Three
The Flying Serpent

The thing appears to Loyola initially in the hospice, an appropriate place for a pseudosacred vision. Although the physical site is unnamed, it was the Hospital de santa Llúcia.^[1] A hospital in sixteenth-century vocabulary was a hospice for wayfarers, such as Loyola, or for dying paupers.^[2] The endowment and maintenance of such places was a common form of lay piety,^[3] a charity that might have attracted a former soldier, since the hospitalers were elite military orders.^[4] This particular hospice of Manresa is the perfect place for Loyola: St. Lucy is the patroness of eyes. An early virgin-martyr commemorated in the canon of the Mass, Lucy signifies "light."^[5] Her attribute is the lamp and, especially from the fourteenth century on, a pair of eyes held in her hands or on a plate. The ocular attribute developed from her legendary response to denunciation by her pagan betrothed: to pluck out her own eyes and deliver them to him on a plate. The Virgin rewarded her with more beautiful, luminous eyes, from which derived her name.^[6] In Spanish folklore St. Lucy was the tracer of order before the reform of the Gregorian calendar, as in the proverb "Saint Lucy makes the night wane and the day grow."^[7] As the miraculous healer of ophthalmia and even blindness, she was attributed in its sixteenth-century cult with the cure of eyes by water from a spring.^[8] Loyola will experience the highlight of his life when his eyes encounter certain local waters. In another allegory of pilgrimage Lucy was situated in the mystical rose opposite Adam. It was she who urged Beatrice to rescue Dante, "when you were bending your brows downward to your ruin," from the midst of the dark wood of error.^[9]

At the hospice Loyola frequently sees in broad daylight in the air beside him a thing that affords him much consolation, because it is very beautiful in grand style. He does not descry well its species, but somehow it seems to him that it has the form of a serpent and that it has many objects that glisten like eyes, although they are not. He delights and consoles himself greatly in its vision; when it disappears from sight, he is displeased. One day he goes to a church a little more than a mile from Manresa along the road following the river. In his devotions he sits down for a while with his face toward the river, which runs deep there. The eyes of understanding begin to be opened to him: not that he sees any vision but he understands and knows many things—as much about spiritual matters as of those of faith and letters, with an illustración so great that everything seems to him new. Loyola is unable to state to Gonçalves da Câmara the particulars he understood then, although there were many, only that he received a great clarification in his understanding. In the entire passage of his life up to the past sixty-two years the collection and summation of all the many assistances he has received from God and all the many subjects he has known do not seem to him to have accomplished as much as that singular time.

After this experience, which lasts a good while, Loyola goes to kneel down at a nearby cross to give thanks to God. There appears to him the vision that often appeared to him without his ever recognizing it, the thing that seemed to him very beautiful with many eyes. But he sees well before the cross that it does not have such a beautiful color as usual and he has very clear recognition, with great assent of will, that it is the devil. After these frequent apparitions the thing persists for a long time, appearing to him habitually. In a gesture of disdain Loyola rejects it with the pilgrim's staff he carries.^[10]

The episode is traditionally named after its site as the Cardoner experience. Through Manresa flows the river Cardoner, on whose bank Loyola locates himself. This is appropriate spiritual geography, for fresh waters running clear in rivers and springs were symbolic since antiquity of inspiration and revelation. Because they originated underground, waters were privy to the secrets of the chthonian spirits.^[11] The Castalian font, source of the Muses' inspiration and the Pythia's utterance, flowed under the most celebrated of all oracular sites, the temple of Apollo at Delphi.^[12] As Seneca attested of the classical spirit, "We worship the sources of mighty rivers; we erect altars at places where great streams burst forth suddenly from hidden sources; we adore springs of hot water as divine, and consecrate certain pools because of their dark waters or

their immeasurable depth."^[13] The belief in waves as gifted with prophecy, so that visions in the coursing of a river evoked the notion of glory, was contemporary with poetry such as Joachim du Bellay's Odes and Pierre de Ronsard's "A Monsieur le Dauphin" and "A Diane de Poitiers."^[14]

In the rushing of the Cardoner there echoes in its initial and final letters—hard C and r —the river whose site afforded a paradigm for visionary experience in the Judeo-Christian tradition.^[15] "In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I was among the exiles by the river Chebar, the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God" (Ezek. 1:1). That was the testimony of the prophet Ezekiel of his inaugural vision while hostage during the Babylonian captivity of Israel. It was from such rivers, the irrigation canals that webbed Babylon, that originated a belief in the god of fresh running water on the surface of the earth and in the underground abyss. As personified wisdom, Ea symbolized the privilege of secrets, the knowledge of conjuration, the power of magic, the ability to understand, and therefore, supremacy in sapience, counsel, and skill.^[16]

Loyola distances himself from Ezekiel in specifying that there was "no vision" for his understanding.^[17] Yet like that ancient prophet by the river, also in about his thirtieth year, he is impressionable. A vision does appear. Loyola retains a crucial detail from Ezekiel's visionary vocation: multiple eyes on an aerial creature. In the vision at the Chebar the prophet beheld a north wind propelling a massive cloud ringed with brightness and flashing a fire whose intense center was gleaming bronze. From the center emerged the image of four living creatures elaborately described. Those cherubim who bore the flaming throne of God across the sky were the tetramorphs. Animal in form, each had four faces arranged in opposing pairs, with the visages of man, eagle, lion, and bull. Their four wings were a pair folded and a pair extended, with which they darted forward like lightning by a spiritual impetus. Each creature was accompanied by a whirring wheel, sparkling like chrysolite and constructed as a wheel within a wheel. Those concentric wheels were capable of moving in any of four directions without turning. The rims and spokes of the wheels and the wheels themselves were "full of eyes." Wherever the cherubim traveled, the wheels accompanied them as inhabited by their spirit (Ezek. 1:4–21; 10:9–17).

The cherubim have been related to the monstrous winged quadrupeds of Mesopotamian or Syro-Palestinian art and to the tetramorph Baal.^[18] They have been compared formally with the Egyptian type of the Bes

called Pantheos or Hamerti. In that example the body is studded with eyes, and the frontal face is profiled by animal faces on either side, while the feet are bestial like the calves' hooves of Ezekiel's cherubim.^[19] Whatever their provenance, the creatures winged into Christian imagination. The Byzantine exemplar symbolized Ezekiel's vision as a winged circle or wheel covered with eyes. The wheel and wings represented constant mobility; the eyes, vigilant intelligence. An angel might be depicted as two fiery interlocking circles with eyes around the rims and ocellated wings, as in the mural painting from a thirteenth-century Athenian church. The angels on Byzantine monuments typically had this rotary form as the bearers of the divine chariot upon which God the Father or Son stood. From that Eastern exemplar the eyes were transferred to angels depicted in human form. Such was the usual iconography in the Latin Church. An angel with ocellated wings sculptured at the cathedral of Chartres in the thirteenth century stands on the symbolic wheel as if on a footrest.^[20]

Many cherubim and tetramorphs in Western art retained nothing of the ocular imagery of Ezekiel's visions.^[21] Some versions suggested vision on angelic wings by short strokes or dots within semicircles.^[22] Large stylized dots arched with feathery strokes suggest pupils with eyelids and eyelashes in the paintings of Bartolomé Bermejo, the medieval Spanish master of the Flemish style.^[23] Yet sufficient depictions from various periods, regions, and styles represent the eyes realistically: sculptured on an altar, painted in a sacramentary or bible, or designed in a mosaic.^[24] As no longer the exclusive vision of Ezekiel, the cherubim surrounded the throne of Christ triumphant. They also adopted the six wings that were the proper attribute of the seraphim. Often the cherubim were transformed into symbols of the four evangelists.

Striking examples of the multiple ocular motif appear in depictions of the apocalyptic vision of the Lamb with the four living creatures of Ezekiel (Rev. 4:6–8). In a ninth-century illumination in the so-called Alcuin Bible from Tours eyes stud wings of the beasts, who surround the sacrificial Lamb with the instruments of the passion and a chalice for the drops of his blood.^[25] In the Trier Apocalypse, a Carolingian manuscript based on an Italian early Christian model, the tetramorph surrounding the triumphant Lamb has eyes on all its wings. The Lamb has six additional eyes covering its head.^[26]

With illuminations of Spanish provenance the ocular motif assumes importance. In a manuscript of Gregory the Great's Moralia in Iob the seraphim flanking Christ in a mandorla are covered with eyes on their

wings.^[27] The celebrated Catalan bibles of Roda and Ripoll portray Christ in majesty accompanied by angels with both stylistic and realistic eyes.^[28] For the vision of Isaiah another manuscript has cherubim and seraphim with realistic eyes on wings.^[29] The Beato from San Millan of about the millennium portrays the Lamb with seven eyes on its profiled head. It holds a book locked with seven seals, with probable ocular motifs of a circled dot. Three of the tetramorphs have dotted feathers.^[30] Less dramatically but more typically, in the Beato of Fernando I y Sancha the creatures enclosed within a wheel have eyes on their wings, as does the inner wheel that encloses the victorious Lamb.^[31] In the celebrated Beato known as the Apocalypse of Saint-Sever, in the depiction of the second glorification, the encircled tetramorph has, except for its human figure, definite eyes on the bodies. The angel who reaches down from a cloud in the vision of the four horsemen extends to the evangelist a hand with an eye on it. There are three more eyes on the angel's garment and two on its neck.^[32] A major work of Spanish illumination and Romanesque art, the Liber testamentorum regium , portrays Alfonso II with his armor-bearer at prayer. The angels who bear Christ in a mandorla have eyes on their wings, notably the two golden eyes on the blue wings of the seraphim who embrace its top and bottom.^[33]

The most awesome, perhaps, of all artistic angels adorn the polychrome murals of a group of Romanesque churches Loyola could readily have visited. All are located in the northeast triangle of the Hispanic peninsula where it joins with France, east of Pamplona near the border and northwest of Manresa and Montserrat. These seraphim with wings full of eyes and eyes on their hands and feet appear at Sant Quirze de Pedret, at Esterrí de Cardós incensing the Eternal One, at Santa Eulàlia d'Estaon, at Sant Clement de Taüll, where the Lamb has eight eyes, and at Esterri d'Àneu. In the fresco for the central apse of this last example are two seraphim with eyes on the four folded wings and an eye on the extended palm of each hand. Beside each is a prophet, Isaiah, whose lips a seraph cleanses with glowing coals, and Elijah. In the center are two flaming intertwined wheels of a chariot.^[34]

The multiple ocular motif symbolized omniscience. That quality was not necessarily virtuous, as in Greek culture, where knowledge defined virtue, so that its presence need not signify good. Had not Satan fatally promised Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil that they might be like gods? In the Apocalypse of Saint-Sever, in the very scene of the angel with the eyes on its garment and neck who assists the evangelist, coexist evil winged animals. Two have eyes covering their bodies, while

the third has two extra eyes on the top of its head.^[35] The motif cannot be naively identified with good or with evil. The devil had multiple eyes. Jewish legends reported Sammael (Satan) as full of eyes.^[36] Azrael, the angel of death in both Judaic and Islamic lore, had as many eyes as there are humans; as each person died, an eye closed.^[37] In Spanish manuscript illuminations of the Apocalypse there were evil beasts with many eyes, such as the one in the Beato of Madrid who stalks the earth with defined red eyes spangling his purple body.^[38] In Christian art and literature the devil is sometimes represented with three faces or three heads in antithesis to the Trinity, as in Dante's description. It may also have a head on its stomach or rump or eyes for kneecaps.^[39] In a Catalan example by the Mestre de Glorieta the archangel Michael lances a devil who has miniature heads on his shoulders and knees and a huge head from the waist to the genitals.^[40] Although multicephalism can be merely monstrous—demoniacal and not divine—it is a variant of the omniscience of celestial beings as symbolized by their many eyes.^[41]

An ocular motif may also decorate the wings of devils (as if anticherubim), although rarely. An Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the early eleventh century typically depicts a human devil with bristling hair and protruding claws, but with the deviant detail of realistic eyes on its wings.^[42] Diabolical humans, dragons, and monsters emerged in the thirteenth century, with the sinister wings of nocturnal bats transferred to Satan, prince of darkness.^[43] Although these wings are usually undecorated, eyes can appear between their membranes, as in the Triumph of Death attributed to Orcagna in the Campo Santo of Pisa.^[44] The dominant devil in the Last Judgment who seizes and devours souls is covered with the ocular motif of a circle within a circle.^[45] In a retable of Michael the archangel by Jaume Ferrer II the same motif appears on the breast and between the membranous bat's wings of a devil with heads on its knees and shoulders. The archangel in counterpoint has the multiple ocular motif of peacock's wings.^[46] Bestial and anthropomorphic demons similarly appear in the upper scene of the Breaking Out of the Imprisonment of Hell by the most important of medieval Spanish painters, Bermejo. Satan as the central figure in the background has a head like a cock, while on his body and arms shine oval jewels, as if knowing eyes. The demon on his left has the same ovals on the outer part of his batlike wings, while a demon meditative with chin in hands is dotted on his wings and legs.^[47] In a more notable example by Miguel Jiménez the devil whom the archangel Michael lances has a cock's crest, a feathered body, and the claws of a bird. In rows between the membranes of its

bat's wings are realistic eyes of the same type traditionally depicted on the cherubim.^[48] The motif of multiple eyes is ambivalent. It signifies omniscience—but not necessarily as a good, in symbolic contradiction to the Greek culture of wisdom.

Ezekiel envisioned the cherubim with "the whole body full of eyes in their four wheels." Indeed, "the whole body, and the necks, and the hands, and the wings were full of eyes in the circle of the four wheels" (Ezek. 1:18; 10:12 Vulg.).^[49] Philo and Origen concurred that their name meant "full of science." John Chrysostom thought that it denoted "full perception," and that their eyes symbolized "clairvoyance."^[50] As Augustine defined, "Cherubim is the seat of the glory of God, and is interpreted as the fullness of knowledge."^[51] The treatise that established the nine choirs of angels and their attributes for theology and art, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite's Celestial Hierarchies , specified the cherubim and the seraphim as the "many-eyed and many-winged ones." Together with the lesser thrones they comprised the first celestial order, as most intensely illumined by the divine light. From their Hebrew denotation of "an abundance of knowledge or an outflowing of wisdom," the text elaborated that "the name cherubim denotes their power of knowing and beholding God, their receptivity to the highest gift of light, their contemplation of the beauty of the Godhead in its first manifestation, and that they are filled by participation in divine wisdom, and bounteously outpour to those below them from their own fount of wisdom." It interpreted the ocular symbolism as "the power of sight as an image of their most transparent upliftment to the divine light, their single, free, unresisting reception of that light, their responsiveness, and pure receptivity without passion to the divine illuminations." The details of "eyelids and eyebrows represent the guarding of intellectual conceptions in divine contemplations."^[52] Although this was the speculation of an anonymous monk writing in about the fifth century, the text enjoyed a quasicanonical status until discredited in the sixteenth century. But by then its angelic ideas had worked their influence.^[53] Multiple eyes had become a symbol of contemplation. Hildegard of Bingen illustrated the inaugural vision of her Scivias with a figure covered with eyes, symbolizing fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom.^[54]

Knowledge was not originally an implicit attribute of the deity or his angels, however. It was a defined ideological complex as a specific attribute of celestial gods, astral gods, and gods associated with that realm of light. The concept of omniscience was detached from any particular environment such as monotheism or polytheism. It developed in pastoral

societies, which regarded the sky for survival, rather than in agricultural societies, which focused on the earth. The omniscience of the divine beings who inhabited the heavens was visual. Knowing was seeing. In literature and art those bright gods were equipped with eyes that were the very stars or the sun and moon. In contrast, the omniscience of earth was of a magical or oracular kind, as in the waters flowing in the depths of the Chebar or the Cardoner where Ezekiel and Loyola had each stood. That universal sight was ascribed concretely in many cultures to the eyes of those gods. They were uncommon organs of intense luminosity, as in the testimony that "the eyes of the Lord are ten thousand times brighter than the sun" (Eccl. 23:19).

The abnormality of divine omniscience was more commonly a matter of quantity, however. Transcendence was symbolized anthropomorphically by a multiplicity of form: many eyes. The eyes of the deity were more numerous than usual, either as divided among many heads, or as scattered all over the body, like the Egyptian figure of Bes pantheos. Similar patterns prevailed since antiquity in Hittite, Phoenician, and Babylonian cultures. A Babylonian captive envisioning celestial creatures with multiple eyes was the prophet Ezekiel. The cherubim appeared to him as the typical instrument for omniscient retribution, a meteorological event. They were a thunderstorm, flashing with lightning, whirring with the wheels of the winds, and having the four faces of zodiacal design. Their many eyes were the attributes of the celestial deity as omniscient. They symbolized the power to initiate the prophet into revelations about human deeds and divine retribution, since the divine omniscience did not survey the universal range of knowledge but focused on man and his activities. It penetrated not only human deeds and words but also, as another prophet told, inmost thoughts and secret intentions (Jer. 11:20). That visual omniscience was one of vigilant benevolence and just retribution. Corresponding to that equity was a religious experience of the incertitude of the human condition and the disquiet of moral conscience. In the spontaneity, originality, and simplicity of the ideological complex was mythical thought.^[55]

Loyola's visionary aerial thing with multiple eyes is consistent with this celestial mythology. The Basques as shepherds were pastoral people who observed the sky. The earliest recorded name, dating to the twelfth century, for God among the Basques was Urcia , or "sky," in relation to ortz as "thunder," or in his native Guipúzcoa, ostegun .^[56] Loyola's vision is also literarily imitative of the masterful allegory of pilgrimage. The tetramorphs with multiple wings full of eyes appeared to Dante in pur-

gatory as guardians of the triumphal chariot of the Griffon as Christ. The poet compared their ocular motif to Argos and he advised the reader to consult Ezekiel's vision for their description.^[57] Loyola's experience proves not so simply religious, however; ultimately he descries the creature as the devil. Angels appeared in the heavens, but so did demons.^[58]

Stock stories portrayed ascetics as subject to incessant attacks from the forces of evil, whether interpreted as external creatures or internal creations.^[59] The demons could assume visible form, changing shape at will into an aerial giant or a black boy, a natural beast or a monstrous centaur. They attacked with the din of robbers, furiously whipping and clubbing their victims. The event was horribly documented in the seminal Vita Antonii^{[ 60]} The cult of that saint flourished in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with the most popular of all ascetic scenes being that of his temptation. Although it inspired painters from all schools,^[61] was most inspired (and repulsive) in Matthias Grünewald's masterpiece, the Isenheim altarpiece, where the prostrate saint is assaulted by a swarming chaos of hybrid men and beasts. The extravagant organisms attack with the infernal violence of nightmares as the beleaguered hermit grips only a rosary and a stick.^[62] There was a retable of Anthony in the Seo at Manresa^[63] for Loyola to consider. At his next destination, Barcelona, was the most remarkable, perhaps, of the many legendary cycles, a retable painted by the Catalan primitive Jaume Huguet for the church of San Antonio Abad attached to the hospice of the canons.^[64] Loyola's vision of the flying serpent compares poorly with these brutal confrontations of the desert father. One amusing monster, quite pretty, too, tamely appears and is dismissed with a staff.

Yet the devil had two methods: when violence failed, he resorted to trickery. He could appear alluringly in a nocturnal vision as a woman. Or he could be a seemingly pious monk plying a sinner with false counsel. The most insidious deception of the devil was to transfigure himself into an angel of light, playing the harp, singing psalms, reciting scriptures. The apparition goaded the ascetic to excessive devotions, then disgusted him with the futility of asceticism and its grievous burdens.^[65] The episode of Loyola and the flying serpent has the appeal of folk tales in which the cunning of the devil was symbolized by animal tricksters outwitted by ingenious humans.^[66] Monasticism perpetuated the ascetic image of a vivid, ferocious, and ubiquitous devil. Homilists exploited those notions to terrify the faithful into good behavior. In folklore, where the devil was even more colorful and immediate, a popular tendency prevailed to make the devil ridiculous or impotent. The devil thus

oscillated between the roles of master and fool. With the decline of medieval culture, the furious devil also diminished through the influences of scholasticism, nominalism, mysticism, and humanism. The Neoplatonist theory of evil as privation especially rendered the devil vacuous and contemptible.^[67]

Yet even the ancient ascetics had believed that. Vita Antonii insisted that the demons, as already vanquished by Christ, were powerless except to threaten. The tempted soul should venerate the cross. The most important defense against diabolical stratagems was to practice the discernment of spirits, whether an impulse was from God or the devil.^[68] Such discernment was not easy. The devil did not always appear true to the iconographic type. Although in the East it was a monstrosity of animal forms—fabulous, gigantic, and incoherent—in the West its figure was more restrained. The hideous depictions only began in about the eleventh century but they achieved their ultimate horridness in the sixteenth. Before then the devil was a cruel man with bristling hair or a little black imp. In medieval art the primary characteristic of demons was the nakedness of the damned with the innuendo of animality and sexuality. The body was hairy, furry, or leathery. Its color was usually black like hell, but it could be an infernal red, serpentine green, or pallid gray. Particular characteristics were spiky hair standing on end like flames, glowing eyes, a mouth spread to oxlike ears, a hooked nose, the horns of a faun, the feet of a he-goat, claws protruding from hands and feet, the membranous wings of a bat, and a monkey's tail. The demon was armed with a trident, hook, or pitchfork as an instrument of capture and torture.^[69]

The devil could also appear treacherously as an angel of light, as scripture warned and anchorites attested. In its primary Christian portrait the evil angel on a Ravenna mosaic is only distinguishable from the good angel by color.^[70] Satan is portrayed in other examples as indistinguishable from a graceful philosopher, celestial angel, or Christ himself, except perhaps by a mauve tint or protruding claws.^[71] The devil could assume a human form, young or old, in a variety of secular occupations. More frequently and more ironically he appeared in the sacral guise of a holy man—priest, monk, or pilgrim. As skilled in rhetoric and logic he could also be a theologian. He dared to mimic Mary and even Christ.^[72] In renaissance art the iconography reverted to its origins, and the devil again assumed human tendencies. He was frequently clothed in a monastic habit with only claws, horns, or bat's wings betraying his identity. In the performance of the mystery plays a professorial Satan

even wore spectacles as a sign of his knowledge.^[73] Although less developed a character in Spanish drama than in the French mysteries, the devil usually appeared there in black but sometimes costumed as a dragon, a serpent, or a maiden.^[74] Agents of the devil or of the seven capital vices in disguise provided entertaining relief from its moral didacticism. Their very delight tempted their victims to sin.^[75] This is the dramatic experience of Loyola with the flying serpent.

The devil was often identified with animals, an iconography originating in the fantasies of anchorites and exploited in folklore. Fifty-eight species, from adder to worm, have been catalogued as diabolical guises. The most popular were the serpent or dragon, the goat, the dog, and the ape.^[76] Augustine scoffed at flying serpents in detailing the calamities that befell Rome before the Christian era. "I say nothing of manifestations which were more remarkable than harmful; talking oxen, unborn infants shouting from the womb, flying serpents, women turning into men, hens into cocks and so on, which are recounted not in books of fables but in historical works, and which, whether true or false, produce astonishment rather than ruin among men."^[77] The crowd was credulous, however. The generic flying serpent was the dragon, a monstrous hybrid of reptilian and avian features that had terrorized the populace for centuries.

In the year 1551, just prior to Loyola's recital, the distinguished naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi claimed to have received an actual specimen of a true Abyssinian dragon, just as reported in the classics. In his history of dragons and serpents he illustrated it as a biped armed with claws. Its body ornamented with green dusky scales had five prominent tubercles on its back, wings for flight, and a long flexible tail with yellowish scales like those that shone on its belly and throat. The head had eyes with black pupils and tawny irises, a mouth full of sharp teeth, two ears, and two open nostrils. Aldrovandi reported from men esteemed worthy of confidence a recent sighting of a great scaly dragon near Pistoia and a published account of one near Styria. That natural history he reinforced with the authority of such experts as the encyclopedist Isidore of Seville and the classicist Julius Caesar Scaliger.^[78] Extant at Manresa itself are two decorated ceramics whose juxtaposed scenes portray in popular imagination a vision of a flying serpent. The basin depicts a young man in a pleasance into which the tail of a serpent writhes. On the server is a flying serpent, having the body and legs of a cock but the smooth neck and head of a serpent crested with a feathered diadem.^[79] The dragon as a winged serpent also appeared in Basque tales, as in the myth related

by fishermen to children in the ports of Guizpúcoa about Erensugue, an enormous monster lurking in the hollows of the stepped seabed, or in the legends of illustrious knights in the image of St. George, who slew such creatures.^[80]

The flying serpent who allures then annoys Loyola is no such generic dragon, however. It is a peacock. Although in modern zoology a peacock is a bird, in the medieval aviary it was a hybrid^[81] of a bird and a serpent. The peacock appeared with the serpent in ancient India as a mythological motif of hostility against a small or dwarfed race, although it was not outstanding as an eater of serpents or as a flier. The motif on pottery of a man swallowed in a peacock's belly comments on the subjugation of an ophiolatrous society.^[82] Among the Spaniards the great encyclopedist Isidore of Seville described the peacock's head as serpentine.^[83] That description was confirmed by an even greater philosopher and scientist, Albert the Great, in his Liber animalium .^[84] It was frequently repeated by both moralists and naturalists in such diverse sources as Brunetto Latini's Li livres dou tresor^[85] and Aldrovandi's Orinthologiae .^[86]

The physical appearance of a peacock coincides exactly with Loyola's flying serpent. He says it is very beautiful and colorful, with many objects glistening like eyes that are not eyes. This feature is the ocellation of the tail feathers of the male of the species, whose brilliant plumage earned its reputation since antiquity as the most beautiful of all birds. In classical legend the ocellation derived from Argos panoptes, the Graeco-Roman version of the multicultural creatures with many eyes, such as Bes pantheos and the cherubim.^[87] In Ovid's Metamorphoses Argos was a monster of a hundred eyes appointed by Juno to guard with celestial vigilance her rival Io, who had been changed into a cow. Mercury lulled Argos to sleep with his pipes, then hacked off his unnatural head. An enraged Juno plucked out its multiple eyes and set them with jeweler's art in the tail feathers of the peacock.^[88] The scene would be most famously depicted by Peter Paul Rubens,^[89] who was incidentally the most celebrated painter of Loyola.^[90] There was also a medieval moralization of the myth, in which the Christian was to be Argus, and his soul, the cow Io, which he guarded with vigilance. The hundred eyes were the good deeds and pious services by which that was to be secured. The thief was the devil, who lulled Argus to sleep by vices and so captured Io, the soul.^[91]

From its Indian provenance the peacock became associated in classical culture with the celestial queen. It was an attribute of the principal goddess Juno, her sacred pet. As a symbol of the apotheosis of Roman

empresses, the peacock was portrayed at their thrones and carved into their tombs and on their funereal lamps. From pagan monuments the peacock became transferred to Christian sepulchres as a sign of the ascent of the sanctified soul to God.^[92] Since its tough flesh resisted putrefaction, as an experiment by Augustine confirmed, it was believed incorruptible.^[93] The peacock became an emblem of the resurrection of the corruptible body; its splendid plumage, of the glories of heaven. As a symbol of paradisiacal joys, it adorned frescoes in catacombs^[94] then mosaics in churches.^[95] Peacocks appeared on an episcopal cathedra, on choir gates, stone reliefs, a gate plate, an ornamental plaque, sarcophagi, and more mosaics.^[96] The bird frequently appeared in renaissance art, such as perching on the windowsill in Domenico Ghirlandaio's painting of the Last Supper.^[97]

Its particular place of delight was the garden. Among the birds of the park and gardens of Charlemagne were peacocks. In a painting for Queen Isabella of Spain by a follower of Hans Memling the Madonna is portrayed in a summer house with a prospect of the garden in which peacocks have freedom of the lawns. In Jan van Eyck's rendering of the Madonna in a garden overlooking a Gothic city a walk-wall behind the battlements is enlivened by peacocks. A peacock perches on the garden wall in a painting of St. Catherine's spiritual marriage. In a miniature in the Hennessy Book of Hours SS. Cosmas and Damian share an open book as they sit on a bench of turf in the daisied lawn of a large mansion, with specimen trees, pinnacled Gothic fountain, trellised herbier and tunneled arbor, and a peacock. Yet the peacock did not only grace holy gardens. A scene at the Court of Burgundy has a peacock perched on the trellised railing of an enclosed herbier and on the trellised fence of the most famous of pleasure gardens, in the Flemish illustrations to Roman de la rose .^[98]

This popular symbol of immortality appealed also to the Spanish imagination. A full-page illustration of a peacock decorates a tenth-century Moralia in Iob . The bird appears in Spanish manuscripts as part of the repertory of celestial or paradisiacal symbols in the arcades of canon tables. It also plays an important role in peninsular Islamic depictions of celestial or royal settings.^[99] Extant from medieval navarre are several other examples, most impressively the royal peacocks in Byzantine style on the capitals of the cathedral of Pamplona,^[100] the city in whose defense Loyola was wounded.

The peacock would have presented an attractive image to the ascetic Loyola, a vision of the immortality for which he labored. A hymn of

Ephraeum Syrus compared the spiritual beauty of the ascetic with the physical beauty of the peacock.^[101] The medieval revelations of Mechthilde of Magdeburg attested that among the ornaments of the spiritual bride "she has a hat of peacock's feathers; that denotes holiness on earth and high honour in Heaven."^[102] The peacock was the special attribute of a saint whom Loyola would have known well, St. Barbara. The bird was her earliest attribute, portrayed on an eighth-century pillar in the church of S. Maria Antiqua in Rome. It was not only a symbol of immortality but also probably an allusion to the legend in which the cane with which Barbara's father beat her was transformed into a peacock's feather. She held it erect in her iconography in substitution of the standard palm of victory and also in allusion to her patronage against sudden death. St. Barbara became in the fifteenth century the patroness of artillery men, who were exposed to sudden death from accidental explosions. She guarded artilleries, forts, and arsenals. Her patronage of soldiers was also attributed to the legend in which her father was struck by thunderous lightning for having decapitated her. She was thus patroness against death by lightning, and in Basque territories against thunderstorms, since the fiery booming of artillery echoed that celestial phenomenon.^[103]

As a soldier Loyola may well have invoked St. Barbara's protection against death. It was a wound by artillery, the cannon shot blasting his legs, that terminated his military career. As the pacifist Erasmus mocked her invocation by the limping soldier of his colloquy "Militia":

HANNO : Weren't you worried about the destination of your soul if you fell in battle?

THRASYMACHUS : Oh, no, I was confident, because I had commended myself once for all to St. Barbara.

HANNO : Did she undertake to protect you?

THRASYMACHUS : Yes, she seemed to nod her head a little.^[104]

There is another acute association between them. Because Barbara began to study the mysteries of the Christian faith so young she became, together with the more illustrious yet elusive Catherine of Alexandria, the patroness of scholars and students. A famous fortress of learning under her protection was the Collège de Sainte-Barbe at the University of Paris. That was the very place where Loyola would arrive by October 1529 for three and a half years of study toward the baccalaureate examination, finally gaining a licentiate and a master of arts in philosophy in March 1533. Loyola attests difficulty in applying himself to his les-

sons.^[105] He may well have invoked the St. Barbara in whose college he toiled as earnestly as he may have prayed to her in the fortress at Pamplona. It is her attribute, the peacock's feather, that invests with meaning his great learning at the Cardoner.

The peacock also conveyed a significance that would have stirred his chivalric spirit. It commonly adorned medieval courts, both royal and ducal, where it was esteemed for its beauty, for its plumes as adornments in helmets, and as a delicacy at table.^[106] The pope in state, while processing into St. Peter's basilica in Rome, carried the flabellum, a fan of ostrich feathers onto which were sewn the ocellations of peacock's feathers.^[107] In Parzival the paragon of castles for Gawain, the Schastel Marveile, had a roof with the appearance of peacock's feathers; while kings Anfortas and Gramoflanz sported the plumage in their bonnets.^[108] An early sixteenth-century colored wood carving by Hans Burgkmair the Elder portrayed Kaiser Maximillian I with the order of the golden fleece and with peacock's feathers as plumage on his helmet.^[109]

The peacock was the image of a very voguish cycle of poems that amplified and glossed the adventurous and moralizing Roman d'Alexandre , the most important text in the medieval Spanish kingdoms for the idea of fame. Jacques de Longuyon's Voeux du paon was one of the most popular of late medieval romances and the most popular of the immense literature on Alexander the Great.^[110] In its chivalric plot a captive during a truce slew a peacock flaunting in a courtyard. The assembling lords and ladies pardoned him and dispatched the bird to the kitchen. At a sumptuous feast each vowed to the peacock a feat of valor. The peacock was presented to the bravest swearer, and the vows were fulfilled in battle and in marriage.^[111] Its sequel, Jean Brisebarre's Li restor du paon , developed the oath to restore the peacock wrought in gold and set with gems symbolizing the courtly virtues of a lover. A panegyric to the peacock was declaimed at a banquet, and the members of the company each genuflected before the image, offering it a gift. After the ceremony Alexander proposed that each deliver an opinion on how well the original oaths to the peacock had been performed; a prize was awarded to the best debater. The conclusion of the cycle, Jean de la Mote's Le parfait du paon , displayed the restored peacock, to which vows were again sworn, although few of Alexander's men would survive the battle. The peacock was not unique among birds to whom chivalric vows were made^[112] but it was the most splendid and celebrated.

Loyola's lady is the Madonna, the woman of his conversional vision during convalescence in the castle. He has pledged himself her knight in

vigil before her altar at Montserrat and perhaps vowed chastity at her shrine in Arançuz. Since the peacock had a definite Marian association it would have especially appealed to his chivalric imagination. The classical theme of Juno in her celestial chariot drawn by peacocks was transferred in renaissance art to Mary as the new queen of heaven. Paintings portray the peacock at her house in Nazareth and in scenes of the annunciation in the garden near her chamber or on its windowsills and balustrades. In an altar painting by Carlo Crivelli of Mary as Juno caelestis a peacock perches above her chamber. Its tail points at her head and intersects with the inspirational ray of the descendant dove of the Spirit that touches her forehead. The archangel Gabriel remains outdoors in conversation with a bishop.^[113] The peacock has become the celestial messenger, the substitute for the announcing archangel. Chaucer poetized the inversion in Parlement of Foules as "the pecok, with his aungels fethers bright."^[114]

The ethereal matter of angelic wings was feathers. Alain de Lille in his treatise on the six wings of the cherubim ascribed definite forms of virtuous behavior to their plumage, with the first wing designating confession.^[115] Feathers acquired theological symbolism when artists plucked the tail feathers of the peacock. In a seventh-century mosaic from Crprus the archangel Gabriel has peacock's wings.^[116] In the Annunication by the Siennese master Simone Martini the angel Gabriel saluting Mary has blue and gold peacock's feathers for its wings.^[117] Gabriel also has peacock's wings in the Annunciation by Filippo Lippi.^[118] The motif was a favorite of Giovanni da Fiesole, who, for his exquisite paintings of angels, earned the title Fra Angelico.^[119] A Florentine fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli depicts chorusing angels with peacock's wings, while another angel feeds a peacock perched on a fence.^[120] In Tobias and the Three Archangels by Giovanni Botticini the central figure of Raphael, who guides Tobias on his journey, has peacock's wings.^[121]

The motif was not an Italian monopoly. In the Last Judgment by Jan van Eyck the archangel Michael, who straddles the skeleton of death above a gaping hell, has peacock's wings.^[122] In Rogier van der Weyden's version Michael weighing souls in the scales of judgment also has peacock's wings.^[123] In Hugo van der Goes's Adoration of the Shepherds the angel in white before a vase has the unusual coloration of white peacock's feathers at the tips of its white wings.^[124] In Catalan examples the angel Gabriel on the retable of Cardona has peacock's wings^[125] as he does in the Annunciation in Bernat Martorell's Llibre d'hores .^[126] An

archangel Michael trampling Satan has peacock's wings.^[127] Combining such iconography with the original image of the cherubim is the illustration in the fifteenth-century Bamberg Apocalypse, where a peacock angel upholds a mandorla of Christ enthroned with a book and surrounded by the tetramorph.^[128] In Hieronymus Bosch's painting of John of Patmos a heraldic angel with peacock-feathered wings reveals in a celestial sphere the Madonna crowned with peacock's eyes.^[129]

Animals, biological and legendary, were especially examined in the bestiaries, popular manuals that exploited natural history for moral doctrine. The beasts became a repertory of metaphors applicable to the meaning of the universe and of man. Symbolic interpretations of animals could and did conflict, however. A single image evoked a multiplicity of significant associations. While that confusion of meaning caused the symbolic approach to nature to be rejected in the seventeenth century by the scientific revolution, polysemy was embraced by medieval and renaissance thinkers seeking the hidden connections in creation. Symbolic thought tended to be obsessed with a single theme; in animal imagery, most importantly with the perils that beset the soul in quest of salvation and the aids it might obtain from divine powers. It approached nature with its manifold phenomena as a lesson designed by God to impress that theme on human minds. Within that major theme of salvation any single image might assume a generous range of different, and often contradictory, meanings. Although each animal specimen could not be docketed according to class and species in the moral order, such variance was no embarrassment to the symbolic mind. It decided the relevance of a particular meaning in a given context.^[130] That is the very task of Loyola toward the flying serpent: the discernment of spirits.

The peacock was no exception to the ambivalence of animal imagery. Its presence could victoriously symbolize immortality, even daring to adorn the throne of Christ in glory.^[131] Antithetically it could symbolize the vice that most threatened salvation, pride as vainglory. Despite all the divine, angelic, and saintly associations of the peacock, Christian moralists, in condemning sensual beauty as diabolical in origin and influence, emphasized the imperfection and ugliness concealed in its showy display. The peacock, they decried, had the voice of a devil and the gait of a thief in angelic garb. The peacock was commonly said to weep at the sight of its incongruously ugly feet. The brilliant hues of its fanned tail contrasted with a cry so strident that the name "peacock" (pavo ) was derived from "fear" (pavor ), since its voice terrified its hearers. Its

raucous nocturnal screaming for fear that its beauty might be lost symbolized the human soul imperiled of losing grace.

The moral was not only Christian. The peacock had its chorus of critics since pagan antiquity. Aristotle typified it: "jealous and self-conceited." Ovid symbolized it as pride; Pliny catalogued it as ostentatious, spiteful, salacious, alien, and proud. Physiologus , the primary source for medieval bestiaries, named the peacock, among all birds, "the boaster." Its habit of strutting and of displaying its exotic plumage suggested to Boethius pride and vanity. Although it was the male of the species that displayed its tail, the peacock incongruously symbolized female vanity.^[132] As Stefano Guazzo observed in La civil conversazione , it was as common for women to display themselves as vain as for peacocks to fan their tails.^[133] In Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Delights a peacock graces the edge of the pool where women bathe.^[134] In the engraving of Superbia in Pieter Breughel the Elder's series of the seven vices a peacock accompanies a woman looking into her mirror.^[135] This is the usual iconography of pride;^[136] it so appears on the choir stall of the cathedral of Barcelona.^[137]

The peacock also had pride of place in contemporary natural history, occupying the initial three chapters of Aldrovandi's Orinthologiae . The naturalist subjected the creature to exquisite scrutiny: ordinis ratio, aequivoca, synonyma, genus et differentiae, pavonis nostratis, locus, coitus et partus, incubatus et educatio, vox et aetas, volatus, mores et ingenium, sympathia et antipathia, corporis affectus, cognominata, denominata, praesagia, mystica, moralia, hieroglyphica symbola, proverbia, usus in sacris iconis: numismata, usus in externis, usus in medicina, usus in cibis, apologi, fabulosa, historia. Nor did he neglect the white peacock or the Japanese peacock. As he recorded, the bird owed its fame to the extension of its colorful tail to the sun, enacting a pomp of its beauty. That was attested not only by the ancients Lucian and Oppian but also by the moderns Tasso, Cardano, and Scaliger. Aldrovandi's own description of the peacock began, citing Albert the Great's authority, with its serpentine head. Its tail feathers were distinguished by "small orbs" (orbiculi ) as a metaphor for eyes; or, as Pliny and Theophrastus had literally written, "eyes" (pennarum oculi, opsthalmoi tou ptirou ). Its feathers were green like sparkling chrysolite, gold, and sapphire. The colors of its eyes, which varied the splendor of sunlight, were gold, then chestnut, green, and azure or sapphire. Aldrovandi reported that a Jesuit named Julius Mancinellus once obtained for his examination a specimen of the

pavonine gem, so called because its partly green, partly amethyst color emulated the peacock's tail.

Aldrovandi discoursed gravely on its moral. The peacock could be an elegant image of the Savior, as Anthony of Padua had allegorized. The saint preached that the peacock fanned its feathers like the primal tree of Eden shooting forth its foliage; and, after those feathers were ejected, like the tree, it became foliated and fructified. The primal tree was Christ planted in the garden of delight, the womb of the Virgin Mary. The foliage of the tree was his speech. When the sinner acknowledged the word of God thrust forth by the preacher in his sermon, he cast off his feathers, his costly ornaments. At the general resurrection, when all trees—all saints—would begin to flourish, the peacock who cast off the feathers of mortality would receive those of immortality. Anthony also designated by the bird a disdain for temporal glory and he repeated the moral about its ugly feet as the repentance that rejected mundane glory. Truly, decided Aldrovandi, the entire composition of the peacock's body seemed to have a mystical sense.

Its small crested head was, again, as Albert the Great had reported, serpentine; its tail was decorated with various colors, its gait concealed, its voice terrible and raucous. It was popularly said to be vested like an angel, to have the voice of the devil, and the gait of a thief. Its serpentine head, concealed tail, and gait suggested it was a crafty creature, a type of fallacious people. Such deceivers displayed their beautiful feathers in a feint of neighborly love but soon insinuated themselves as thieves. Aldrovandi extended the lore of the peacock to the devil. His fraudulent impulses were initially trivial and easily repelled; but, persisting with blandishments, the devil proposed vain promises, until he exercised his tyranny. The hidden gait of the peacock meant his secret temptations; its hidden tail, his transitory powers and delights. Its terrible voice meant his tyranny. The twelve eggs it was said to lay were the mortal sins of adultery, fornication, homicide, theft, deception, immodesty, lust, blasphemy, pride, and folly. (Aldrovandi also reported the contrary interpretation that the peacock was said to chase away poisonous beings with its voice. Such beings were the devils, and all heretics, sycophants, decliners, and good-for-nothing men of that sort who not only did not hear the voice of the peacock—the salutary warnings, confessions, and sermons of just men—but also avoided the places where it was proclaimed.)

The peacock was detailed as an emblem of vice. Its popular association as Juno's pet with her envy made it a representative of the profes-

sional jealousy of the learned. The male peacock's ambush of the female's eggs was a type of the powerful person who preyed on the poor. Its exultation in the extraordinary beauty of its body was a symbol of pride. The very verb "to peacock" (pavoneggiare ) meant to admire oneself vainly or to parade haughtily. Yet the peacock's retraction of its feathers on seeing the deformity of its feet allegorized persons who proclaimed their beauty or published their fortunes only to reconsider their affairs in meditating on death. The display of the peacock and its tough flesh also compared with the avaricious. They pompously delighted in the cultivation of an ornate body, while their spirit was vile, scurrilous, and imbued with every vanity.^[138]

The peacock most emblematized the capital vice of pride, as in the slogan "as proud as a peacock." An elaborate moral and encyclopedic treatise by Matthias Farinator extended the conventional association of the capital vices with animals into a complicated zoological symbolism. In his Lumen animae the virtues and vices each rode in procession on an animal and bore a symbol on a helmet, a shield in hand, and a mantle over the shoulder, with sometimes an object in hand. More than sixty animals were introduced in this incomparable treatment of the symbolism of sin with its vast zoological lore. Superbia (pride) headed the procession with a peacock on her helmet.^[139] In an Italian engraving of the seven vices from the late fifteenth century Queen Pride is flanked by her horned attendants; on her immediate right is vainglory, who holds a staff flourishing with her sins and a shield depicting the head of a peacock.^[140] In a woodcut in a contemporaneous Bavarian manuscript St. Benedict with a cross opposes an allegorical figure of the world as a woman. "Get behind me, Satan," commands the monk. "Never recommend to me what is vain. Evil is what you offer; drink the poison yourself." The silent World, personifying the seven capital vices, wears a diadem of peacock's feathers labeled "superbia."^[141] In Pèlerinage de vie humaine the vice of Pride has a peacock's tail.^[142] William Langland's allegorical Vision of Piers Plowman compared a peacock and a lark. Pride could not fly high because its tail trailed on the ground, and so it was easily caught. With its loathsome feet and flesh and its unlovely voice, the peacock symbolized price.^[143] The illustrated prow of the famous ship of fools had a streamer with a peacock as its emblem,^[144] and in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene the coach of Lucifera, or Pride, was drawn by peacocks.^[145] In the first illustrated edition of Loyola's Exercitia spiritualia there is an engraving of a man in a landscape, blindfolded and naked, crawling in fetters on all fours. His back is straddled by two

baskets filled with animals and by a devil with dotted bat's wings, who reins and flogs him toward the pit of hell. On the man's rump, behind the devil's rear, perches a peacock with a fanned tail.^[146]

The capital vices were originally associated with devils or demons. Despite medieval personifications of the sins as humans, the diabolical association was perpetuated by the belief that demons infested the air to attack souls. The earliest listing of the cardinal vices was in the pseudepigraphic Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs as "seven spirits of deceit." The ascetic who popularized the tradition, Evagrius, extended it to eight: gula, luxuria, avaritia, tristitia, ira, acedia, vanagloria, superbia. It was the desert fathers who personified those sins as diabolically possessed animals. Their unsystematic linking appropriated animal lore for moral instruction. The list of John Cassian, who mediated Eastern to Western monastic spirituality, had: gula, luxuria, avaritia, ira, tristitia, acedia, inanis or vana gloria , and superbia . Gregory the Great reduced that list to seven in a devotion no longer monastic but popular: vana gloria, ira, invidia, tristitia, avaritia, gula, luxuria. Later acedia replaced tristitia and vana gloria merged with superbia . Of the two basic lists, the Cassianic and the Gregorian, the papal one was more influential in the West, with most medieval authors employing it or a variant. Peter Lombard in his Sententiae , required for commentary by all medieval aspirant bachelors of theology, listed inanis gloria first; so did Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure. This remained the order in modern catechisms, rendered widely popular by the Jesuits through their mnemonic saligia .^[147] The Exercitia spiritualia includes in its first method of prayer a meditation on the seven capital vices, which Loyola in a very common error identifies as "the seven deadly sins."^[148] By the thirteenth century superbia usually substituted for vana or inanis gloria as the chief of the capital vices. The principal authority in penitential literature, Raymond of Peñaforte, in his Summa casuum poenitentialis established superbia as the root of all vices but in his list of the seven capital ones he included inanis gloria .^[149] It was with such lists that Loyola expended three days at Montserrat writing a general confession of sins.

Not only were there professional manuals for the clergy there were also popular formulas for the laity, such as Pedro López de Ayala's rhymed confession.^[150] Although the concept of the seven capital vices developed in Spain somewhat later than in the rest of Europe, it was integrated with its culture.^[151]El libro de Alixandre , perhaps by the father of Castilian literature, Gonzalo de Berceo, digressed on hell extensively. Pride as the sin of its protagonist Alexander the Great was typically the

queen of the deadly sins. The seventh of those was orgullo , or vana gloria , which desired human blessing and praise.^[152] Although that elaborate personification of the sins was unrivaled for two centuries, the tradition continued in sermons, mirrors for princes, tracts on good conduct, and vernacular bibles.^[153] Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor , a fourteenth-century entertainment and edification on the complexities of love, decried the capital sins with exemplars from animal fables. The illustration of envy was the crow jealous of the peacock's fanned tail, as symbolizing a vain woman. The crow plucked off her black feathers and decked herself out in the borrowed plumes of the peacock, delirious with joy in her colorful fancy as now the fairest bird. The peacock discerned the hoax, snatched the feathers, and flung them into a bag. The moral was one of surpassing friends from an envy so inflated that it almost split the body.^[154] Although that Aesopic tale of the unmasking of the jay in peacock's feathers illustrated envy, it equally illustrated vanity or vainglory.^[155]

In Juan de Mena's important Coplas de los siete pecados mortales the faculties of Reason and Will debated. The appetitive faculty was a deformed female monster with seven heads, representing the capital vices on the model of the apocalyptic beast. Pride (Soberuja) spoke first as the most vicious evil. She recounted her five origins in knowledge, beauty, wealth, lineage, and poverty. As she confessed that final source,

poverty with religion

touched with vainglory

makes me show without gain

great desire for affection.

Reason castigated pride for the religious presumption that inflated the soul with vainglory, so as to publish its virtue, its disdain for crime, and its contempt for the world, while prizing only to be accounted holy. The vainglorious person desired to be perceived as good without being so. That was denounced as vile hypocrisy, which tricked observers with a simulation of virtue.^[156]

Loyola in his asceticism is vulnerable to the temptation of the flying serpent: the peacock as vainglory. Although vainglory was commonly conflated with pride, it was subtly distinguished from it. Evagrius best explained its nature and psychology. Vainglory was clever in obscuring the virtues because it always pursued human glory, and thus expelled faith from the soul. He cited Jesus' question to the Pharisees, "'How can you believe, who receive glory from one another and do not seek

the glory that comes from the only God?'" (John 5:44). The good was to be chosen for itself, not for something else, the realization of the good that is God, not the drive toward the good that was lesser. "The thought of vainglory is a very subtle thought that dissimulates itself easily among the virtuous, desiring to publish its combats and pursuing the glory that comes from men. It makes the monk imagine demons shrilly protesting, frail women cured, a crowd touching his mantle." It predicted his ordination to the priesthood, with people flocking to his door. As he continued its evils, "it also makes him exalt himself with vacuous hopes; it takes flight and abandons him to temptations, whether pride or sadness, which in turn introduce other thoughts contrary to these hopes." It was difficult, he reflected, to escape vainglory, because whatever effort was taken might occasion further vainglory. Manifestations of humility might become sources of vainglory by exposing to the monk and the crowd the grandeur of his virtue. Yet whoever attained to spiritual contemplation and cultivated its pleasure would not be convinced by the demon of vainglory proposing to him all the pleasures of this world. What could vainglory promise greater than spiritual contemplation, he posed?^[157]

Augustine taught that pride contended with charity in external works. Both impulses might perform deeds of mercy, even suffer martyrdom, but with different intentions. Scripture summoned the believer from external display before people to internal examination of conscience with God as witness. If the heart did not accuse, all was well; but one should fear doing good for praise. Vainglory practiced a "crafty semblance of holiness." As he argued, "We must particularly point out that vainglory can find a place, not only in the splendor and pomp of worldly wealth, but even in the sordid garment of sackcloth as well, and it is then all the more dangerous because it is a deception under the pretence of service to God."^[158] In classical morality the love of glory was an incitement to virtue. Glory was a present or posthumous reputation or renown, either praise by others or esteem by self for virtues and possessions, especially the prestige of knowledge and wisdom. Yet medieval authors adopted the contrary judgment of Augustine and often cited him on vainglory. Thomas Aquinas decided vainglory a capital vice against charity because it denied what was owed to the Creator in its immoderate craving for human excellence.

Jean Gerson condemned it severely. In examining the spectacle of the contemporary Church he decried the love of human honor as the source of schism. Vainglory also caused doctrinal errors, for theologians ad-

vanced contestable theses in hope of personal promotion. Preachers prized reputation more than truth. Vainglory was a dangerous passion that precipitated an individual toward corrupt goods. The religious person who coveted reputation did not shrink even from lying but fabricated extraordinary experiences such as visions. The desire to shine originated superstitious beliefs and bizarre practices. Yet no deed performed for mundane glory accrued any moral value. The appetite for glory was deranged, like the folly of Satan who desired to be master of the universe, equal to God. To God alone belonged honor and glory; the creature only participated by imitation in the divine praise. The remedy for the vice was again contemplation, which by the love of God would rout worldly care, especially such love of honor and dignity.^[159]

The immorality and iconography of vainglory were popularly exemplified by the anonymous Fiore di virtù , a successful compendium on the virtues and vices. Knowledge as the first cause of love was explained as entering a person through the senses, especially the eyes, then proceeding to the intelligence, which resided in the imagination of the intellect. There was a movement from memory to pleasure to desire. Everything under the sun was vanity, however, except for the love of God. Because the love of the world filled a person with this vanity, it saddened him. The treatise then described each virtue or vice, followed by an example from the animal kingdom and one from human history. Vainglory was the vice opposed to magnanimity. It might be of three kinds. The first was vainglory proper, the popular desire to show off greatness and to be praised beyond measure. The second was bragging about and praising oneself. The third consisted in praising oneself falsely or of displaying more to others than there really was. That was hypocrisy.

The animal embodying the vice of vainglory was the peacock. "We may compare the vice of vainglory to the peacock who is full of vainglory and who knows no greater pleasure than to admire his own feathers and spread out his tail to be praised by everybody." Vainglory was the most tenacious of vices, persisting even when all others had been overcome. Advisory quotations followed from Solomon, Cato, Plato, Isidore of Seville, Seneca, Cicero, and Augustine. The historical example of vainglory was a tale from the lives of the fathers, in which an angel disguised in human form traveled with a hermit. Upon passing the stinking carcass of a dead horse, the hermit covered his nose, while the angel seemed unbothered by the smell. Later when they passed a groomed and well-dressed young man, the angel covered his nose. When the hermit expressed surprise, the angel explained, "Vainglory smells worse to God

than all the carrion in the world." The importance of that vice was emphasized by the titular woodcuts of some of its sixty-six editions, which display the peacock on the crest of the entrance to a monastery garden.^[160]

Loyola's contemporary John Calvin scathingly identified monks as peacocks: "They are all completely unlearned asses, though because of their long robes they have a reputation for learning. If one of them has even tasted fine literature, he spreads out his feathers, proud as a peacock, his fame spreads wonderfully and he is worshipped by his fellows. The old proverb holds that ignorance is bold, but the extraordinarily insolent pride of monks arises from the fact that they measure themselves only by themselves."^[161] Calvin's cameo of asinine monks decked out with peacock's feathers replicated the essential elements of vainglory: the presumption of knowledge or virtue and the cupidity to display its grandeur to the applause of others. Vainglory was not the proper desire for good but the perverse desire to be acknowledged as good. The peacock flaunting to Loyola's imagination with its ocellated feathers promises him what the devil had originally promised Adam and Eve, the knowledge of good and evil, which would make humans like God.

Loyola's association of the serpent of his vision with broad daylight, with the sky, and with its multiple orbs of omniscience, identifies it as the noonday devil. This demon was invented by a false translation of scripture. Although modern versions render the text correctly as "the destruction that wastes at noonday" (Ps. 90:6), the Vulgate ignorantly collapsed five Hebrew words into two Latin ones, daemonio meridiano . Thus was created another devil to tempt humans.^[162] In Loyola's experience it is not the noonday demon commonly interpreted as persecution or sloth. His is the noonday demon as false illumination. That demon's temptation resonated with vainglory. Augustine, interpreting it as persecution, identified the reason for succumbing to its temptation as a lack of humility. A Christian, he preached, must possess an implicit and absolute trust in God, without presumptuous pride in his own strengths and merits. It was those who presumed upon themselves who apostatized. In Jerome's alternative exegesis the noonday devil was the heresiarch in the guise of an angel of light. It corrupted with the promise of an abundance of knowledge and virtue, as symbolized by noon, the hour when light and heat are most intense. The phrase "at noon" meant "in perfect knowledge, in good works, in clear light." As Jerome moralized, "When the heretics give some mysteriously sounding promises concerning the kingdom of heaven, concerning chastity and fasts and holiness

and renunciation of the world, they are promising the [light of] noonday. Yet, because it is not the light of Christ, it is not the [true light] of noonday, but the devil of noonday."^[163]

Richard of St. Victor also warned of the midday devil as the deceptive source from which sprang all heresies and errors. Transfigured into an angel of light through its revelations, it promoted the misinterpretation of false visions.^[164] But it was Bernard of Clairvaux who in his commentary on the Song of Songs interpreted the noonday devil as the wiles of invisible powers, which lie in ambush to deceive men through simulated good. He counseled that those who had attained to the grace of devotion must be on guard and he quoted the scriptural warning about the angel of Satan transformed into an angel of light. In discharging duties with sensible devotion, a person might be so attracted to asceticism as to injure his health with indiscreet austerities—to great spiritual loss. The ascetic must be enlightened by the day of discretion, the mother of virtues and the crown of perfection. Prudence taught the avoidance of excess in everything.^[165]

The detection of the midday fiend as false illumination was popular in late medieval spirituality.^[166] Walter Hilton, in The Scale of Perfection , spied it as a deception through the manifestation of a false light under the color of a true light. This demon who feigned light but was darkness affected souls who had abandoned the world outwardly but not inwardly. Its victims imagined themselves to be holy in virtue and learned in scripture. Because they fulfilled the commandments literally they imagined that they loved God perfectly. So they posed as capable of preaching and teaching all other men, as if they had received the grace of understanding and the perfection of charity from some special gift of the Spirit. That light and heat, he analyzed, derived not from the sun of righteousness as Christ but from its mimic, the noonday devil. It operation could be detected by the presence of two black rainy clouds: the upper one presumptuous pride, the lower one deprecation of fellow Christians. In Hilton's exposition of psalm ninety the noonday devil was the last temptation, the most private and perilous one, which quietly assailed chosen and elevated souls at the state of perfection. Like the spirit of darkness as an angel of light, it manifested to a soul its loftiness with wonderful knowledge and spiritual conceits. It thus persuaded someone that he was at the summit of contemplation and the perfection of love, beyond the common living of other good men. He might live as he liked, for he would not and could not sin. Those were false lights

from which emanated errors and heresies. The remedy was meekness and trust in God.^[167]

In treatises on the discernment of spirits, attributed to the author of The Cloud of Unknowing , the devil appeared as a good spirit to cause damage under the guise of virtue. He inspired souls to affect an extraordinary holiness beyond their capacity. He goaded them to external observances such as fasting and hair shirts as signs of a great devotion simulating charity. The worst trap of the noonday devil was to persuade a soul to a special vow binding it to unusual practices. That was a veneer of holiness in contradiction to Christian freedom. The devil's motive in such deceptions was love of the dissention and slander arising from inappropriate displays of holiness.^[168] Richard Rolle's Incendium amoris warned of that "false and feigned devotion into which those who are ignorant of contemplative life are beguiled by the devil at midday, because they think themselves to be very high, whereas they are very low." Resistance was to fix the mind on God and to be busy with love, forgetful of vanity.^[169] Gerson also identified as the noonday devil the danger of committing sin through the aspiration of achieving something lofty. "So that you may understand how nothing is safe even in the very love of God, while we pilgrimage to the Lord, ponder with profound reflection that among those practiced in the love of God and proceeding in other virtues there can be a terrible deception. What kind of deception?" he asked. "Such a kind that these devout, by the just but hidden permission of God, for instruction or for perdition, are deluded by the noonday devil of pride, transfigured into an angel of light under the appearance of a great good."^[170] That great good was symbolized by the peacock in Marcus of Orvieto's Liber de moralitatibus , one of the most elaborate medieval handbooks for preaching. The beautiful blue feathers on the bird's breast were moralized as deceptive vanities of the devil transforming himself into an angel of light.^[171]

The peacock shared with the cherubim the omniscience of aerial creatures and celestial gods, whose extraordinary vision was symbolized by multiple eyes. It was such omniscience, the divine knowledge of good and evil, that the serpent had promised the primordial pair in the garden of Eden. Early in sixteenth-century art the tempter, coiled about the tree offering its fruit to Eve, acquires on its head the crest of a peacock. The serpent is so depicted in Albrecht Dürer's engraving of the Fall of Man and his woodcut for the Small Passion, and also in Hans Baldung Grien's woodcut of the Fall of Man. In a Netherlandish painting of the Fall attributed to Michael Coxie the serpent acquires a more realistic pea-

cock's crest and even the bird's beak. The peacock's crest appears most alarmingly on the lurid, feathered angel who lurks in the shadows of the Isenheim altarpiece playing a viol for the Madonna.^[172] It is the discernment of such spirits that Loyola practices at the Cardoner. He relates as his fifth tutorial and memorial point how he once went to that river and, with his face toward its deeply flowing surface, experienced a great learning.^[173]

The virtually universal metaphor for understanding was vision, and vision was symbolized artistically as a mirror.^[174] Water was the natural mirror, both feared as a reflector of the soul and exploited for divination. Since antiquity peoples believed their reflection to be their soul. A dread maxim warned against regarding it, lest spirits dragged the reflection underwater, leaving a person soulless—to perish.^[175] It was also contrarily believed that the potential divinatory disposition of the soul became effective under the influence of a spirit that approached through running water. Plutarch wrote, "The prophetic current and breath is most divine and holy, whether it issue by itself through the air or come in the company of running waters." That created an "unaccustomed and unusual temperament, the peculiarity of which is hard to describe with exactness." Among its analogies he proposed that it was like dipping steel into cold water to make it tense and keen. The prophetic power of the soul was especially like an eye.^[176]

The most famous male ever to gaze into the reflecting surface of water was the fair Narcissus. In mythology he was prophesied longevity if he did not "know himself." Although pursued by youths and maidens, he proudly spurned their love; but they prayed to the gods for revenge on his disdain. Once when fatigued from the hunt Narcissus reclined by a clear, deep pool for refreshment. His physical thirst increased into an amorous desire for the image reflected in its water. Fixed speechless, he gazed at its starry eyes and divine form, enchanted by his own charms. Narcissus bent to kiss and embrace the elusive image in the silver well, until he died wasted by his efforts at its grassy edge.^[177] The classical motif of Narcissus was illusion unto death. His error was not a deliberate and arrogant self-love but deception by a beautiful illusion that victimized him. Narcissus's love was for his reflection, for his image, not for himself, whom he initially failed even to recognize. His was a foolish infatuation for the imitative and elusive. The choice of an object for his passion was mistaken. Narcissus was a sympathetic dupe, regarding an image as real. Its very unreality, incapable of requiting his love for it, sealed his fate. Narcissus was perpetually fixed before his image with no

release from entrapment by illusory beauty. His classical myth was not about perilous love, as the courtly tradition would so convert it, but about reliance on sensory perception without any comprehension of its propensity for error. As a symbol of the transitory beauty of the material, the myth introduced the theme of vanity.

In medieval literature the myth was adapted to the perils of ordinary human experience in moralizations, romances, narrative and epic poetry, and handbooks. The mythological elements were suppressed as Narcissus was translated to medieval dress and feudal society. He was exploited in moralizations on Ovid's Metamorphoses about the deceptions of love and in courtly lyrics about the perils of drowning in the pools of a lady's eyes. The revenge of Amor, whose power mocked reason and moderation, was dramatic. The most notorious of the lovers was Amant, the protagonist of Guillaume de Lorris's and Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose , the most important and influential medieval composition in the vernacular. In a dream Amant chanced into a pleasance upon a river in whose clear water he washed his face for refreshment. Following the course of the river, he entered into the garden of mirth to its source in a shady fountain. An inscription warned, "Here perished the fair Narcissus." After hesitation, Amant dared to peer within the fountain and there he beheld reflected prismatically in twin crystals at its bottom the myriad pleasures of the garden. From those enticements he chose a rosebush laden with blossoms and from those beauties, one perfect bud. The rape of the rose became his quest, as he related obscenely his penetration of the pudendal emblem with his pilgrim's staff.^[178]

Since Narcissus was hardened against his lovers by pride, treatises philosophical, moral, and natural introduced allegorical explanations of the myth. In John of Salisbury's Policraticus the figure of Narcissus strove for power, glory, and praise. People who yielded to such ambitions pursued the fantasies of their own confused imaginations. Like Narcissus they were captivated "imprudently," for their desired object was a vacuity created by the self in muddled judgment. Those vainglorious persons despised others in comparison with themselves and sought to attain the impossible. They gloried in deceptive images, for power was nothing in itself—only a false concept. Arnulf d'Orleans moralized on Ovid about the conceited person whose excellence was illusory and who ended in ruin like an ephemeral flower. Alexander of Neckham in De natura rerum specified that "by Narcissus is meant the vainglory which is tricked by its own vanity, since it admires and praises itself too much." John of Garland also moralized about Narcissus as greedily decived by

the splendor of objects. Pierre de Beauvais in his Reductorium morale wrote that Narcissus set store by the beauty of the soul concerning knowledge. Spiritual persons who reflected upon their own virtue and despised others would turn into flowers and end in hell.^[179]

The peacock was the animal symbol of the illusion of vainglory; Narcissus, its human counterpart. In both lores figured vainglory and illusion; or, as the moralizers conflated those, vainglory was illusory. Water as the place of retribution for Narcissus's pride in spurning lovers becomes the place of redemption for Loyola's pride in coveting lovers. Although Loyola's desires are not erotic but vainglorious, they are still cupidinous. The frigid, sunless landscape in which Narcissus was metamorphosed in death becomes penetrated in Loyola's experience by light from a crucifix. The violent death of Jesus substitutes for the tragic fate of the sinner. From the sensual image of his own face reflected in the river Loyola proceeds methodically from vision to contemplation. He begins to understand "as much about faith as about learning." This understanding is about his cupidity for the knowledge of good and evil, with which the serpent had seduced the primal parents in Eden and now allures him in the guise of the peacock. The tempter promised immortality through omniscience, the attribute of the many-eyed astral beings. Yet the misuse of vision in the regard of self and others was the characteristic of Vice in the choice of Hercules: "Now she eyed herself; anon looked whether any noticed her; and often stole a glance at her own shadow."^[180] Loyola will perceive in the light of the cross the vainglorious peacock as a projection of himself, like the reflection of his face in the water of the Cardoner river.

Loyola is the peacock. He struts about ascetically like the gay, brave, young lover of Libro de buen amor who walks erect as a peacock.^[181] While Erasmus warned in his manual on civility that preening before others in elegant, opulent clothing was for peacocks,^[182] by the moral of the sartorial topic so was displaying oneself to them in poor, shabby garb. Loyola decks himself out in such peacock's feathers when he dons the sackcloth at Montserrat. There he appears before the Madonna's statue, posturing in the scene that peacock angels most frequently visited in renaissance art, the annunciation. It is the very feast of the annunciation (25 March) for which he keeps vigil. The angel saluting Mary is none other than Loyola the peacock, embodying asceticism as "the angelic life." In his diary, composed about twenty years later, he still has the thought or judgment in prayer that he should behave or be like an angel, and his eyes suavely mist over.^[183] This is why at Manresa the

peacock appears aerially "next" (junto ) to him: it is his double. Loyola is playing autofascination.^[184] He gazes at the peacock with his two eyes; its multiple iridescent eyes reflect him. He sees in them himself gloriously multiplied—an infinity, an immortality of Loyolas. This is the motif of the pupillary soul.^[185] As Leonardo da Vinci stated the phenomenon, "If you look into the eye of another person you will see your own image."^[186] Loyola's vision also related to the amatory motif of lovers gazing mutually into each other's eyes, a variant on the commonplace of the unilateral glance as an arrow that penetrated the eyes of the lover and wounded the heart.^[187] Looking into the beloved's eyes as a mirror implied self-love.^[188] The peacock's eyes spy Loyola out in judgment, just as the river Cardoner in which his image is reflected divines his soul. The peacock cogently appears at this climactic understanding and judgment about goods. Loyola is able to dismiss the thing for what it is: a creature, an attractive but lesser good than God.

Splendor, especially false glitter, was related since Christian antiquity to the pomps of the devil. Those pomps were not grave sins such as murder but rather vain praise, glory, proud insolence. As the diabolical vanities were denounced in a medieval treatise on baptism, "His pomps are ambition, arrogance, vainglory and others of this type that are discerned as flowing from the fountain of pride."^[189] Loyola recognizes the identity of the peacock "in the light of the cross." A cross is not a light; its only beams are of dense, opaque wood. Yet it is for Loyola the source of his great enlightenment. This understanding identifies in his conscience all other lights—from the spangled sheen of the peacock's tail to the shining surface of the river Cardoner—as merely reflective surfaces, imitations of reality. The supreme good is the source of those lights, their Creator. The imagery is Platonist, as mediated through Augustine's Neoplatonist theory of illumination. Loyola moves in place from the river to the crucifix. Although the major Catalan shrines like Montserrat were dedicated to images of the Madonna, the miraculous signs of the sixteenth century became almost exclusively dedicated to crucifixes or other images of the passion.^[190] Loyola wounded with self-love considers before the crucifix the wounds of selfless love.

In medieval lyrics on the crucifixion the wounds of Christ were appealed to for protection against the seven capital vices.^[191] There was also an ancient and general convention that Christ was a mirror. On ivory cases for mirrors the crucifix was prominent among religious motifs as a shining exemplar.^[192] Another artistic practice was to set the wounds on crucifixes with five carbuncles, whose deep red color symbolized

blood.^[193] The carbuncle was esteemed as the most luminous of all gems because it was self-luminous.^[194] Petrarch associated it with the sun and by allusion with Apollo, the solar god.^[195] As a reflector of eternal light it was allegorically a natural mirror of God. In Roman de la rose a carbuncle in the park of the Good Shepherd countered the crystals in the garden of delight. Those gems in the perilous pool of Narcissus could reveal nothing without the penetration of sunlight. They were mere imitations, fake gems.^[196] In Piero della Francesca's predella of the stigmatization of St. Francis an aerial crucified seraph is a sharp source of light, artistically novel in throwing the surroundings into deep neutral obscurity.^[197]

The crucifix is especially illuminative for Loyola by the same rhetorical topic that had already afforded him light toward conversion, the opening of the book. Although a crucifix may seem no more a book than a light, it was revered as such. Since the art of the catacombs the sacrifice of Christ was symbolized by the pastoral motif of the mystical lamb,^[198] whose attribute was a book. In manuscript illuminations of the biblical book of Revelation (Apocalypse) the slain but victorious Lamb was depicted standing on a scroll or on the very book of revelation with the seven seals, or even opening it.^[199]

Augustine wrote of the cross as a school in which the master Christ taught the thief; the wood on which he hung became his professorial chair.^[200] He also compared the stretched skin of Christ crucified to the leather on a timbrel, the gut on a psalter, or a woolen garment.^[201] Mendicant authors developed the analogue into a book. The Franciscan spiritual observant Jacopone da Todi poetically announced of Christ crucified:

I am the book of life, sealed with the seven seals;
When I am opened you will find five signs,
The color of red, red blood. Ponder them.^[202]

Angela of Foligno advised that for "superillumination" in prayer the faithful should read the book of life that is Christ.^[203] A devotional poem of the Beguines spoke of going to school in the glorious book of Christ's side^[204] rent with a lance at the crucifixion. Some medieval charters of Christ specified the deed of redemption as his crucified body. That deed was written on the parchment of his skin with pens that were the scourges of the Jews; the letters were his wounds; the sealing wax, his blood.^[205] The meditations on the crucified by a hermit of Farne elaborated the five principal wounds as vowels, the remainder as consonants.

He enjoined the believer not merely to read the book but to "eat" it, as sweet in the mouth and understanding but bitter in the belly and memory. There were many, he wrote, who knew all manner of things, such as the movements of the stars, but because they were ignorant of the crucified Christ, their knowledge would profit them nothing toward salvation.^[206]

Among the Dominicans Henry Suso wrote a book on wisdom only less popular than the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux and the Imitatio Christi . In it Christ recommended asceticism as "the beginning of the school of wisdom, which is to be read in the open and wounded book of my crucified body. . . . See, the diligent contemplation of my loving passion makes of a simple man a high learned master. It is indeed a living book, in which one finds all things; how truly blessed is the man who has it at all times before his eyes and studies it." The servant replied, "Alas, Lord, if I could but write thee upon my heart, if I could but engrave thee in the very depths of my heart and soul in golden letters, so that Thou would never be erased in me!"^[207] Cavalca advised the vainglorious to glory in nothing save the cross. The medicine for their pride was the humility of Jesus. Of vainglorious scholars he pronounced: better a holy man who is illiterate than a savant sinner. In his mirror of the cross he taught Christ crucified as the book of perfect and useful knowledge in which Everyman, learned or unlearned, might read in abridgment the entire law and scripture. A book, he elaborated, was nothing more than a well-shorn sheepskin stretched between two poles, on which there was writing in black letters with red for the principal initials in majuscule. In this guise was Jesus on the cross like a book. His skin and flesh were that of an immaculate, sinless lamb; his naked body stretched out and nailed on the cross between two beams. He was blackened with beatings, and his bloody wounds were the capitals of illumination. On his body was cancelled the writ of sin (Col. 2:14). Cavalca's mirror was written expressly for the use of simple laity, who did not read the Latin of theological treatises. A translation into Catalan, Mirall de la creu , was made in the fifteenth century from a manuscript by a monk of Montserrat.^[208]

Catherine of Siena lauded the cross as the professorial chair of Christ. "Christ has written His doctrine on His body; He made a book of Himself, with initials so large and so red that even the dullest and most unlearned can see them and read them plainly." On his body he wrote in great initial capitals the eternal truth of the ineffable love by which man was created to share in the supreme Good. As master Christ was

elevated on the professorial chair of the cross so that people might better study the suffering that honored the Father and restored beauty to the soul. The devil propped up before their eyes the contrary book of sensuality, in which was written all the vices and evil inclinations that come from self-love. She exhorted, "Let us then choose the heart-felt love, founded on truth, shown us in this book of life." Its charity had destroyed on the cross the charter Adam had underwritten to the devil. The parchment became the immaculate Lamb who wrote the human race upon his own body, cancelling the original debt.^[209]

Unless, she warned, a person attended the school of the Word, the Lamb slain and abandoned on the cross, he would not lead a good life. One must behold him to see oneself, for humans were created in the divine image and Christ was incarnated in the human image. In his sweet school people learned the doctrine of humiliation. When the soul saw itself not for its own sake, but self for God and God for God, it found in the supreme Good the image of the creature and in itself as an image, him. Contemplating the divine love for himself, the creature was compelled to love his neighbor. Then he was moved "to love self in God and God in self, like a man who, on looking into the water, sees his image there and seeing himself, loves and delights in himself." That watery mirror was the "wellspring of the sea of the divine Essence." Catherine advised that the wise person would be moved to love the water rather than himself, for the water provided the primary essence in which he might perceive his image to love it, and it also revealed to him a smudge on his face.^[210] That spiritualization of the perilous pool of Narcissus occurred in a letter to Raymond of Capua, her Dominican confessor. Catherine was illiterate and used to dictate her communications, although the friar claimed that she had been miraculously taught to read with the skill of a scholar.^[211] Except for her personal obsessions with the purgatives of blood, food, and fire, her dictations were ascetic commonplaces. Her proposal that a human as Narcissus saw Christ crucified in his own reflected image was plausibly a popular oral tradition rather than a personal literary invention.

It was a dictum that the images and pictures of the saints, but especially the cross of Christ, were the books of the laity.^[212] The cross is the book that Loyola opens for self-knowledge toward conversion. He may be imagined in the landscape like the most bookish of all ascetics, that saint whose admiration and imitation was so much in vogue, Jerome. In reading the lives of the saints during convalescence, Loyola proposed to himself the medieval models Dominic and Francis; yet the paradigms

of this text are the ancient archetypes Peter and Jerome. Its relation about his enlightenment at the Cardoner was that he understood there matters of "faith and learning." Faith and learning was a topic. In his humanist manifesto Antibarbari Erasmus instructed the way to the finest praise as the emulation of the finest persons. The truly attentive imitator not only chose unerringly the right example but also the noblest qualities in that example. "Take Peter and Jerome, the one first among the apostles, the other first among the doctors. In Peter there was the ardor of faith at its highest; in Jerome there was learning at its best. It is for you to imitate the spirit of the one and the scholarship of the other."^[213] Peter and Jerome were humanist archetypes of faith and learning. The Petrine motif of the text is plain, yet the Hieronymite motif is also prominent. Loyola in his precepts for holding an opinion with the Church mentions Jerome first among the positive doctors.^[214]

The cult of Jerome exploded in the fourteenth century with the discovery of some apocryphal writings proclaiming him the virtuoso ascetic, prodigious in miracles. Devotion especially imitated his austerities. Colombini, the irascible husband converted by the opening of the book of the saints, organized his lay congregation in imitation of Jerome. It was in Spain that the cult of Jerome especially flourished with the Hieronymites, who maintained among their magnificent monasteries the Escorial, the royal repository of the largest collection of his relics beyond Bethlehem. Jerome had compelling associations for Loyola in excess even of his legendary asceticism, for which he was portrayed as bloodying his breast with a stone. Jerome was devoted to the Madonna, and his treatise in defense of her perpetual virginity—the subject of Loyola's altercation on the highway with the "Moor"—was the foundation of Western Marian theology. Under the pseudonym of Jerome, her assumption and her immaculate conception were taught by Paschasius Radbertus, whose text on her dazzling snowy whiteness was retained in the Roman breviary for the office of the immaculatist feast.^[215]

Jerome's presence to Loyola's recital is whispered in the opening phrase of the preface, which dates the conversation in the garden to the vigil of the feast of Our Lady of the Snows. Jerome was buried precisely in its archetypal site, S. Maria Maggiore in Rome. The translation of his remains there from Bethlehem was arranged, evidently by the Dominicans, so that he might be with its Presepio, the huge reliquary containing the ancient oratory of the holy manger.^[216] Loyola's devotion to the Presepio is salient. He will on Christmas eve of 1538 celebrate his first Mass as a priest at its altar.^[217] The relics of Jerome were housed in a freestand-

ing altar-chapel erected in the aisle in front of the Presepio, so that the men were very close indeed. The Gesù, in which church Loyola would himself be entombed, acquired the relic of Jerome's arm,^[218] and Jerome was painted there with the other Western fathers.^[219] S. Maria Maggiore also housed art about Jerome. An important altarpiece, generally attributed to Masolino and Masaccio, was executed for one of the small chapels near the high altar. It depicted the Miracle of the Snow flanked by the ascetics SS. Jerome and John the Baptist. Iconography of the saint was added in the sixteenth century. The altar of a chapel to the Madonna had a pair of reliefs of her with SS. Jerome and Bernard.^[220]

Jerome was frequently painted in the posture of Loyola in this episode, kneeling in penitence in the wilderness (often an attractive landscape) before the cross. He was portrayed there with his attributes, the lion and the cardinal's hat, and in almost fifty examples^[221] with the book. An instructive exemplar for situating Loyola's experience in a Catalan landscape is a painting by the Master of the Seo of Urgel.^[222] It depicts Jerome alone in penitence on the ledge of a crag above a verdant landscape, through which winds a shining ribbon of river. He kneels attentively before a crucifix praying. Scattered about him are five locked books and one open book with a fluttering page, directly beneath the crucifix in the line of sight. The topic of the book of the cross as conversional illumination informs this and similar scenes, the most overt statement of which is a painting by Paolo Veronese. There the crucifix is spread out on the open pages of the book Jerome reads.^[223] Books are not only scattered in these landscapes but also juxtaposed. The book of the cross is the archetypal text; the texts of Jerome's scholarship are imitations. The scene ripples back to the manuscript illuminations of the Apocalypse in which the slain but triumphant Lamb stands upon the book with the seven seals, its body covered with seven eyes, surrounded by Ezekiel's whirring, peering tetramorphs. The peacock, their artistic ally, appears in several paintings of Jerome,^[224] but facing in the direction opposite the saint. Jerome's sight is fixed on the cross; he has renounced the vision of vainglory.

This is the symbolic book of conversion Loyola opens: the crucifix. It is "in the light of the cross" that he recognizes the peacock as the devil. The illuminating crucifix, the enlightening book, is luz rather than lumbre , that matchlight struck in the dark when during convalescence he read the lives of the saints.^[225] Now he reads the ultimate exemplar, the death of the crucified. The difference between luce and lume was current in renaissance artistic theory, as in da Vinci's distinction. There was the

luminary, not simply light or brightness but the very source of light, the pure, undimmed brightness inherent in the nature of the illuminating body (luce ). Then there was the light that emanated from it, derivative light as less intense and mixed with shadow (lume ). Although the distinction was common in medieval theology and philosophy,^[226] it is its primary source that illuminates Loyola's experience. His metaphorical allusion of light (luz vs. lumbre ) is to the myth of Plato's cave. In his Republic there was another epideictic composition, the "hymn of dialectic." The faculty of sight imitated the effort of the intellect, for it beheld the real animals and stars, and finally the sun. In dialectic a person began the discovery of the absolute by the light of reason only, without any sensory assistance, and he persevered until by pure intelligence he arrived at the perception of the absolute good. That was the goal of the intellectual realm as sight was that of the visible.

This philosophy was illustrated by the myth of the cave. There eyes unaccustomed to looking at forms in daylight looked instead with weak eyes at shadows and at "likenesses and reflections in water." Liberated eyes would gradually adjust to sunlight and look at the sun itself—and not merely at reflections or phantasms of the sun on earth like the shadows cast by firelight. The myth illustrated how the mind turned from the sensible to the intelligible. In the ascent from their underground den to the sunlight prisoners were released from their chains and transferred from shadows, to images, to light. Even with feeble eyes they were able to perceive the images in the water, which were divine shadows of true existence. Those were unlike the shadows cast by firelight (lumbre ), which was only an image of the sun.^[227]

The myth illustrates Loyola's spiritual pilgrimage, which will culminate not fortuitously in visions of Christ as the luminary sun. Until now he has only been admiring shadows of the Good: imitative knights and saints, and his own amiably illusory reflection in the likeness of the peacock and the water of the Cardoner. The meaning of Loyola's grande illustración becomes luminous. The noun illustratio occurred but once in classical literature. Quintilian wrote that from impressions arose the vividness (enargeia ) that Cicero had termed illustratio . It was the quality that promoted the exhibition, rather than narration, of a scene and stirred the emotions as actively as if the reader were actually present at the event.^[228] The Castilian illustración means just such an "illustration" and also "learning, erudition; elucidation, explanation; enlightenment; learning; illustrated or pictorial publication." Loyola employs it as a direct translation of "the grand learning" (megiston mathema ) of Plato's Republic , which was repeated and glossed by Plotinus's Enneads

as "the huge illumination."^[229] A mathema in classical philosophy was an insight to be learned, and the most important (megiston ) of those was the subject of the good.^[230] It is precisely the ancient question of the supreme good that involves Loyola at the Cardoner.

Water served the sun as a mirror. The sun, which could not be perceived directly, could be seen through its reflection on the surface of a river, a phenomenon since Plato for expressing an indirect apprehension of the inapprehensible sublime.^[231] The sources of water for a Spanish town—springs, fountains, streams—were womanly places for drawing the drinking and cooking water for households. The laundry was frequently taken just outside a town to the banks of a river, where the women would scrub the linen and wash their hair.^[232] As a female place of meeting riverbanks acquired a certain connotation. When Loyola confesses going to the river for his great learning he is not just narrating a geographical itinerary. The phrases "to go to the river" and "to come to the river" were medieval Spanish expressions, or euphemisms, for a lovers' tryst. The river and the fountain were dramatic places of encounter, for the heroine went there to meet her lover and bathe with him. Numerous love poems commenced with "riverbanks" as the key to this motif.

I went to bathe
at the banks of the river. There I met, mother,
my fine beau.

The banks were frequented in poetry by maidens singing amorously, and the blossoming of flowers there was no natural development but an allegory for the bower of love.

The riverbanks, mother,
grow flowers of love,

and,

I have come, mother,
from the banks of a river: There my loves
in a rosebush flowered.

The maiden invited her beau:

To the river carry me, friend
and carry me to the river.

The ultimate euphemism was falling into the river.^[233]

There was also in medieval Spanish literature a legend of a noonday apparition of a god or goddess, as in Juan de Mena's vision in a pleasance by a river of a procession of loyal lovers.^[234] Or the apparition might be the demon Empusa.^[235] There was the visionary Melosina, the enchanting woman who was a serpent from the waist down, with aerial and aquatic features from the folklore of fairies metamorphosed.^[236] And in Micer Francisco Imperial's Dezir a las syete virtudes seven flying basilisks as heresies appeared by a brook springing from a clear fountain.^[237]

Loyola's experience at the river converts the erotic encounter into a charitable one; yet the event remains amorous. With the detail of his face to the river he betrays what sort of lover he is: a Narcissus, an Amant. He also in his meditation imitates the hero of the chivalric romance Amadís de Gaula , with whose adventures he confessed himself heady as he began his pilgrimage. Its knights were spurred by a zest for fame and by a concern to maintain and increase it. They engaged in danger so that they might participate in glory, pursuing praise for great deeds to perpetual memory.^[238] Amadís, having lain down his arms, retired penitentially under the assumed name of Beltenebros to a hermitage at sea in renunciation of worldly honor. He became involved in a dangerous confrontation, however, which accorded him unexcelled honor and prowess, especially the favor of his lady Oriana. Setting out to meet her at Miraflores, he entered the densest thick of a forest, where he discovered a river beneath large groves. Dismounting for his horse to graze, he washed his hands and face and drank of the water.

"And he sat down thinking of the changeable things in the world, recalling the great despair in which he had been, and how of his own free will he had asked for death, not expecting any relief for his great distress and grief, and that God, more through his compassion than through his own merits, had so restored everything, not only in leaving him as he was before, but also with much more glory and fame than ever." He mused especially on possessing his beloved Oriana, whose absence caused him great sadness and tribulation. That amorous thought "led him to recognize how little confidence men in this world ought to have in those things in the pursuit of which they suffer and toil, devoting to them so much zeal, so much love, not remembering how quickly they are won and lost, forgetting to serve that all-powerful Lord, who gives them and can confirm them." Secure worldly prizes were taken from men to great anguish of heart; yet the losses were sometimes returned to them by God, as he had done to Amadís concerning his lady's favor. Amadí's understanding was that "neither in things ac-

quired nor things lost should one have faith, but that, doing what people are obliged to do, they leave them to That One who commands and rules them without any contradiction, as one without whose hand nothing can be done." From that meditation he proceeded with apparent divine blessing to an erotic encounter with his beloved.^[239]

Amadís as Beltenbros was "meditating beside that stream voluntarily restraining the great pleasure and pride that came to him from those very great adventures" he had just performed.^[240] Loyola's "understanding" while he is similarly seated at the river is "as much about faith as about letters."^[241] Whether or not it exactly mimics the meditation of Amadís on created goods as transitory, compared with the Lord who disposes them, it concerns the same problem of the good. Loyola is engaged not only in the Herculean task of choosing between good and evil but also in choosing in an Augustinian scheme among goods, in a hierarchy from created goods to the supreme good.

What Loyola sees reflected in the surface of the Cardoner is his image, much as his contemporaries viewed themselves in the moral mirror both realistically and correctively. Mirrors in literature could be factual, exemplary, prognostic, or fantastic. Exemplary mirrors, in analogy with their use for toiletry, were held up to the self for interior discernment and moral beautification. Virtues and vices were portrayed as exemplary and admonitory mirrors in numerous manuals, either as cataloguing behavioral rules or as compiled from the deeds and fate of individuals. Some admonitory mirrors, like Loyola's Acta , deterred vice by an image of blatant evil depicted with force and exaggeration.^[242] As Shakespeare will portray the conversion of King Richard II from conceit to humility, the protagonist sends for a mirror:

I'll read enough

When I do see the very book indeed

Where all my sins are writ, and that's myself.

He looks into the flattering glass only to discover that "a brittle glory shineth in this face."^[243]

Concluding his catalogue of the moral disposition of animals with the peacock as "ostentatious," Aristotle climaxed it with the judgment that "the only animal that is deliberative is man."^[244] It is such deliberation that Loyola requires to understand and judge his fantasy of vainglory. As Augustine taught, the soul was deceived through its own erroneous opinion, through a lack of understanding that confused

different objects because of their similarity.^[245] Loyola is bedeviled by the ambiguity of his vision. The virtue in classical and Christian morality that distinguished between good and evil was prudence, the correlative of the charism of the discernment of spirits Loyola applies in recognizing the peacock as vainglory. Although prudence as foresight could be symbolized by the peacock's feathers,^[246] the attribute of prudence, as the science of scriptures, was established since Carolingian times as the book.^[247] It is the book of the cross, in which Loyola reads the lesson of divine glory humiliated for love, that allows him to discern as evil human glory exulting in self-love. As the stock of attributes for the cardinal virtues increased, prudence acquired the serpent and the dove (Matt. 10:16).^[248] It also acquired the mirror.^[249] Yet mirrors were tricky. There were innumerable artistic examples of pride with a mirror.^[250] Who looks in the mirror—prudence or pride—when Loyola turns his face to the Cardoner river? Pride, as discerned by prudence.

The peacock had the nature of a mirror. The Catalan bestiary in its translation of a Tuscan original varied significantly the attribute of eyes. "The peacock is a beautiful bird with a grand tail that is entirely fashioned in the semblance of mirrors" (mirals , for occhi ). It committed vainglory when it fanned its tail into a wheel and gloried in its beauty, although when it regarded its ugly feet it retracted the tail. Its many mirrors (espills , for occhelli ) signified that a person had wisdom, or providence, of all past matters, whether or not his life was pleasing to God.^[251] That is the moral Loyola descries in the mirror, although the peacock has previously appeared to him as angelic, an emblem of his asceticism. Angels were since the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite revered as mirrors and they appeared in Dante's pilgrimage as mirrors in which the divine ray was divided.^[252] The peacock is in Loyola's pilgrimage the angel of darkness in the guise of the angel of light, the trick mirror.^[253] The ambiguity of that beast mirrors the perplexity of humans, who must discern between good and evil as not always clearly black or white. The peacock was classically an unlucky bird. As the attribute of the most envious of all the deities, Juno, it was a mischief-maker. The bird was associated with the envious glance, the "evil eye"; and its feathers were used in eye-spells and in magical craft.^[254] The glance of the peacock at Loyola is spiritually lethal.

Loyola's habitual failure to descry the peacock as vainglory is due to its ambiguous and illusory nature. His inaugural impression, that of the Madonna during convalescence, functioned narratively to eliminate one possibility, the peacock as a symbol of lust. There remained other at-

tractions, however. The peacock was the Madonna's pet bird. Its feathers adorned angels, saints, and knights as a prize of immortality. Loyola sees a peacock only fabulously; he elects it as a symbol of the vice of vainglory, for which his recital is to serve as a mirror. This artistic choice involves dramatic irony, for the initiated reader recognizes the devil in disguise while the protagonist Loyola does not. It was a device of the allegory of pilgrimage that the audience viewed the visionary world as simultaneously seen by the stumbling narrator and in its universal significance. The detachment of irony was involved in the discrepancy between amusement at or sympathy for the protagonist.^[255] The plot of Loyola's pilgrimage is to involve readers in this act of the recognition and rejection of vainglory.

The reader is birdlimed, as is Loyola, by curiosity. The peacock as a hybrid of bird and serpent implied that fault, for Augustine's exegesis of the dominion of humans in the divine image over other creatures (Gen. 1:26) was that birds symbolized pride, while serpents symbolized curiosity.^[256] In his interpretation of the three temptations "the lust of the eyes" was curiosity. That was the first among the insidious and deceitful suggestions by which the devil held sway over the body, since the eyes lusted for curiosity. The scope of curiosity was broad: in spectacles, in theaters, in diabolical sacraments and magical arts, in all dealings with darkness.^[257] Curiosity darting from the eyes toward displays wounded the soul.^[258] The association of the peacock with curiosity was especially colorful. "The lust of the eyes cannot but be lying; it has a colour, it has no truth. . . . For is not the lust of the eyes that which transforms him to an angel of light?"^[259] It was vainglory, Augustine taught, that prompted people to desire equality with the angels by desiring the angels to descend to their level. They should rather seek the humility that Jesus manifested.^[260] In his analysis of the two societies issuing from the love of self and the love of God Augustine cogently cited scripture. Humans glorying in their own wisdom became fools and "exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles (Rom. 1:22–23)."^[261]

This is the vice pestering Loyola. The peacock appears to him in the guise of good. It is a beautiful object by the classical definition of form and color. Even its serpentine form does not necessarily insinuate the devil that tempted the primordial pair in the garden of Eden. In renaissance art the serpentine form popularly reclaimed classical contrapposto , or antithesis. As Aristotle taught, "This kind of style is pleasing, because contraries are easily understood and even more so when placed

side by side." There was da Vinci's maxim, "Opposites always appear to intensify one another," so that the painter ought to juxtapose the ugly and the beautiful. Contrapposto in serpentine form conveyed an important notion of grace and beauty of line.^[262]

The blue coloration of the peacock suggests ultramarine, whose unique vividness accorded it the dominant position in painting. It was commonly used for the sky and for the Virgin's robe, to distinguish her excellence from other figures. As ground from lapis lazuli it was a costly color, and its usage stipulated in contracts between donor and artist signified a liberal piety.^[263] When Loyola kneeling before the cross has yet another vision of the flying serpent, he notices that it lacks its usual beautiful color.^[264] Color, as observed theoretically by Alberti and taught definitively by da Vinci, was the quality of reflected light.^[265] The peacock as "colorful" contrasts as reflected light with Loyola's impressions of Jesus and Mary as "white." They are pure light, illuminative sources rather than illuminated bodies.^[266] In the light of the cross as an illuminative source the peacock as an illuminated body loses before Loyola's very eyes its colorful appearance.

The plumage of birds was since classical antiquity an important indicator of color in artistic theory. The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise De coloribus taught that the plumage of feathers, when blended with sunlight, produced a great variety of chromatic effects. The necks of pigeons looked lustrous when light was reflected from them because there was continuity and density. Variety of hue was characteristic of the plumage of birds because feathers were smooth objects, with a variety of blends into which the impinging rays of light entered to show various colors.^[267] Lucretius in De rerum natura wrote specifically about peacock's feathers. "A color is changed by the light itself," he instructed, "according as the brightness responds to a direct or oblique impact of light." An example was a dove's plumage in the sun, about the nape and encircling the neck. Sometimes it was as red as the blazing carbuncle, while from another perspective it appeared to fuse emerald green with blue. "And the peacock's tail, when it is suffused with plenteous light, in like manner changes the colours as it turns; and since these colours are caused by a certain impact of light, assuredly you must not think that it can be produced without it."^[268] A peacock since antiquity designated not just a brilliant blue but the quality of iridescence,^[269] as da Vinci noted.^[270] There was a fashionable color in dress called "peacock" (pavonazzo ),^[271] which may have meant such variegation. A phenomenon similar to peacock's feathers in renaissance textiles was shot silks, in the contemporary term,

"changing." They were a taffeta woven with the warp and the woof in different colors; the fabric obtained its effect from the reflection of changing lights from different perspectives. The paler color predominated in the light, the darker in the shadow.^[272] Changing colors were frequently painted as draperies for angels to denote exotic, expensive silks.^[273] Changeables in color were also mentioned in manuals on courtesy.^[274]

The color of the peacock's fanned tail reflects the light; it is not self-luminous. Blue was in optics and in art, from classical to renaissance theories, the final stage of color before black.^[275] Blue and black were paired.^[276] Lack of beautiful color in the peacock, as Loyola observes, is a failure of light in comparison with the elucidation reflected in the surface of the Cardoner and the light emanating from the cross. The fading of color was attributed by Lucretius to the pulling of an object into minute particles, as when purple wool was torn into bits.^[277] In renaissance theory of art hues were mixed with white to pale them. This practice was like the effect of outdoor lighting in full sunlight when glare, reflection, and the adjustment of the eye to brightness lowers the perception of colors. In Alberti's De pictura , the initial primer on painting, the least illumined portion of the surface—the shadow—received the most intense or saturated colors. The well-illumined portions were lessened in intensity by the addition of white pigment. The most vibrant tones occurred in areas where, under normal conditions in the actual world, they appeared neutralized by the deprivation of light. The painted shadows thus attracted the eye and seemed to advance, while the lights, as neutralized, receded.^[278] The changing color of birds' feathers was a traditional example of this illusion.^[279] Loyola's initial admiration of the intense, saturated colors of the peacock is the attraction of the eye to the least illuminated part of his symbolic landscape. It is in reality the shadow. In full sunlight, radiating from the illuminative crucifix, he perceives the peacock's colors to fade and fail. He recognizes his vision as the ultimate dark thing, the devil, commonly painted black.

It was expounded in De sublimitate that in painting light is seen before shade, just as in rhetoric the brilliance of a figure may outshine and so conceal its artifice.^[280] Sextus Empiricus argued the issue of illusion from positions, distances, and locations, according to which the same objects could produce great variety in sensory impressions. "The necks of doves, also, appear different in hue according to the differences in the angle of inclination."^[281] It was a matter of perspective.^[282] And that perspective was governed by movement. As da Vinci attested, "There are

many birds in various regions of the world on whose feathers we see the most splendid colours produced as they move, as we see in our own country in the feathers of peacocks and on the necks of ducks or pigeons."^[283] Loyola's perception of the peacock alters as he himself moves from place to place, beginning in the hospice of the patron saint of eyes, until he finally perceives it correctly in his posture of kneeling before the crucifix. A late medieval treatise that adapted a consideration of the eye to the knowledge of divine wisdom supplied yet another answer to Loyola's failure to discern his vice. In De oculo morali et spirituali Peter of Limoges moralized from the science of perspective. The deprivation of direct rays or lines of sight caused uncertainty about the quantity or size of an object of vision, while direct rays or lines of sight resolved the problem. That was evident from the case of objects viewed now through air, now through water. Similarly the recognition of sin and its relative enormity could only be known by an observer who looked straight at sin with the eye of reason. The sinner, however, did not recognize the exact degree of error or its enormity, because he did not view it directly but by an oblique and broken line of sight.^[284]

The serpentine figure, such as the peacock, conveyed in renaissance art its important notion of grace and beauty of line precisely in comparison with the woodenness of sticks.^[285] Loyola does dismiss the flying serpent with a wooden stick, his bordón . The pilgrim's staff was a long, sturdy stick cut to form a node in its middle, on which a hand could rest or a bag be hung. It had a crook at its end and a metal toe. The upper part unscrewed, for storage of relics or forbidden foreign items such as silkworms or saffron.^[286] In Pèlerinage de vie humaine the pilgrim's staff was suggestively topped with a mirror, while a lower pommel was set with a carbuncle,^[287] as if it saw and shone. Although neither an example nor an explanation is extant, entrepreneurs like Johannes Gutenberg, before his invention of movable type, manufactured glass mirrors for pilgrims. The badges commonly sold at shrines sometimes included small mirrors. Pilgrims may have used them to collect as souvenirs the rays emanating from the reliquaries during their solemn display.^[288] The pilgrim's staff was a walking stick, a utilitarian object symbolic of the role. Its usage recalled Jesus' commissioning of the disciples, who were each to take a staff on his mission (Mark 6:8). That imitated the Exodus, in which the Israelites were to be ready with a staff in hand (Ex. 12:10), and it recalled the consolation offered by the divine shepherd in adversity (Ps. 23:4). The staff was blessed by the clergy as one of the rites of pilgrimage and it was a cherished item that many

pilgrims had buried with them for their journey beyond the grave.^[289] It was also the theme for most sermons delivered to congregations of pilgrims at their departure. The ritualistic presentation of the staff resembled the dubbing of the knight and the ordination of the priest,^[290] so that Loyola's carrying of it in pilgrimage includes his past and future roles.

The staff could also be a defensive weapon. The promotional literature for the pilgrimage to Compostela, Liber sancti Jacobi , included a famous sermon "Veneranda dies" that expounded on the staff for driving off wolves and dogs as symbolic of diabolical snares. The staff was called the pilgrim's "third leg." It symbolized the conflict of the Trinity with the forces of evil.^[291] In hagiography the saints were often described in recognition of the deceitful demon, the angel of darkness in the guise of light, as inflicting punishment on it,^[292] as in that of St. Juliana, who beat it violently with a chain until it hollered its true name.^[293] Loyola dismisses the flying serpent with a gesture. His use of his staff for rejection indicates that he is a pilgrim, one who has not yet arrived at the state worthy of the praise that vainglory perversely desires. His staff also replicates the stick with which was danced regionally the military imitation of the contest between good and evil, the danza de bordones , or pordon-dantza .

Quintilian instructed that the movements of the dance were frequently filled with meaning and appealed to the emotions without any assistance from words. The temper of the mind could be inferred from the gait.^[294] The renaissance posture of the orator was the same as that of the dancer, and the dance was related to the epideictic genre both in praise and in virtuosity.^[295] Loyola's gesture toward the peacock suggests "the peacock," a fashionable dance at parties and banquets in aristocratic homes, performed extensively in court masques and in entertainments. That dignified processional was the pavane , and the great continental favorite was the Spanish pavana .^[296] The dance is also emblematic of the recital and the text, for as Quintilian wrote of memory, "As soon as the memory of the facts requires to be revived, all these places are visited in turn and the various deposits are demanded from their custodians, as the sight of each recalls the respective details. Consequently, however large the number of these which it is required to remember, all are linked one to the other like dancers hand in hand."^[297]

The most famous, or notorious, pilgrim's staff in literature was the burdón with Amant raped the reliquary shrine of the rosebud he had spied in the crystals in Narcissus's fountain. He even compared the

difficulty of intercourse with a virgin to a Herculean task.^[298] Loyola's dismissal of the peacock with his staff is its moral antithesis, as he rejects vainglory with its concupiscence for the love of others. Obscenity is replaced with spirituality. The problem of love is resolved with its proper ordering to God. Until now Loyola has not been a pilgrim but a bordonero , a spiritual vagabond. He has been acting at bordonería , or "wandering idly about on the pretense of a pilgrimage," gawking like any tourist at the sights. A blow with a stick was legal outrage,^[299] and as Loyola takes the stick to the devil, literally he takes the matter of honor into his own hands. With this moral thrust of his bordón he chooses his direction.