammadanes, Hagaranes (after Hagar), and Saracenos , despite their baptism. Such appellations were applied scurrilously and indiscriminately throughout the sixteenth century, regardless of the sincerity of an individual's conversion. The terminology demeaned the converts by distinguishing them as "new" from the original or "old" Christians. Considered still aliens and heretics, they were marginalized or ostracized by legal edicts and by popular action, such as harassment by disorderly soldiers. Except for some romances about the frontier in which the converts were portrayed as chivalrous, they were ridiculed as an abomination to be eradicated,^[66] precisely Loyola's intention.

The Moor symbolizes the infidel who must be convinced or killed,

an attitude opposite to Loyola's maturer social justice, which will establish in Rome a house for Muslims seeking conversion to Christianity.^[67] Here the encounter, or conflict, is potentially antagonistic, a mock imitation of the epic battles of the Cid and the romantic chivalric lists. In the medieval visionary allegory of pilgrimage such an opposition of believers was polemical. In Huon de Méri's poem, Tournoiement Antichrist , the hero as Everyman quit a war and entered a forest, where he encountered a Moor, Bras-de-fer (Iron Arms), a harbinger of Antichrist. The Moor only vanished after the hero witnessed a vision of the vices and virtues in processional and confessed his amorous sins.^[68] The inclusion of the episode with the "Moor" reinforces Loyola's agonistic character introduced at the siege of Pamplona and it orients his pilgrimage within the chivalric traditions of epic and romance. It also serves an apologetic purpose to ensure Loyola's orthodoxy and loyalty to the papacy, for on 7 August 1555, during the recital of this very text, Pope Paul IV condemned those who disbelieved the perpetual virginity of Mary.^[69]

It is not fortuitous that the subject of dissent is her "honor," for Loyola introduced himself as vaingloriously pursuing through combat "honor." Honor connoted in classical Latin respect, esteem, prestige. Two ideas developed in medieval society that distinguished its vernacular usage, however. Both restricted the ethical principle of classical antiquity that community was primarily citizenship. Those ideas were the barbarian sentiment of pride of blood and the Christian conviction that the righteous composed a community of faith. The lapse or even apostasy of the converted Muslims in Spain provoked an apologetic controversy and created a social class within the community of the faithful. That distinction between the "new" and the "old" Christians was allied with lineage and faction. The Inquisition, which was established to terminate the ensuing rivalries and riots—to prevent unjust persecution of the "new" Christians by the "old," while punishing severely any guilty apostates—condoned statutes of blood.

Those statues, which excluded the descendants of condemned apostates, and even without qualification any "new" Christians, penetrated tenantry and township, religious and military orders, cathedrals, professional guilds, and brotherhoods. Spain in the sixteenth century was socially dominated by a preoccupation with purity or cleanliness of blood (limpieza de sangre ) and with impurity, stain, and blot. Purity of blood was equated with honor; impurity, with dishonor and disqualification from the very competition for honors. Muslim blood in the line-

age of a Christian was a shame.^[70] This was an extension to the ecclesiastical community of a pride of lineage that was tenacious among the Basques. In his history of the northern regions, Las bienandanzas e fortunas , Lope García de Salazar included the Loyola family. "The Lot (solar ) of Loyola is an ancient lot and lineage." In his chronicle of the notorious atrocities of the Basques in the name of such honor he included the blood feud of Lope García de Loyola, which resulted in "many deaths and murders."^[71] Vengeance for impurity of blood was in Loyola's bloodline.

The episode on the road with the "Moor" is a compelling profile of his native character. The Madonna must be avenged not merely because she is his sentimental Lady but also because the "Moor"'s disbelief in her perpetual virginity is the absolute affront to her honor. It is precisely her virginal womb that is the archetype of purity of blood: her blood conceived without stain of original sin and Jesus' blood conceived in hers, unmixed with any other human lineage. This purity exists not only for the Church but especially for the Society of Jesus. Loyola will found his company in the name of Jesus, who received his name at his circumcision, the ritual shedding of his blood in the temple that prefigured the redemptive shedding of his blood on the cross. That blood of the Savior was created in the womb of Mary, the immaculate one, ever virgin, the ultimate guarantor of purity in spiritual lineage. That social and religious complex of values, in which Gothic blood was better than Muslim blood, explains the "Moor"'s affront as the gravest possible. He who lacks purity of blood insults her who is the fountain of all purity of blood.

Although Loyola's mental agitation about the issue tenaciously persists, in the end he lapses into doubt about what he ought to do. The "Moor," who has ridden on, mentioned his destination as a place a little ahead on the same road, quite near to the highway but not intersecting it. Weary of examining what would be the good choice, and of not finding any definite resolution, Loyola decides on this: to let go of the reins of his mule until the crossroads. If the mule should take the road to town, he will seek out the "Moor" and poniard him; if it should choose the highway, he will let the "Moor" go free. Loyola acts upon his thoughts. And God wills that, although the village is only about thirty or forty paces on and the road toward it is very wide and very good, the mule takes to the highway and leaves behind the route to the village and the "Moor."^[72] This is another choice of Hercules at the crossroads.

With it Loyola transcends the agonistic social values of honor and shame and initiates the missionary model for the Society of Jesus as acculturation. No important religious community suffered more in sixteenth-century Spain from the social obsession with purity of blood than the Jesuits. Loyola's intimates Diego Laínez and Juan de Polanco, who served the Society as second General and as personal secretary, were conversos , or converted Jews. Because of the inclusive policy of the Society, its initial attempts to establish in Spain were met from 1551–52 with the hostility of an interdict and with the further penalty of excommunication and fine for anyone assisting their infringement of it. The Jesuits lost many candidates among the Spanish nobility to orders like the Dominicans, who accepted only caballeros. To profess as a Jesuit was to commit "dishonor," to be stained as a "Jew." It was only in 1593 that the Society yielded to the social prejudice and adopted a statute of blood, its first deviation from the Constitutiones as composed by Loyola.^[73] By its rule candidates are still to be questioned about whether they are established Christians or recent converts.^[74]

The medieval Disciplina clericalis , a collection of oriental tales mediated to Christian piety by a converted Spanish Jew, reflected on such traveling as Loyola's in an alien society. "A philosopher said: 'Do not undertake a journey with anyone unless you know him already! If someone that you do not know joins you en route , and enquires after your proposed journey, tell him that you wish to go further than you have decided. If he draws a lance on you, turn to the right and if a sword, turn to the left.'" An Arab admonished, "'My son, if on a journey with a fellow traveller, love him as yourself, and think not to deceive a person, lest you too be deceived.'" Its counsel not to leave the highway also proved prudent by experience. As the Arab continued, "'Follow the main roads even if they are a longer way round than the footpaths.'"^[75]

Loyola's dropped reins are also imitative. In sixteenth-century art Fortune at her wheel was depicted with a bridle around her neck, a bit her mouth, and her reins in God's hand extending from heaven. Or she was emblematized as fallen from a broken wheel attached to heaven by a cord and the motto "Fortune in the world is nothing; God governs all."^[76] Adventure, the hub of chivalric activity in attempting to right wrong, involved the real danger of homicide, just as Loyola meditates. The episode with the "Moor" decisively imitates the judgment in Wolfram von Eschenbach's romance Parzival , in which its celebrated knight also dropped his reins. The action was another type of the choice of Hercules.^[77] Parzival's horse, guided by no man's hand, took him through

a wild, deserted region straight to Munsalvæsche, the castle of the Grail. Later after he failed the test there, his plea for "the highest hand" again to guide his horse led him providentially to the cell of Trevrizent the hermit. The poet celebrated the divine willingness to guide a knight who trusted in him by abandoning his reins. The divine control of Parzival's travels was marvelously revealed in his arrival at the right destination by the wrong paths.^[78] He was guided by the God of the Pilgrims.^[79] The reinless riding also graced him to avoid a tragic encounter in mortal combat with the knights of the Grail, who warded off all intruders to the territory. By his reinless riding Parzival preternaturally penetrated to the castle, while avoiding the enemy and the sin of homicide. God decided for Parzival without bloodshed,^[80] as he does for Loyola.

Loyola thus arrives at a large town where he purchases for the costume he intends to wear to Jerusalem some sackcloth, a pilgrim's staff, and a small gourd. He places it all before the saddlebow of the mule and makes his way to the monastery of Montserrat, musing as usual on the deeds he must perform for the love of God. Since his mind is crammed with the affairs of Amadís de Gaula and similar romances, similar deeds occur to him. He determines to guard his weapons an entire night, neither sitting nor lying but either standing or kneeling, before the celebrated altar of Our Lady of Montserrat. There he intends to divest himself and put on the arms of Christ. Thinking on these proposals, he arrives at the monastery.^[81] He may be imagined, like the noble in Bartolomé Bermejo's panel of the Madonna of Montserrat, utterly devoted.^[82]

After prayer and arrangement with the confessor for pilgrims, he writes down for three days a general confession of sin.^[83] Loyola's act of recollection comprising his recital becomes explicitly confessional as he labors to transfer his sins from the metaphorical tablet of memory to a literal piece of paper. Don Carnal (Lord Flesh) in Libro de buen amor ventured the same, only to be advised by a monk:

"One cannot make confession in a letter or in writing,

But only through the very lips of a sinner who's contrite.

One cannot be absolved or freed of sin by written papers;

Words said to holy confessor are essential to the rite."^[84]

Yet the practice of bringing written notes to confession was recommended for those penitents who confessed infrequently, either by annual obligation or less often.^[85] Its popularity was suggested by the entry in first place in Libro de enxemplos of the moral tale about the bishop who

pardoned a sinner because there were tears on his written confession.^[86] The practice led to abuse, as in the hagiography of the saint whose daily examination of conscience to jot down sins for a weekly confession ran wild. His habit became one of listing sins anywhere, anytime—before a hearth, in his oratory, during studies; even during travel one of his servants carried the discreetly folded scraps of paper detailing his offenses.^[87] At his death a chest was discovered full of his lists of sins.^[88] The practice establishes Loyola's scrupulosity.

Loyola also arranges with the confessor to shelter his mule and to have his sword and poniard hung in the church at the Madonna's altar, in the fashion of a votive offering. On the eve of the feast of Our Lady of March in the year 1522 he steals as secretly as possible to a pauper, before whom he strips and to whom he donates his clothing. Vested in sackcloth as planned, he returns to the Madonna's altar, where he keeps vigil, sometimes kneeling, sometimes standing, with his pilgrim's staff before the gold and polychromed but blackened statue.^[89] Investiture with the arms of Christ was an elaborate topic derived from Ephesians 6:13–18 and developed in Prudentius's Psychomachia , since virtues protected the pilgrim, especially the type of the Christian soldier, from his spiritual enemies.^[90] In Pèlerinage de vie humaine the guide invested the pilgrim not only with scrip and staff, but also with an array of armor: the gambeson of patience, the helmet of temperance, the gorget of sobriety, the gloves of continence, the sword of righteousness, the scabbard of humility, the girdle of perseverance, and the shield of prudence. Only his legs and feet remained unencumbered to facilitate flight from lust. The pilgrim was so burdened that in disgust at the weight of his armor he peevishly cast it all off, down to his drawers and stockings.^[91]

This Marian vigil of Loyola was intimated in his conversation with Gonçalves da Câmara on the vigil of the feast of Our Lady of the Snows. The episode plots the reversal typical of medieval hagiography, in which the sinner became a penitent—as the merchant an almsgiver, or the lecher a eunuch, while the scholar pledged his pen to the Trinity and the knight his sword to Mary. There was the soldier who renounced his profession because of a dream about the pains of hell after he was almost killed in battle. There was the equestrian who exchanged his horse for a donkey and lived a penitential inversion of his worldly adventures. A knight who prayed to the Virgin before a tournament pledged himself to her service as a monk when she favored him in the jousting. A noble was converted from knightly pride to saintly humility; when summoned

to a bishopric, he placed his sword upon the altar in dedication of his life to the Virgin.^[92]

At dawn Loyola departs from the monastery stealthily on foot, traveling not by the road straight to Barcelona, where many would recognize and "honor" him, but detouring to the town of Manresa. There he intends to stay in a hospice for several days and to note some items in his copybook of consolations, which he carries very protectively. Only a league distant from Montserrat a man in hot pursuit overtakes him and questions him whether he has indeed given clothing to a pauper, as the pauper claims. As Loyola responds affirmatively, tears stream from his eyes in compassion for the pauper, for he realizes that his charity has involved the man in an accusation of theft.^[93]

In lives of male saints the occasion of sin was an alien agent (in contrast to lives of female saints, where it was a domestic parasite). A knight's pride was a condition he could shed, like his armor.^[94] Yet such external divestment proves ineffective for Loyola; it only exacerbates his temptation to vainglory. Loyola's social position, although as a soldier in active service he is at the least rank of nobility (caballero ),^[95] involves him in a dilemma. As Montaigne would shrewdly observe, "A man may be humble through vainglory."^[96] The more assiduously Loyola shuns to be seen, the more others regard his asceticism. His tentative experiments in virtue—in keeping his plans secret except to the single confessor at Montserrat, in stealing about in charity to the pauper, or in keeping vigil in prayer to the Madonna under cover of dark—only betray him. And, as much as he flees esteem, he will regret that he is able to do little in Manresa without people remarking great things, as originating in the opinion formed at Montserrat. "Fame increased to declare more than what he was," that he had relinquished quite an income and other rumors.^[97] Since the word "honor" was commonly employed as an equivalent of inheritance or patrimony,^[98] Loyola in abandoning his family renounces not only property but also honor. The resolution of the dilemma about praise will prove to be his recommendation to Gonçalves da Câmara in the garden to "refer everything to God";^[99] that is, not to hide good deeds from the public but to attribute them publicly to grace.

Loyola realizes from the accusation of theft against the pauper that he has only benefited him to his own benefit. His donation of clothing was a conventional token of piety.^[100] It was also a temptation to vainglory. Medieval allegories of the virtues and vices contrasted vainglory with fear of the Lord, representing it artistically by examples reminiscent of the scriptural injunction to secret almsgiving (Matt. 6:1–4). The vain-

glorious man attempted to arouse admiration by showering gifts on a cripple; the God-fearing man, while engaged in conversation with a companion, secretly slipped alms into a beggar's hand.^[101] Before Loyola, such saints of the nobility as Martin of Tours and Francis of Assisi had famously given away their cloaks.^[102] St. Rayner at his conversion removed his clothing in full view of an astonished crowd, gave it to beggars, and had a priest invest him at the altar in a pilgrim's tunic.^[103] The faithful reveled in such tales of the ascetic who shared his cloak or his crust with an even poorer soul,^[104] so that Loyola's gesture was certain, if not calculated, to promote gossip. His charity was common, cheap enough, since cloth was the basic mercantile commodity of that province.^[105] On this spot in the road commences his conversion, however. Its sign is still external but not sackcloth. It is tears. The tears that he had checked, unexpressed in physical pain during the operation on his legs or in spiritual compunction during his general confession, now spill.

Although for centuries it had been a commonplace that it was the monastic vocation to weep,^[106] the devotion was universalized by late medieval piety. It promoted an affective meditation on the passion of Christ and an exorbitant vogue for penitence, as if to remedy the horrific historical calamities of pestilence and war. Although the religious phenomenon of tears was ancient, and even God was precedent (in scripture Jesus wept), the hagiography recorded a profuse and frequent weeping of intense fervor.^[107] The depiction of tears became a contemporary phenomenon. Although weeping was literarily described as an ascetic practice and a spiritual gift, even in medieval manuscript illustrations of sadness other gestures were employed. Weeping was initially indicated by the gesture of a hand or scarf wiping or dabbing at the eyes. Only with the intensely affective devotion to Christ's passion did an artist like Rogier van der Weyden paint a tear rolling like a liquid pearl down a cheek. Yet the saintly faces that wept in paintings were never contorted by their crying, as in actual physiognomy; they remained ideally serene.^[108]

With his tearful release of "compassion" for the innocent pauper, Loyola assumes the role of the hero, for if heroes were limpers, they were also weepers. Tears were not only the gift of saints but also the badge of heroes. There were shed many literary tears: tears of mourners in the consolatory genre, tears of lovers in a variety of poetry and prose, sentimental tears, and even intellectual tears.^[109] Yet tears were particularly heroic. All of the great heroes of the Iliad wept as a sign of an active, energetic, viril suffering. The badge of tears was one of the ele-

ments that constituted their heroic nature. In the Homeric epics masculine tears were never a sign of weakness but a manifestation of force and vitality.^[110] Roman men also wept in a public show of emotion. The nobility approved of an exaggerated and ostentatious display that was artificially induced. Weeping encompassed pleading, repenting, and longing, with the responsive audience also bursting into sympathetic tears.^[111] In the medieval epic the weeping of heroes was commonplace: they wept in impatience and wrath, in discouragement and despair, in tenderness and compassion.^[112] The pages of Loyola's favorite chivalric romance, Amadís de Gaula , are soaked in tears.

Here on the road from Montserrat to Manresa is Loyola's introduction to the complexity of conscientious emotion. In the castle he naively identified, by his responses to his religious fantasies, consolation with good—with the vision of the Madonna effecting in his soul "extreme consolation"—and desolation with evil.^[113] In asceticism certain emotions were identified as moral indicators, as if symptomatic of the presence of good or evil spirits. A traditional criterion for a vision of a good spirit was initially fear, then pleasure and consolation. The test was current, practiced in the interrogations of the Inquisition.^[114] Yet Loyola's conversion from confrontation to compassion disproves that simplistic equation. His emotional sadness, expressed in piteous and remorseful weeping for the pauper, becomes the very sign of his new moral felicity.

Loyola's next place—Manresa—is introduced by cataloguing his ascetic practices. The introduction of his daily begging for alms^[115] follows immediately upon the report of rumors from Montserrat about his fame: how he relinquished a large inheritance.^[116] His begging imitates the topic of vainglory in Augustine's Confessions , which observed that deeds known to men tempt from love of praise, "which gathers approving opinions as a beggar does alms, for the sake of a certain personal importance." The temptation remained active even when reproved by oneself, precisely because it was reproved. As Augustine explained, "Often, a man may become more vainglorious because of his very contempt for vainglory; thus, it is no longer because of contempt for glory that he glories, for when he glories, he does not contemn it."^[117] Loyola's contest with vainglory at Manresa is disclosed during a fever to the point of death. There occurs to him the thought that he is just; he cannot repel it for all his might. When the fever slightly subsides, he implores his nurses, should he again approach death, to shout loudly to him, calling him a sinner and reminding him of his offenses before God.^[118] He echoes

the desert father who, even if the patriarchs should appear and declare to him, "You are just," would lack confidence.^[119] The surfacing of vainglory in Loyola's crisis dramatizes his contest with the vice at the place Manresa.

Because, as was fashionable, Loyola has been quite fastidious in caring for his good head of hair, he decides to let it down "naturally," without grooming it, or cutting it, or covering it with anything by day or night. For the same reason he lets his toenails and fingernails grow, because he has also been neat in manicuring them.^[120] Disdain for the body, signified by letting hair and nails grow freely, was since early medieval accounts a mark of the penitential pilgrim.^[121] Just as Loyola disclosed his physical stature of lameness only in a moral context, however, so is this further detail about his good head of hair not flatly factual but also moral. The historiographic description of personal physique is absent from this text. In epideictic rhetoric the body is less physiological than moral, and its parts all display lessons. In appearance Loyola becomes something of a "wild man," that late medieval literary and artistic invention who differed from other men in the thick coat of hair, filthy and matted with dirt and debris, that covered his entire body. His universal attribute of a club is substituted here with the pilgrim's staff Loyola carries in hand. The wild man personified social outcasts. His iconographic convention of disheveled hair derived from ancient ancestors—in classical mythology from Hercules wearing the pelt of the Nemean lion, brandishing an enormous cudgel, and performing feats of superhuman strength. Hirsute appearance also symbolized a debased mental state, since melancholy was associated with shagginess. The wild man was commonly identified with eremitical saints like Anthony, Onuphrius, Mary Magdalene, and John Chrysostom in penitence.^[122]

Loyola's mimicry of the appearance of the ancient ascetics betrays his puerile misjudgment of spirituality. He punishes external vanities about his body with external penances to it. Long hair and a long beard growing from a serious, pale face were indeed one of the external badges by which a pilgrim could be recognized.^[123] Yet it was not the common decency. As Erasmus instructed in his manual on manners: "It is boorish to go about with one's hair uncombed: it should be neat, but not as elaborate as a girl's coiffure. . . . The hair should neither cover the brow nor flow down over the shoulders. To be constantly tossing the hair with the flick of the head is for frolicsome horses. It is not very elegant to brush back the hair from the forehead with the left hand; it is more discreet to part it with the hand." Hair was also to be clean, free of

nits.^[124] As for Loyola's lack of manicure, it was considered medically important to clean one's nails, for dirt under them was dangerous when scratching at vermin. The practice at table of taking food from a common dish with the hands (the fork as an eating utensil existed in the sixteenth century only among the upper classes as a luxury)^[125] also suggests that Loyola's asceticism is not socially nice. His practices are so obviously countercultural that his appearance is certain to be noticed as vainglorious. In Libro de buen amor the fate of Nebuchadnezzar for his vainglory was to grow long fingernails.^[126]

Loyola's decision not to cover his head involves the value that initiated the text: honor. To expose the head was an offense to honor. The ritualistic bestowal of honor in his culture centered on the head of the protagonist, as in the crowning of the king to whom all honor ascended and from whom all honor descended socially. The payment of honor in daily life was through the offering of precedence and through the demonstrations of respect associated with the head, as to whether it was bowed, touched, covered or uncovered. Dishonor was also a heady affair, as in the decapitation of criminals or in the practice Jesuit missionaries would witness: scalping.^[127] Hats were so important in designating social status that even naked persons—in the tub or in hellfire—were artistically depicted with them still on.^[128] Hats were doffed, exchanged, demanded, stolen, and knocked off.^[129] There were laws and penalties in the Spanish kingdoms for the provocative tousling—even touching—of hair; for men violating the taboo of the wifely toque; for women grabbing the hair or beard of men; and for women uncovering a married woman's head and revealing her hair, so demeaning her to the status of a girl (manceba en cabellos ). Such humiliations were affronts to honor.^[130]

Loyola down the road will commit such an affront to honor and later correct one. En route from Ferrara to Genoa he is arrested as a suspected spy and taken for interrogation to the captain of the guards in a town. He determines not to show him any mark of respect, even to take his hat off to him. The result is that he is judged a "madman" and "brainless."^[131] (He was not unique in his affront: Michelangelo used to keep his hat on in the presence of popes and was judged barbarous for it.)^[132] The affront about the head that Loyola addresses concerns the common practice in his native region of mistresses of the clergy shamelessly covering their heads for public acceptance as wives. He persuades the governor to legislate the just punishment of such offenders, so that the abuse begins to be eliminated by his intervention.^[133] It was the Spanish custom regarding an adulteress to tear off her headdress at the city gates.^[134]

Loyola's decision not to cover his head with anything by day or by night is an election of social dishonor. The sentiment that regulated the laws governing fame and infamy, as yielding honor and dishonor, was the sense of shame. Shame as the basis for an honorable life included not only sexual modesty but also reverence for the law, respect for parents, courtesy in address, and personal neatness in dress.^[135] Loyola is deliberately being shameless, courting personal dishonor and social infamy. Yet his self-humiliation, invested in external appearance, proves not necessarily to be humility. Moralists censured as vanity, even vainglory, the excessive attention of males to grooming and admiring the self in a mirror. As Petrarch reminisced with his brother, "What should I say about the curling irons and the care we took of our hair? . . . What fear we felt that a single hair might fall out of place or that a light breeze might spoil our elaborate coiffures." Torture by pirates was preferable to the cruel pain inflicted by hairdressing. It was better to have hair neatly combed and gathered out of eyes and ears. Primping was the vanity of youths eager to be pleasing in the eyes of others, to be conspicuously pointed out by people saying, in the words of Seneca, "'There he goes.'"^[136]

Yet Seneca also argued the opposite. The subject of hair, which Loyola lets down "naturally," introduces a famous moral, the tonsorial topic. Among the ancient Stoics an index of a rigorist orientation was attitude toward matters tonsorial, with policy on hair indicating a general stance on the spectrum from asceticism to moderation. Epictetus and Musonius asserted that cosmetic practices such as cutting the hair and shaving the beard were unnatural and thus should be avoided. Seneca, who adopted a more moderate ethical position, criticized such unwillingness to resort to a barber and any other bizarre example of personal appearance. A man should be clean-shaven with neatly trimmed hair on his head and depilated armpits. As he argued with wit and acuity, the slob may be just as much a poseur as the fop. An unconventional appearance might mask a perverted desire for self-display. Such behavior, moreover, was unreasonable for the philosopher since it might alienate his audience. Deliberate lack of grooming by a sage was a sign neither of virtue nor of common sense. Christian theologians decisively shifted the original focus of this doctrine by applying it primarily to the censure of women and their vanities. Augustine, however, baptized it by immersion, rinsing every Stoic stain. In a handbook for some unruly monks in his diocese he criticized them for wearing their hair long. He accused them of masking their vices hypocritically by imitating the tonsorial practice of the

Judaic priesthood. He exhorted them to examine their souls, reform their lives, and cut their hair as a sign of humility.^[137] It was classical morality that excessive carelessness was as reprehensible as excessive care.^[138] With experience, Loyola matures toward such moderation. After he begins to be consoled by God and to see fruit in the souls for whom he is caring, he abandons his ascetic "extremes." He cuts his hair and nails.^[139] Loyola's moral reform is exemplified in the Constitutiones . Jesuits are to maintain a good appearance, the better to edify others. Ugly men are constitutionally excluded from the Society,^[140] in an application of the convention that ugliness was wickedness.^[141]

Later, after Loyola's recovery from a violent illness that left him weak and subject to stomachaches, the ladies who have nursed him to health insist that he dress properly against the severity of the winter: clothing, hat, and shoes. They make him accept two brown doublets of bulky cloth and a matching cap.^[142] Clothing was the body of the body and from it could be inferred a person's character, as instructed in Erasmus's manual on civility.^[143] The function of a garment was traditionally to contribute to the making of a self-conscious, individual image, associated with all the other imaginative and idealized visualizations of the human body. Clothing derived its visual authenticity and importance from figurative art, so that a garment was more like a painting than like other household objects such as a chair. Personal preoccupation with the details of one's clothing indicated among the moralists a shallow heart and dull mind. Yet clothes were metaphors and illustrations. Clothes did not make the man but they were the image of the man. Clothes were like the conventions of literature whose canon had been assimilated by the public. They were a form of visual fiction.^[144]

The early Christian artists borrowed from the clothes and attitudes of Roman statesmen and seers. They depicted Christ and the apostles in classical drapery, a convention that persisted in medieval practice and became codified as the suitable dress for holy persons. Renaissance artists developed this convention with an even more faithful imitation of antiquity, so that the long loose tunic with wide sleeves and a cloak slung over it was considered the correct dress for Jesus, the angels, and the saints. The adaptation associated draped cloth and lofty ideals. That idealization concealed the human body as wretched and silly, while conferring an ennobling and decorative dimension to it. Artists used cloth in such emphatic and expressive ways—for which there was a vogue in Spain—that the very presence of drapery, even in a portrait, inferred the solemnity of religion or allegory.^[145]

When Loyola purchases cloth and has it made for his pilgrimage to Jerusalem into a long loose garment, in which he vests for the vigil at Montserrat,^[146] he is in this idealized tradition of drapery. His was not the proper outfit for pilgrims to Jerusalem, who wore a tunic called a sclavina , a red cross, a cincture, and sandals.^[147] The other usual attire of pilgrimage was a scrip, a soft pouch, usually of leather, for belongings; a staff; and, by then, a great broadbrim turned up at front.^[148] Loyola is projecting the image of a holy man, although his garment to the feet is only covering up the scarred legs on which he spiritually, as well as physically, limps. He eschews the basic item in the renaissance male wardrobe, the shirt. It was a simple rectangle, which could be of fine white cloth or of coarse heavy material like linen or hemp. Since it was worn next to the skin, hygiene depended on this garment, which could be washed frequently, unlike lined overgarments of wool or silk. Pilgrims to Jerusalem from Venice were advised to take three or four dozen shirts to provide them with a fresh garment for each day of the journey.^[149]

Castiglione noted that sobriety was characteristic of the Spaniards in clothing.^[150] Personal neatness and proper dress were part of the national sentiment of shame as allied with honor.^[151] Yet Loyola's purchase of cloth sufficient for only one garment, necessarily worn daily, is austere. Even the basic monastic rule provided for a nightly change of clothing.^[152] Loyola's singular robe is certain to be smelled as well as seen. Erasmus wrote on manners that clothing should not be conspicuous by its shabbiness.^[153] There was parallel to the tonsorial topic the sartorial topic, in which disarrayed clothing, like disheveled hair, signified not wisdom but vainglory. In the Spanish kingdoms social distinctions were apparent in dress to display rank, so that since medieval times there were sumptuary laws against excessive personal expenditure on appearance.^[154] Dressing finely was considered among moralists a sign of vainglory.^[155] Yet so could dressing shabbily.

Although Loyola's vestment in sackcloth divests him of the social status of the soldier, it invests him in the superior status of the ascetic. He spends less money on sackcloth than on silk but gains in stature by his apparent imitation of the saints. With the acceptance of the doublets Loyola acquires some sense about religiosity, if only on the authoritative orders of confessors and nurses. He is still concerned about self-image, as betrayed by his recital of the details of the color and texture of the cloth, and even the fashion of the coordinated doublet and cap. Spanish confessional manuals declared that if a male sought, or even spoke about, novel fashions, so as to appear more excellent than others or so

that others should notice him, it was a sin.^[156] His cap, especially a knitted beret, was merely fashionable. The doublet was condemned by moralists, because as a short, tight garment that did not cover the buttocks and genitals, it necessitated the wearing of hosiery—and worse, the codpiece. Males in doublets seemed to the imagination nearly naked.^[157]

The women who so invest him are identified as "important ladies" (señoras principales ). This identification is a guard and a guarantee of his chastity, for they must nurse him during the night at his bedside. After his ordination upon entry into Rome, Loyola will counsel his companions, "'We must always be on our guard and hold no conversations with women, unless they be noble matrons'" (donne illustri ). The misogynist topic is extended by examples of how two Jesuit advisors to women were deceived. One woman became pregnant, although the confessor was absolved from suspicion when the father was discovered; another woman was caught in fornication.^[158] The assault of the lewd woman on the celibate male was a standard topic of medieval hagiography. Chastity under trial was a form of spiritual heroism the hagiographers relished, dwelling on the length and persistence of the temptations, the voluptuousness of the women, and the difficulty of resisting their advances. The stories were often shallow and even prurient but could never be repeated often enough. Celibate males were typified as delectable prizes, not only for lewd prostitutes but even for respectable matrons. Women were portrayed as inflamed by their innocence and so as schemers of their seduction. In this drama of trial and victory the women were stock figures of conventional behavior, while the men were individual characters whose tension and torment were rendered so vividly as to emphasize the heroism of their resistance.^[159]

Besides his austere dress, Loyola at Manresa also abstains from meat and wine, except for a little wine on Sundays, if offered.^[160] Hagiography carefully noted a saint's rigorous observance of ritual abstinence and fasting, for a single lapse could reveal in the popular mind a failure or imposter.^[161] In the Spanish kingdoms the man who drank wine was the definition of the bourgeois, although wine was often drunk mixed with water, or too frequently adulterated with lime, salt, or plaster. The common diet of the poor was chick peas, locust beans, asparagus, spinach, and lentils.^[162] Once after Loyola fasts for a week without even a bite to eat, a confessor orders him to break the fast; he obeys, although he feels strong enough to maintain it. His firm perseverance in abstinence is interrupted one morning upon rising by an apparition of some meat to eat, just as if he had seen it with his bodily eyes. Although he has ex-

perienced no previous desire for it, a great assent of will comes to him from now on to eat meat, which he determines without a doubt to do. When a confessor instructs him to examine the matter, to determine whether the apparition was a temptation, Loyola's thorough deliberation convinces him that it was not.^[163] His certainty is reminiscent of Dante's belief at the gate of purgatory that at dawn the mind is most unencumbered by flesh and becomes almost prophetic in its vision.^[164]

On another issue Loyola also arrives at his own decision. Often when he retires to bed, great information comes to him, great consolation, so that he loses much of the slight time he has allotted for sleeping. He reflects that he has decided on so much time for relating to God in the seven hours of the daily office, then the remainder of the day for thinking about those divine subjects he has meditated upon or read. He doubts whether these nocturnal notices come from a good spirit and he arrives at the conclusion that it would be better to forsake them and to get the appointed sleep. He does this.^[165] This is a conscious rejection of traditional ascetic vigilance against the devil on the prowl. In their vigilance, or in their vanity, some ascetics hardly slept, while others slept on stones or thorns.^[166]

Yet Loyola's bedevilment is his "many troubles with scruples" concerning sacramental confession. Although he made at Montserrat a general confession in writing with sufficient diligence, still it sometimes seems to him that he has not confessed certain sins. This concern greatly afflicts him, because, although he confesses them, he remains unsatisfied. Loyola begins to search for some spiritual guides who might remedy these scruples, but nothing helps him. A very spiritual doctor of the Seo, a preacher at the cathedral church, finally tells him one day in confession to write down everything he can remember. Loyola does this; but, after having confessed these sins, all the scruples return, splitting hairs, so that he is very upset. Although he recognizes that these scruples are harming him greatly, and that it would be good to free himself from them, he is unable to get rid of them himself. He sometimes thinks that the remedy would be for his confessor to order him in the name of Jesus Christ never to confess to him anything of past matters. He wishes that the confessor would indeed so order him but he does not have the audacity to tell that to the confessor.^[167] In his immaturity of conscience Loyola has a problem with external authorities, notably confessors as judges, which will afflict him until he summons "audacity": not to speak his desire to them so that they might order his conscience, but to speak his will to himself so that he might order it for himself.

Yet his confessor does order him to not confess anything of past matters, unless it is something very clear. Since Loyola considers everything very clear, this command is of no avail, and he remains continually troubled. At this time he is located in a small room the Dominicans have granted him in their "monastery." There he perseveres kneeling for the seven hours of the divine office, rising continually in the middle of the night, and in the rest of his exercises. In all of these practices he finds no remedy for his scruples, which have tormented him for many months now. Once in great tribulation from them he places himself in prayer with such fervor that he begins to cry aloud to God saying, "Lord, help me, who finds no remedy among men or in any creature. If I should think it findable, no trouble would be great to me. Show me yourself, Lord, where I might find it; and, even if it should be necessary to follow a puppy for the remedy, I shall do it."^[168] Animals in folklore befriended the saints, as in the example of the jackal who led lost holy men out of the wilderness.^[169] Loyola's bargain to trot even after a puppy for the remedy is, however, an irony about the Dominicans with whom he lodges. They were popularly called "the dogs of the Lord" (Dominicanes ). The mother of their founder, Dominic, had dreamed in pregnancy that she bore a small dog with a lighted torch in his mouth, with which at birth he set the world on fire.^[170] Loyola's quip participates in a broad tradition of antifraternal satire provoked by their privileges and practices, including the contentious usurpation of confession from the pastoral care of the parish priests, and especially of cases reserved for episcopal absolution.^[171] He expresses disdain for the Dominican "dogs" who fail to guide him by his bargain with God to follow even a "puppy."

Disturbed by scrupulosity, Loyola is frequently visited by very impulsive temptations "to cast himself from a lofty pinnacle that his room had and that was near to the place where he used to pray."^[172] This Dominican "monastery" (monasterio ) is a curious place, since those friars have never lived in monasteries but rather in convents (convento ; in Catalan, convent ).^[173] The specification that the Dominicans allowed the cell to Loyola renders intelligible his critical prayer there about the "puppy." Although in modern Spanish the text translates that Loyola is tempted to throw himself "from a large hole" (de un agujero grande ) that his little room had, this rendition is illogical. He could only throw himself "into" (en, dentro ) such a hole.

Loyola's "little room" (camarilla ) imitates the place of the meditation in Augustine's Confessions that disclosed his fascination with the phantasm of vanity. Augustine discovered there that the search for external

joy led to vanities rather than to enlightenment. That conversion took place, he said, "in the interior of my private little room" (cubili ); that is, in his heart.^[174] The place of Loyola's perilous temptation in his imitative "little room" is not "a large hole," as in the extant text, but "a lofty pinnacle." The modern philological difference is slight—from agujero to aguja —but the significant difference is substantial. An agujero is, besides a "hole" or "dugout," a maker or seller of the aguja . This item (aguja ) is a "needle." The meaning of the two words was conflated in sixteenth-century discourse, as is evident from the other occurrence of agujero in the text. When after his pilgrimage Loyola resumes the ascetic practices of Manresa, he makes in the soles of his shoes a "pinpoint" (agujero ), which gradually widens until only the uppers remain.^[175] The term agujero meant originally not just any hole, such as a human body might hurl itself into, but the particular hole made by a needle when sewing. It is this connotation that resolves the puzzle, for an aguja , or "needle," was also a "spire" or "steeple," such as that of a church.

The notion of a pinnacle in Loyola's cell, or near the place where he prays, may seem physically odd but it is rhetorically coherent. The epideictic genre is not invented from the factuality of geographical places but from the propriety of topical places. Loyola's allusion by his temptation is to those hermitic heroes of the desert whom he mimics in his religious practices, the stylites. Those anchorites, a phenomenon of Eastern asceticism in the early medieval age, lived on top of lofty pillars or columns. It is precisely Loyola's vainglorious ambition to ascend to perfection, as symbolized by such a height of sanctity as a pinnacle, that involves him in scrupulosity. He is a perfectionist at religiosity. In his self-righteousness he cannot accept sacramental absolution for sin but must justify himself remorselessly in his conscience by its own moral work: relentless examination and confession of every imagined fault.

Asceticism was traditionally motivated not only by expiation or devotion but also by competition. The athletic model of the stylites evidenced this agonistic spirit in recording austerities, contending in mortifications, and boasting in achievements.^[176] Anthropologically asceticism might be explained as seeking social status:^[177] favor from God as "grace" and so honor among people. The eremitical literature was populated with vainglorious sinners. The originator of the scheme of the seven vices, Evagrius, was himself blamed in the Lausiac history as "intoxicated with vainglory." In another tale a virgin in sackcloth was immured for six years, denying all pleasures. Yet she succumbed to lust "because of her overweening pride . . . because she had practiced asce-

ticism for the sake of human applause rather than for religious purposes and out of the love of God." As the author concluded, "Vainglory and evil intentions are the cause of that." Then there was an anchorite living in a cave "deluded in dreams by the madness of vainglory." Although he chastised his body, "his thinking powers were utterly deranged by the great evil of vainglory."^[178]

In yet another tale the devil deceived a vainglorious monk into believing that he was angelic, too good to partake of the Eucharist. By this sign the other ascetics recognized his delusion. They fettered him for a year in chains and converted him through prayer and the prescription of ordinary occupation. The incident was included as a caution against inflation in virtue, for even virtue, when not perfected with the right intention, might occasion a fall. As the summary moralized, "We have commemorated men and women who aimed at the highest virtue, but who in many cases were pulled down toward the deep pit of hell by vainglory, the so-called mother of pride. The perfection of asceticism which they had desired, and for which they had struggled and worked so hard for so long a time, was lost in one minute by pride and self-esteem."^[179]

Loyola's temptation to hurl himself down from the pinnacle is not generated by despondency, although he sometimes experiences desolation. Anxiety was integral to the formation of early modern culture, as society struggled to cope with the dissolution of medieval boundaries.^[180] The case of Luther's scrupulosity was historic. He universalized in medieval fashion his fault as Everyman's fault and his remedy of justification by faith as Everyman's remedy. Yet Loyola's experience was different, as expressed in this epideictic rhetoric. Despondency was itself differently understood: it was the capital sin of sloth (acedia ). Independent of external circumstances, independent of will, sloth was a phenomenon of estrangement from a world void of significance. It was experienced as the spiritual vacuity of a soul deprived of interest in action, life, and the world, whether this world or the next. The immediate consequence of the encounter with nothingness, it had as its immediate effect a disaffection with reality. A sudden incursion, it was sometimes identified as a disease, sometimes as a vice. As the malady of the monasteries it was a syndrome of four principal symptoms: the predominance of melancholy, restlessness of place, loathing, and vague sorrow. Other symptoms were obsession with death, lack of involvement, monotony, immobility, and distorted perception of time and space. Although originating in the soul, it produced a paralysis of both soul and

body, thought and action. Spiritually there was indifference to duties and obligations; mentally, a lack of emotion leading to boredom, rancor, apathy, inertia, or sluggish thought. Physically there was cessation of motion and indifference to work, yielding the laziness, idleness, and indolence that defined sloth.^[181]

In this withdrawal from society and service there was an aimless drifting of the mind, a restlessness of spirit, nagging anxiety, and spiritual despondency. The vacuity of a nameless woe promoted an indifference that led to a disgust for the spiritual and an abhorrence of its good. Morose joylessness promoted despair and suggested suicide in the movement by which vague disinterest led to total abnegation. The psychological concatenation in which one vice generated another yielded in scholasticism to a profound analysis of moral acts in which the vices gnawed at the roots of the appetitive faculty. With Thomas Aquinas's definition of sloth as the theological vice—the aversion to spiritual good—it lost its attachment to the monastic class. Sloth became secularized from the spiritual inappetence of the monk to the ordinary laziness of the laity. It became a popular image of external idleness in religious observance, with the sleeping apostles as its iconography. The vice that had entered eremitical literature to tempt the monk with disgust of the cell now prowled the whole world in search of lay victims.^[182]

Loyola on the pinnacle is not the victim of that nameless woe. He is, like the moral limper, enlightened in his intellect although disordered in his will. He states that his demon is scrupulosity and he knows that its remedy is not to confess again any past sins. The remedies for sloth were different. Its physical phenomena of idleness and somnolence were to be cured by manual labor; its spiritual phenomena of intellectual sluggishness, lack of fervor, and tedium were to be cured by practicing fortitude and nourishing hope.^[183] Loyola is active, even eager, in seeking the remedy for his scruples.

He is not tempted to leap from the pinnacle by sloth as despair. The prostration of the self on the ground, especially in sackcloth such as Loyola wears, was a scriptural gesture of penitence. Yet hurling oneself to the ground, or merely falling to it, was not in medieval or renaissance cultures an act of suicide. Violence to the self in despair, or in fear, was a motif that emerged early in fourteenth-century art in scenes of the judgment of the damned and later was expressed in those of the expulsion from paradise and the lamentation for the crucified Christ. The gestures of despair involved not the feet but the hands: the biting of the back of the hand, the pulling open of the mouth with the fingers, and

the laceration of the cheeks with the fingernails.^[184] It was a classical declamatory exercise in the schools to develop the topic of the father who poisoned a son so mad that he bit and rent his own flesh.^[185] Margery Kempe, in the initial English "autobiography," was tormented during puerperal fever with visions of devils with flaming mouths. "She would have destroyed herself many a time at their stirrings and have been damned with them in Hell, and in witness thereof, she bit her own hand so violently, that the mark was seen all her life after." Quite "out of her senses" she tore at her breast with her fingernails.^[186] Loyola conformed to that convention of manual expression for the emotion of grief when during the surgery on his legs he tightly clenched his fists.^[187]

Suicide was considered since Prudentius's Psychomachia the work of wrath (ira ), not despair (acedia ).^[188] Its iconographic type, derived from the stabbing in that text, was the sword plunged through the body.^[189] The popular exemplar in renaissance art was Lucretia's suicide following her rape.^[190] Although male suicide was rarely depicted,^[191] it was also a stabbing.^[192] As Leonardo da Vinci recorded in his notebooks, "How to Represent a Man in Despair: You must show a man in despair with a knife, having already torn open his garments, and with one hand tearing open the wound."^[193] Its iconography was definitely not the human body plunging through space into a hole on the ground.

Falling from a height was rather the archetypal act of pride. The inversion of a person in space headfirst was a powerful semiotic strategy of the medieval artist to negate that figure. Inversion related to the original fall of the angels and of humans; it was also applied to the toppling of tyrants, the subjugation of idols, and the overcoming of vices.^[194] In the medieval equation of stability with order and instability with chaos artists portrayed evildoers in such disequilibrium. A treatise on virtue and vice, Friar Laurent's Somme le roi , juxtaposed a falling Orguel Ocozias (2 Kings 1:2) with humility. The initial for that verse in other biblical manuscripts perpetuated the motif. The fall of Saul from his horse on the road to Damascus was also blamed on pride, and he was depicted in the ridiculous posture of an inverse body, headfirst.^[195] Falling represented the essential dehumanization of the upright stance.^[196] Defamatory paintings of civic enemies on the walls of Florentine public buildings portrayed them hanging upside down. It was a denigrating pose, a standard form for depicting culprits. The figure upside down as a symbol of infamy dated to antiquity, and the damned in hell were so painted in Giotto's Last Judgment.^[197]

Loyola had practiced the upright stance in his initial prayer of star-

gazing. Now at prayer he is tempted to fall down. The inventor of the scheme of the capital vices wrote that pride conducted to the gravest fall, by inciting the soul not to recognize the grace of God but to believe itself the cause of its good actions.^[198] Proverbially, "Pride goes before a fall." Loyola's temptation to fall belongs to the topic of pride, not despair. The generation of his scrupulosity from the vice of vainglory is patent from the place of the pinnacle in the paradigmatic temptation. That was not the temptation of the stylites but of Jesus himself. After his baptism Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where he fasted and was tempted in recapitulation of the experiences of the Israelites in the desert. In the second temptation the devil took him to Jerusalem and placed him on the pinnacle of its temple. He commanded Jesus to throw himself down, for if he was indeed the Son of God the angels would bear him up before he dashed his foot against the ground. Jesus rebuked him with the saying against tempting the Lord (Matt. 4:1–7).

In medieval theology the temptation of Jesus was paralleled with the temptation of Adam and interpreted according to the tripartite division of evil as "the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life" (1 John 2:16). In an association of sins with the process of sinning the lust of the flesh was gluttony and suggestion, the lust of the eyes was avarice and delectation, and the pride of life was vainglory and consent. The devil had tempted Adam with vainglory when he promised him that he would be like God. The temptation of Jesus to cast himself down from the pinnacle of the temple was also to vainglory. The pride of life was equated in Augustine's Confessions with concupiscence of the eyes, thus with being noticed as vainglory. The exegetical tradition was established by Gregory the Great in his homilies and endorsed by Peter Lombard in his Sententiae and Thomas Aquinas in his Summa theologiae .^[199] Bernard of Clairvaux in a sermon on conversion cautioned vigilance for "any of you who have climbed up to the pinnacle of the temple," especially the clergy. "How ungrateful, indeed how harmful, to the great mystery of ungodliness you are, if you consider godliness a means to gain. How unfaithful to him who consecrated this ministry by his own blood, if in it you seek your own glory, which is nothing; if you look after your own interests and not those of Jesus Christ." Throwing oneself down to earthly things was an unworthy response to the divine condescension that made humans sublime by the dispensation of his humility. "All those who cast themselves down from the heights of virtue to the void of vainglory and seek their own satisfaction, offend the Lord

of hosts instead of thanking him when he bore among us so very much in order to impress on us the likeness of holiness."^[200] The comparison was taught in such popular manuals for the laity as Specchio di croce , available in Catalan as Mirall de la creu , by the Dominican known as "the hospitaler," Domenico Cavalca. He stated that the temptation for Jesus to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple was to vainglory and that its moral was not to perform miracles but to pursue the good life.^[201]

The rhetoric of place clarifies the coherence of the exegesis, since a pinnacle and vainglory are both lofty positions. The traditional exegesis also clarifies Loyola's rebuke to Gonçalves da Câmara in the tower about the comportment of his eyes: "'Obey the rule!'" The three temptations were paralleled by the three vows. In monastic renunciation of "the world" the lust of the flesh was countered by chastity, the lust of the eyes by poverty, and the pride of life or vainglory by obedience.^[202] Obedience to the rule of the Society of Jesus is the essential jurisdical remedy to Gonçalves da Câmara's vainglory; that explains Loyola's insistence on the issue. Medieval institutions also offered ideologies to reckon with the tripartite pleasure, property, and fame for those who could, or would, not resolve the temptations of the world with vows. Those were courtly love for the lust of the flesh, feudalism for the lust of the eyes, and chivalry for the pride of life or vainglory.^[203] Loyola's chivalry at religion, epitomized in his vigil before the Madonna of Montserrat, is a secularized renunciation of vainglory.

Loyola is often tempted impulsively to throw himself down from its great pinnacle. Recognizing that it is a mortal sin to get killed, he changes his mind and shouts, "'Lord, I shall do nothing to offend you.'" He repeats these words frequently and also his bargain to follow a puppy for the remedy.^[204] His cry imitates the rebuke of Jesus to the devil in the desert not to tempt him. The decision to fall or not to fall, as into a well or over a precipice, was also a philosophical example of moral decision. Aristotle illustrated with it the universal formation of unqualified judgments from this judgment that one course of action was better and the other worse,^[205] a type of the choice of Hercules.

There occurs to Loyola the story of a saint who, to obtain from God something he greatly desired, fasted for many days until he succeeded. Loyola considers this for a long time and decides to imitate him, either until he obtains his desire or until the verge of death, at which extremity he would ask for bread and eat it. This is the fast his confessor orders him to break. Upon compliance, the following day he finds himself free

of scruples. The next day at prayer they return, however, as he begins to remember his sins and lapses into musing from sin to sin of his past life. It again seems to him that he is obliged to confess them. At the conclusion of these thoughts there come upon him loathings for the life he has and impulses to quit it.^[206] This is now the malady of the monasteries, the sin of the place, acedia , or sloth.

Loyola experiences its temptation second, during or a little before the suspicious consolation of a beautiful serpentine form hovering in midair. Sloth comes to him as a rigorous "thought" (pensamiento ), replicating Evagrius Ponticus's term (logismos ) for the seven capital vices. This thought bothers him by representing the difficulty of his vocation, by reproaching him within his soul, "And how will you be able to suffer this life the seventy years you have to live?" Sensing that the voice is the enemy, Loyola responds forcefully within, "O wretched one! Are you able to promise one hour of life?" He thus vanquishes the temptation and remains quiet and he experiences great consolation in daily high Mass and sung vespers. Yet later he begins to experience great variations of soul—sometimes so insipid that he finds no enjoyment in any prayer, sometimes its sudden contrary—so that he seems to have lost the sadness and desolation as a cape drops from a man's shoulders. With such alternations Loyola considers that the Lord wishes to awaken him, as if from a dream. Loyola reverts to the experience he has already had of the diversity of spirits and its divine lessons. He begins to regard the means by which this spirit of sloth came to him and he determines to himself with great clarity no longer to confess anything of the past. That very day he remains free from scruples, certain that the Lord has willed to deliver him by his mercy.^[207] Although this remedy for scrupulosity was ordered by his confessor, deliverance is only achieved by Loyola's examination of his own experience and formation of his own judgment to accept it—rather than acceptance of external authority as normative.

There are five particular "points" of experience, in conformity with the classical mnemonic practice of marking divisions at five,^[208] which show Loyola how God is tutoring him as a schoolmaster does a child. They are pointers, like the apparition of the meat that convinced him to discontinue his ascetic practice of abstinence. Loyola explains that he does not know why God should have treated him so—whether because of his rough and homespun native wit, or because he had no one else to teach him, or because of the firm will that God himself had given him to serve him. Yet he clearly judged then, and still does judge, that God treated him in that manner. If he doubted it he used to think he was

offending the divine majesty.^[209] All of the points are visual; the first is only apparently aural.

This initial point concerns the Trinity. Because Loyola is very devoted to the Trinity, he recites a daily prayer to each person, then one to the Trinity itself. The question occurs to him: Why four prayers to the Trinity? Yet it troubles him little, as of no importance. One day, as he is reciting on the monastery steps the Hours of Our Lady, his understanding begins to be elevated to see the most holy Trinity in the figure of three keys. He experiences this with such weeping and sobbing that he is unable to esteem himself. In this state he joins a procession issuing from the monastery and he is unable to check his tears until mealtime, after which he cannot stop talking about the Trinity with many and diverse comparisons and with much enjoyment and consolation. For his entire life there perdures this impression of feeling great devotion when praying to the Trinity.^[210]

The philology of the "keys" (teclas ) connotes a musical instrument and suggests a theological interpretation such as the harmonization of the Trinitarian persons in one composition. The philology of Loyola's emotional reaction, however, which was traditionally itself the key to interpreting visionary experience, indicates the more common keys (llaves ) that were tools to open locked barriers. Loyola's reaction is such weeping and sobbing that he is unable to value himself, to esteem himself, to consider himself of merit (no se podía valer ). The context of that recital is Loyola's scrupulosity concerning the validity of sacramental confession.

There was a traditional relationship between spiritual visions and images meditated, especially in private piety.^[211] An example of art tutoring devotion that Loyola would have experienced was the retable of the Holy Spirit by the brothers Jaume and Pere Serra in Manresa's Seo, or cathedral church. Its titular patroness is the Virgen del Alba (Dawn), whose rosary is recited on the feast of Our Lady of the Snows, the date of the seminal conversation between Gonçalves da Câmara and Loyola.^[212] The retable was composed of twenty-four tables and thirty-six small figures painted on the uprights. Its scenes devolved in perfect order, like an open book that the congregation could read in exposition of the mysteries of salvation.^[213]

Images of the Trinity in art and theology did not involve keys. The usual Spanish mode in that period for symbolizing the Trinity was God the Son as crucified in the arms of the Father with the Spirit hovering as a dove.^[214] The Trinity in the Seo on which Loyola could have medi-

tated was an altarpiece painted in 1501 by Gabriel Guardia, a native. It represents the Trinity in accordance with the specifications of the donor, as God the Father supporting the crucified Christ and the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son together. The solid frontal arrangement of the group is exemplary of the Spanish artistic delight in the hieratic, iconic form, a tradition originating in the Pantokrator of the Romanesque basilica, continuing through Bermejo's retable at Santo Domingo de Silos, and concluding in this painting. Most distinguished of the figures is the bearded head of the Father with a halo in three points; he is enthroned holding the cross of the crucified Son in his extended palms.^[215]

The persons of the deity in the painting all assume the posture of the letter Y . Its three branches are forked in the middle. The legs of Christ are smartly straight and his arms upstretched, with no sagging at the joints as in some scenes of crucifixion. Above his halo is the Spirit in the form of a dove, again with its erect body as the central form and its flanking wings upstretched as in the forks of a Y . This figure emerges from the breast of the Father as if by spiration. The Father forms an inverse Y , with his imposing body and arms outstretched downward to almost join with Christ's. The total effect of this juncture is a horizontal diamond. The Pythagoreans symbolized morality by the letter Y , the two branches of which represented virtue and vice, a figure adopted for the choice of Hercules.^[216] It was frequently interpreted as a tree, as in the golden bough of Aeneas, and depicted as a bifurcated cross. The head of Christ typically inclined right toward the choice of virtue,^[217] as in this retable.^[218] Erasmus noted in a colloquy that the hanging of Christ's head to his right shoulder was a commonplace.^[219]

It is such a moral, rather than intellectual, interpretation of the Trinity that informs Loyola's consolation by the keys. The ascetic who invented the concept of the seven vices stated that the contemplation of the Trinity was the first natural contemplation.^[220] The philology (teclas ) of the text suggests that Loyola's experience is a theological resolution to his speculation about why there are three prayers to the persons of the Trinity, then a fourth to its Unity. Yet his recital is episodic, not causal; it locates incidents under the Trinitarian topic. The inclusion of the remembrance about Trinitarian prayer is moral in import. Loyola does not praise himself as speculative, inquiring into a sublime mystery, but he does blame himself as scrupulous, reducing it to a juggle of numbers. He decides that the issue of how many prayers to say is unimportant and he dismisses it. The confessional context in which he relates this first point

establishes its moral meaning. His emotional reaction, traditionally a key to evaluating visions, emphasizes this. He weeps and sobs and is unable to value himself. The historical context of his experience also indicates a moral meaning, for the theological talk of the continent in the early 1520s was not speculation on the Trinity but argumentation on merit. Another scrupulous soul, Luther, had pitched the question of the remission of sin to an international conflict, ecclesiastical and civic.

Keys were a scriptural metaphor for power (Is. 22:22; Rev. 3:7–8). They were not the property of the Trinity but they were the attribute of saints. The Madonna was the bearer of the key to open the gates of heaven.^[221] St. Peter was entrusted keys, as famously reproduced in Perugino's fresco in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican.^[222] In a Catalan altar painting Peter holds in his left hand a key so large that it extends from his waist to the tip of his halo.^[223] In another Peter with his right hand raised holds two keys, while with his left he grasps a soul uplifted to him by an angel. A small naked soul with hands folded in prayer looks up in yet another example to Peter, whose raised left hand holds two large keys extending from the bottom of his beard to the tip of his halo.^[224] Jesus by tradition entrusted to Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven, the power of loosing and binding, of forgiving or retaining sins (Matt. 16:19). These are the keys of Loyola's understanding about the Trinity. Peter has already intervened as the saint at whose intercession Loyola begins to recover at the point of death from the injuries and surgeries to his legs.^[225] Now his presence is intimated to enlighten and console him in his penitential tribulations.

Authorities on that sacrament differed in the precise definition of penance. The contritionists in the tradition of Peter Lombard formulated forgiveness primarily as sorrow and amendment, as in the popular definition of Raymond of Peñaforte, "Penance is repenting past evils and not committing them again."^[226] A Dominican and a Catalan, and the originator of the summa for confessors, he was the probable authority for Loyola's confessors at Manresa. Yet it is precisely the problem about whether Loyola has that virtue of penance, as repenting past evils, that involves him in scrupulosity. The alternative definition would aid him. It emphasized against personal penitence the sacramental power. As it was defined in the tradition of John Duns Scotus, "The sacrament of penance is that absolution of the priest having jurisdiction."^[227] That was the "key of power" to absolve and it belonged to the ordained priest with jurisdiction over the penitent and his sins. To that key most authorities added the "key of knowledge," a certain native ability and spir-

itual learning of the confessor to understand and to judge. Yet there were conditions on the penitent as well as on the confessor, sixteen conditions whose achievement might have left a sinner more desolate than consoled about forgiveness. The principal condition was that a good confession must be complete. This condition created the premise for Loyola's doubts: had he confessed completely? To ease demands on the penitent, moralists generally tended toward the juridical, rather than the contritionist, definition by emphasizing sacramental efficacy as deriving from the work worked rather than the work of the worker. Its benefit came from the power of the keys expressed as the absolution by the priest. That mentality was fundamental to the function of consolation. There was a vague theory that the attrition of the penitent might be transformed into contrition by the power of the keys, which included even forgotten past sins.^[228]

Yet the most convincing evidence for emphasis on sacramental grace independent of individual effort was the development of the words of absolution. The subjunctive formula "May God forgive you" changed in the thirteenth century to the indicative "I absolve you"—from the deprecatory to what in modern analytic philosophy is called the performative. There was considerable argument about whether that indicative formula should be simple or elaborate, but eventually there was appended to it the Trinitarian phrase. The prominent canonist Andreas de Escobar, early in the fifteenth century, concluded his wordy absolution with "in virtue of the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." As stated by Johann Eck, a principal adversary of Luther, the proper formula for absolution was: "May Our Lord Jesus Christ mercifully deign to absolve you, and I, by His authority, which in His place I now enjoy, absolve you from the sentence of minor excommunication, and from all your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen."^[229] That was precisely the exercise of the power of the keys. And that is the form of Loyola's understanding of the Trinity as "keys."

Loyola experiences his understanding "on the steps of the monastery."^[230] His place there is on the topical monastic steps of Bernard of Clairvaux's De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae . That manual was a practical guide on the monastic steps of humility in the Benedictine rule. Only Bernard, instead of describing their ascent, described their descent as the steps of pride. As he explained, he could only teach what he had learned and he knew more about falling down than climbing up. Yet careful examination would reveal the way up, he believed. "If you are

going to Rome who can tell you the way better than one you meet coming from there? He will describe the towns, villages, cities, rivers and mountains he has passed and as you go along you will meet them in the reverse order. So, we have described the stages of the downward road and you will see them as you climb up and down them better from your own experience than from the description of our book." Those steps were curiosity, frivolity, foolish mirth, boastfulness, singularity, conceit, audacity, excusing sins, hypocritical confession, defiance, freedom to sin, and habitual sinning.^[231] They are mnemonic places, not mathematical points. Loyola locates himself where his moral situation is: on these monastic steps. He typifies himself as proud. His own recital imitates Bernard's program. Like the man who has come from Rome, he is able to tell the traveler en route—the Society of Jesus as synecdochic in Gonçalves da Câmara—the landmarks, the villages, towns, and cities, the rivers and mountains of the spiritual geography. Loyola describes his own road to prescribe theirs, so that they may recognize the "places" of pride.

This rhetoric of place is established by the book Loyola is reading when his trinitarian understanding occurs. The topic is again the conversional opening of the book, as during his convalescence in the familial castle. Loyola relates that he is praying the Hours of the Blessed Virgin. This is not a vague devotional reference but his specific indication of the enlightening book. It is very probably Raymond Lull's Horas de nuestra Señora in the prose version Hores de sancta Maria . Loyola indicates that he daily prayed it as a spiritual exercise, for when he says that he prayed for seven hours^[232] he does not mean duration by the clock but the seven canonical hours from matins to compline. Lull's version began at matins with a meditation on the one God and then on each of the three Persons. That coincided with Loyola's statement about his own four prayers. The lesson at terce on "understanding" (entendimiento ) explicated it not as intellectual comprehension but as moral judgment, in an appropriation of the definition more usually accorded the virtue of prudence. As Lull wrote and Loyola likely read, "The Holy Spirit gives the gift of understanding (enteniment ) so that man might discern between good and evil." Understanding brought "contrition and weeping" so that faults and sins might be pardoned and the soul might be prevented from a bad death. At vespers there was a lesson "on penance," explicitly about "the keys." The prose version stated, "The priest absolves the sinner by satisfaction, our Lady by devotion. The priest locks shut the gate of paradise with the keys of St. Peter (les claus de Sant Pere ) through his verdict

of veto; the mother of God opens the gates of paradise with the keys of her Son through prayer." Penance required of the sinner "sighs and weeping" (suspirs e plors ) that he had sinned; the Madonna required of the sinner the same sighs and weeping that he might have hope and love.^[233] Loyola's understanding of the trinitarian keys—the sacramental formula of absolution—promotes the parallel affective response of weeping and sobbing (lloras y sollozos ).

Absolution in the name of the Trinity is a counterpart to the "three" days he expended at Montserrat in writing down his general confession.^[234] Although the sacramental formula may indeed have sounded like music to his ears, the trinitarian keys are juridical, not musical. It was Gonçalves da Câmara who did not understand his penitential reference and altered the sacramental keys (llaves ) to musical keys (teclas ). His rationale would have been the theological harmonization of three persons in one God. Numerology was the common denomination in the relation of particulars to universals in an epistemology of design that considered number the most certain path to wisdom.^[235] Such an intellectual interpretation, as if Loyola's experience were contemplative of the Trinity, is alien to the moral, affective context of the episode, however.

It also misses the matter of "honor" and with that the foundation of the Society of Jesus. The text began with Loyola's confession that in character he was utterly vainglorious in his ambition for "honor" (honra ).^[236] As defined by Las siete partidas , a thirteenth-century Castilian legal code with even greater ethical importance, "Honra means an advanced station and the praise which a man obtains for the position he occupies, or for some eminent deed which he performs, or by reason of some excellence which he possesses." Honor was traditionally founded in the Spanish kingdoms by social position, individual action, or personal virtue. Honor was socially expressed in fame; dishonor, in infamy. Those ideas, based in the typical medieval code of law, were adjusted to Christian morality and classical ethics. Yet a new concept, another factor, intervened to exert an immense influence on generations to Loyola's and after. That was the concept of valer , or "worth," in which valer mas meant "prestige" or "esteem," and valer menos meant "disgrace" or "disesteem." The concepts introduced a type of action not strictly governed by virtue. Disgrace traditionally resulted from such an act as showing cowardice, which was at issue for Loyola concerning the "Moor"'s affront to the Madonna. It was a kind of infamy that could reduce persons of the most lofty lineage to social ruin. Prestige, however,

was only won by force of arms, without much regard for the principle of moderation or of a courage that was serene and just.

In the late medieval period, according to its own historians, disputes over prestige and disgrace were the mainspring of human action. The historian of the lineages of the northern Spanish regions and of their "triumphs," García de Salazar, wrote of the bitter wars of Basque clans and families. He stated that they originated in the desire "for greater worth (mas valer ), as it was in ancient times throughout the whole world, among all the generations to this day, and those that are to come while the world lasts." That new concept of honor revoked honor as established in classical ethics or Christian religion, since prestige was not attained through such ideals. The aspirational motive was not ideational but instinctual, not individual but collective. That collective honor was based on a system of patrilineal clans in which agnates and even more distant categories of relations were considered solidary. The prestige or disgrace of one member affected all. Each lineage thus nurtured pretensions to being worth more than the others, and those defeated in the competition were worth less. Such an agonistic social basis promoted an obsessive competition for the possession of public honors and offices, which then were hereditary within the lineage, accumulating on the senior kinsman or chief.^[237]

When Loyola's understanding of the formula of absolution as trinitarian keys disallows him to "value" himself (no se podía valer ), he is not merely confessing a spiritual state of unworthiness. He is also making a judgment about social values. He explicitly disassociates himself from the zeal for "honor" that had fueled his military exercises and fired Spanish society, particularly the Basques, with agonistic values. He allows himself to be integrated by the grace that heals the wounds of sin into another society, the Trinity. The honor as recognition that descended humanly from the king or the kinsman is displaced by the honor through forgiveness that condescends from the divine Society, with its radically different bond of charity. Worth is gratuitously conferred on Loyola, and he responds by weeping. This is a profound "understanding," yielding lifelong consolation, but one that requires for its comprehension not only spiritual sensitivity but social setting.

Loyola's experience also adumbrates the founding of the Society of Jesus. Honor, as conceived in the late medieval version, was associated with lineage, lineage competing in a social system of prestige and disgrace, offence and revenge. Honor was derived in long genealogies from purity of blood. That is the factor—purity of blood—the Christian con-

vert on the road lacks to his very dishonor; and Loyola insults him for it with the epithet "Moor." In Loyola's repudiation of that social system by a trinitarian understanding, a repudiation already prophesied by divine election through Loyola's reinless riding, is implied a new source for purity of blood. This derives not from the lineage of the family Loyola but from the lineage of the covenantal Jesus. He, Jesus, derived his purity of blood from his mother, whose purest blood among mortals mingled with his in her womb. Fundamentally, according to current gynecology the contribution of the female in generation was precisely her menstrual blood (and not her fertile ovaries), so that Jesus was thought to be conceived from her blood.^[238]

Loyola has a realistic understanding of this intimacy that displays the sensuality of his devotion. In his diary he records his imagination—with a copious, intense sobbing to loss of speech—of Mary propitious before the Father as a party or door of the grace he feels. At the consecration of the Mass she shows him "that her flesh is in that of her Son, with such intelligences that I would not be able to write."^[239] The notion was not novel. In the medieval De laudibus beatae Mariae virginis Mary nourished her guests at banquet "in the sacrament in which is eaten the flesh of Christ, because the flesh of Christ and the flesh of Mary, just as the flesh of a mother and a child, are one flesh." It interpreted scripture on the sexual intercourse of the married as being "one flesh" (Gen. 2:24; 1 Cor. 6:16) to mean the blessed Mother and her son Jesus. "A most dainty dish to consume virginal flesh," it concluded on the Eucharist as Marian. That very popular work was misassigned to Albert the Great,^[240] so that Loyola could well have been exposed to it during his lodging at Manresa with the Dominicans. There was even a liturgical use of the tabernacle and the pyx in the design of Mary's body, so that her halves opened to reveal the Eucharist.^[241] Loyola's devotion to the Eucharist as both the body of Christ and the body of Mary typifies the physicality of his piety and that of his culture. Its theological implication—that Mary also died on the cross in Christ's body as the redemptive sacrifice—emphasizes, however, the naive realism of such theology.

Beyond popular devotion, Loyola's theology traced its anthropological roots in lineage. The maternal-filial bond explains why Loyola is so focused on Our Lady of the Snows, the mother of God, in her immaculate conception: not from abstract devotion but from interested fact. Her purity of blood, manifested in the defined Spanish honor for women as sexual chastity, in her singular privileges of immaculate conception and perpetual virginity, established Jesus' purity of blood. On that purity

Loyola established the Society of Jesus. It was in ritual circumcision that Jesus shed the first drops that prefigured his redemptive blood on the cross and received the name the Jesuits would adopt for their Society of Jesus . The Exercitia spiritualia includes in the meditation on the circumcision the unscriptural detail of mother Mary's "com passion" at her Son's bloodshed.^[242] The principal painting in the Jesuit church in Rome, the Gesù, commemorates the circumcision, but not simply because of the act of naming. Nor are that church's many portrayals of early Christian martyrs simply prototypes of and models for the deaths of later Jesuit missionaries.^[243] The rite of circumcision that legally incorporated Jesus into his society was the archetype for the incorporation of Loyola and his companions into the Society of Jesus. Theirs is a type of blood brotherhood. Its purity of blood is established and validated not in social lineage or prestige—not in the cry "Loyola! Loyola!"—but in the Incarnation and redemption—in the name "Jesus." The founding of this spiritual Society is implied in Loyola's understanding of the Trinity on the monastic steps to humility.

The other visual points of Loyola's memory, although less impressive, demonstrate his religious experience as imaginative. The second point concerns the Creation. There is represented once in his understanding with great spiritual joy the method by which God created the world. Loyola seems to see a white object with rays to which God has given firelight. He is unable to explain these matters or remember entirely the spiritual information God impressed in those times on his soul. The third point concerns the Eucharist. Once, while hearing Mass in the "monastery" church, at the elevation of the host he sees with inward eyes something like white rays from above. Although he still cannot explain this well, he nevertheless sees clearly with his understanding how the Lord Jesus Christ is in this most holy sacrament. The fourth point concerns the Incarnation. Frequently and extensively he sees during prayer with interior eyes the humanity of Christ. The figure seems to him like a white body, neither very large nor very small, but without the division of members. He sees this often in Manresa, thirty or forty times, and again in Jerusalem and once when walking to Padua. He also sees the Virgin in similar form. These visions confirm him in faith so that he often thinks to himself that, if there were no scripture to teach these matters of faith, he would still determine to die for them, only because of what he has seen.^[244]

Loyola's visions are in his "understanding." The qualification of "interior" eyes emphasizes psychological, rather than sensory, visions. Yet

they are vaguely described as undifferentiated white objects of light with rays. Their opacity to his understanding is connoted by their color of "white" as dull (blanco ) rather than shiny (cándido ). He can scarcely explain them, even decades later upon their recital. Augustine, who strained for contemplation of the light above the mind, who developed trinitarian doctrine in analogy with faculties of the soul, would have contemned such experiences as crude. He ridiculed such gropings in his own early experience, criticizing in his Confessions how as a Manichaean auditor he envisioned God materially. A floundering Augustine, immersed in matter yet struggling to emerge from it through comprehension, imagined creation as a great bounded mass and God as one of its components. "It was like a sea, everywhere and in all directions spreading through an immense space, simply an infinite sea. And it had in it a great sponge, which was finite, however, and this sponge was filled, of course, in every part with the immense sea." It was from that watery abyss in which he was blindly drowning that Augustine strove to elevate the gaze of his mind, only to be bogged down in carnal sensation, until he discovered in Neoplatonist intellection the method of spiritual ascent.^[245]

Loyola's envisioning of spiritual realities as white lights with rays is indebted to Augustine's intellection, which established the medieval tradition of theology as contemplative. Light was the standard metaphor for contemplation in Christian theology, as in Neoplatonist philosophy; and a light was considered a better metaphor for the spiritual, even for God, than was a sponge. Yet Loyola's visions are material, crude, less primitive than the finding of statues in brambles, but exceedingly less sophisticated than even the ordinary theological exercise he will essay at university. They parallel the religious development of Augustine's experience from the phenomenal to the contemplative.

Loyola has been petitioned by the Society of Jesus to relate how God dealt with his soul from the time of his conversion^[246] and he does so. His introduction to the five points—on his inchoate understandings of the Trinity, Creation, Eucharist, Incarnation, and finally the great illumination—is self-deprecatory. He does not term them gifts or favors. He terms them lessons, on the model of God as "schoolmaster" and himself as a "child." He explicates with rhetorical hesitation^[247] that he does not know why God should have so treated him. He wonders whether it is because of his "coarseness and dense native ability" (rudeza y grueso ingenio ) or, attributing nothing to his homespun talent, that perhaps it is because of the firm will that God himself had given him to

serve Him.^[248] This confusion about the origin and purpose of a vision or dream applies the rhetorical topic of uncertainty, as in the proem of Chaucer's House of Fame .^[249] Loyola's points are rhetorical, not theological, and they are epideictic: to praise God, however crude the understanding.

Loyola characterizes himself at Manresa not as visionary but as blind. "His soul was still blind (ciega ), although with grand desires to serve him in everything he could understand, and thus he determined to do great penances, not having yet sufficient eye (ojo ) to satisfy for his sins but to please and placate God." When he resolves to perform some penance in imitation of the saints, he proposes to do "the same and even better." In these thoughts is his "entire consolation," without considering "a single interior matter," such as humility, or charity, or patience, or the prudence to regulate and moderate these virtues. "His entire intention was to perform these grand external feats, because thus had the saints done them for the glory of God." Loyola does not notice (non mirar ) this circumstance, just as he has indicted himself for his lack of perception in the defense of the fortress, the performance of "courtly" love, and the sally to Jerusalem. He perseveres in a state of joy, he confesses, "without having any knowledge of interior spiritual matters." It is only when he experiences great variations in his soul that he wonders, "What new life is this we now begin?"^[250] Loyola strives to imitate the saints but limps into other roles. To cite some P s: Parzival, Polyphemus, Prester John, Pyrgopolinices.

Loyola establishes his blame of his spiritual formation at Manresa as vainglorious with a certain incident. Loyola converses sometimes with spiritual persons, who esteem him as a person of reputation (crédito ), because, "although he lacked knowledge of spiritual matters, in his speech he evidenced much fervor and much will to progress quickly in the service of God." There is in town at this time an old woman, very venerable as a servant of God and known as such in many areas of Spain, so much so that even the Catholic King (Ferdinand II) once summoned her to communicate some matters. This woman, in discussion once with Loyola, styled as "the new soldier of Christ," says to him, "'Oh! May it please my Lord Jesus Christ that he will desire to appear to you one day.'" Loyola in astonishment takes the remark "crudely" (a la grosa ): "'How would Jesus Christ appear to me?'"^[251]

A stock character of the romance was the old woman feigning sanctity who was actually a procuress, such as Trotaconventos, abettor of seduction and love.^[252] In hagiography women other than mothers or

sisters were similarly sexual in import. They served no function but to enhance the stature of the saint by an attempted seduction. Tales for a celibate clergy perpetuated a stereotype of woman as sinful Eve. There was a telling increase during the Catholic Reformation in the literary assault on holy men by lewd women, as the new emphasis on clerical, male leadership promoted misogyny over the familial values of the two preceding centuries.^[253] An amorous role is implied for Loyola's old woman: to act as an intermediary in his conflict of loves. She is not a sexual but a spiritual figure, however, in the tradition of wise female discoursers reverting classically to Diotima or scripturally to Anna. Loyola's venerable woman acts as a go-between to God for him, but by astutely indicting him of vainglory.

With the eclipse early in sixteenth-century Spain of lay and public visionary experience, such as the common discovery of Marian statues, other means of ascertaining the divine will survived. Visionaries continued to be believed, but privately among women—not by men as the officials concerned with the town or the parish. Nuns as professed religious and other pious females were consulted by individuals, sometimes by bishops and even kings. The issues were no longer public calamities such as plague or famine, however, but private concerns such as one's personal state of grace, or the destination of particular souls after death, or inquiries about a prospective spouse or child. Some of the beatas , as they were called, were famous and influential like Loyola's example, while others were discreet and simple. Most reputedly had visions in trances. Although some were repressed by the Inquisition, the cultural type persisted throughout the early modern period. As subjected to some ecclesiastical discipline, they were more tolerable to the authorities than ordinary lay seers like shepherds.^[254]

The celebrity among the beatas was María de santo Domingo, a Dominican tertiary whom Ferdinand II indeed consulted, revered, and protected. Since the text states that "at that time" the woman in question was in Manresa, there is possibility of María's visit there, perhaps to the Dominicans, for she lived until 1524. Yet she was supposedly confined to the convent in Aldeanueva, under orders that no one could speak to her without ecclesiastical permission, at the directive of Tommaso de Vio (Cajetan), the Dominican superior general. The woman was the oracle of the rigorist movement in that order but controversial for her bleedings and bracelets and for her practice of having confessors on her bed at night to ward off diabolical assaults. Her utterances published in 1518^[255] suggest by their banality and pathology that she lacked the wit

or the wisdom to have formulated the response to Loyola. Since the text states mujer , not sor or beata or even mujer de orden , a type seems indicated. Most of the female characters in the text are merely mujer , in disregard of the Castilian social distinctions; his nurses, for example, are señoras principales , not señoras de casa or a proper equivalent.^[256]

The role of such charismatics as María de santo Domingo in communicating the divine will differed from that of the occasional lay seers. They were not consulted about, nor did they advise about, specific prospective disasters to the public. Their activity was a habitual communication manifested in reported trances. Some moralists thought women were tempted to have visions as a means of acquiring the attention and power they lacked socially. Jean Gerson warned typically about the character and comportment of all female visionaries. "All the more it is true if these women itching with curiosity are the kind whom the Apostle describes: 'Silly women who are sin-laden and led astray by various lusts: ever learning yet never attaining the knowledge of the truth' (2 Tim. 3:7). For where truth is absent, it follows that vanity and deception are present."^[257] As he formulated the misogynist rule, "Every teaching of women, especially that expressed in solemn word or writing, is to be held suspect, unless it has been diligently examined, and much more than the teaching of men." He so explained: "Why? The reason is clear; because not only ordinary but divine law forbids such things. Why? Because women are too easily seduced, because they are too obstinately seducers, because it is not fitting that they should be knowers of divine wisdom."^[258] Even in hagiography females sought out the poor and the sick with unsolicited advice and if they preached at all it was to the few who would listen. That was in contrast to the hagiography of males to whom the faithful flocked and around whom they swarmed. A woman whose religious impulses directed her into the streets was considered fair prey for ridicule and even for violence.^[259]

Loyola's encounter with the prophetess of Manresa is free of this misogyny; it even reverses its judgment. This woman is not vainglorious as in the suspicious stereotype. It is she, rather, who convicts Loyola of vainglory. And it is she alone of all the spiritual persons—including the male confessors, whom he habitually seeks for counsel in Manresa, beyond in Barcelona, and even in hermitages remote from there—who detects his vice. As he emphatically concludes his recital up to the point of departure by ship on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, neither in Barcelona nor in Manresa, for the entire time he was there was he able to find persons who could help him as much as he wanted. There was only

"that woman" who told him that she would pray to God for Jesus Christ to appear to him. She alone seems to him to have penetrated more into spiritual matters. And so, after the departure from Barcelona, he entirely loses his eagerness to seek out spiritual persons.^[260]

Loyola initially interprets her comment, as he admits, "crudely." He takes it literally to mean that this venerable spiritual woman, consulted even by the king, hopes that he will experience a divine vision. He misinterprets it precisely because he is vainglorious. Since he wishes to appear holy to the approval of other holy persons, such a sanction as the apparition of Christ to him would be marvelous. Yet the prophetess hopes that there will appear to him her (mí ) Lord Jesus Christ, not his version of him. Her comment is irony, a medieval trope of allegory whose striking feature was often associated with the practice of praising someone when criticism was intended. As Isidore of Seville explained, "It is irony when, through pretence, it is desired that something different from what is said be understood. This is the case when we praise what we want to vituperate." Most rhetoricians employed this formula of criticism through feigned praise. Of the many sources, the authority of Quintilian best displayed the fault of Loyola that the prophetess discerns. "That class of oratory in which the meaning is contrary to that suggested by the words, involve an element of irony, or, as our rhetoricians call it, illusio ." This was evidenced to the understanding by the delivery of the speech, the character of the speaker, or the nature of the subject. If something was out of sorts in the words, the intention of the speaker, rather than what he said, should be examined. In most tropes it was important to consider not merely what was said but also about whom it was said, since what was said might in another context be literally true. It was permissible, taught Quintilian, to censure with counterfeited praise and to praise under a pretense of blame.^[261]

Irony implies two audiences, the initiated and the uninitiated. The initiated understand the subtlety and complexity of the situation, while the uninitiated stupidly and unsuspectingly misinterpret the remark. The effect of irony depends on the possibility that someone—here Loyola—will misunderstand the comment and take it literally. It was considered, however, that there was hardly anyone so foolish that he did not understand if he was being praised for what he was not, as the Abyssinian for his whiteness, the lame man for his agility, or the blind for his sight.^[262] Loyola is such a limper playing, and played for, the fool. He is ironically mocked as a blind man expecting a vision of Jesus. The woman is legally giving him an "infamy" of the type that arose from

fact, as defined in Siete partidas : that a person of repute spoke ill of one.^[263] He fails to recognize the infamy because he is focused on fame. Yet the ironic practice of denigration, which could be cruel, is mitigated, for the prophetess couches her criticism as a blessing. It was the rhetorician Quintilian who defined irony as "illusion" (illusio ), sanctioning the venerable woman's usage of the trope to address Loyola's problem prophetically, like with like. Loyola is in illusion. It will be another term of Quintilian's that he will remarkably adopt to define his conversion from illusion to reality. This is illustratio , the famous fifth point of memory about the place Manresa.