One
The Knight Errant

Loyola swaggers onto the scene like the stock comedic character of the glorious soldier. "Until the age of twenty-six he was a man given to worldly vanities and he principally delighted in military exercises, with a great and vain desire to acquire reputation" (honra ). He is situated in a fortress under siege. While the entire garrison clearly perceives that resistance against the invading French army is impossible, and surrender the only chance of survival, Loyola singularly persuades the governor to its futile defense. During the attack a cannonball hits him in one leg, shattering it, and in passing through his legs severely wounds the other. At his injury the garrison surrenders the fortress to the enemy.^[1]

As with the preface, the text begins with a historical date but ends with a moral vice: vainglory. Although there is a discrepancy of this dating with a later statement,^[2] sixteenth-century society was not fixed by the calendar and clock. Spaniards particularly disregarded time. Almanacs were rare, even measuring instruments were scarce, so that it was exceptional for a watch to be included in an inventory of goods.^[3] Most persons were ordinarily unaware of the year of their birth.^[4] Even that of the most distinguished scholar, Erasmus, varied by several years, either forgotten or feigned.^[5] Epideictic rhetoric is invented from good and evil toward praise or blame, so that the time of importance is not Loyola's chronological age but his moral experience. This comprises twenty-six years of vainglory, which as coincident with his youth as a soldier underscores his immaturity.

Here begins the confession of "the fantasies and antics of youth"

(travesuras de mancebo ) that Gonçalves da Câmara declared in the preface Loyola had related to him clearly and distinctly.^[6] The ages of man were differently defined in classical, medieval, and renaissance cultures than in the modern. Augustine in his Confessions only became a "youth" at age thirty. Youth was a period that extended classically into the forties because of the economic dominance of fathers over sons.^[7] The fourth or middle age was the period of military service, in ancient descriptions sometimes called iuvenilitas , with the individual as iuvenis ; and it was cognate in the romance vernaculars with caballero, chevalier, cavaliere , and in the northern vernaculars with cnicht and Knecht. Both the primary meaning of "youth" and a secondary meaning of "service" or "attendancy" were consistently maintained. Iuvenis and miles were interchangeable, and by extension so were mancebo and caballero. According to Isidore of Seville's etymology, a knight was called iuvenis because he was beginning to be able to assist (iuvare posse incipit ). The connotation of "youth" was virility in strength but immaturity in judgment: a junior, not a senior—typically lacking in wisdom. Chronologically that age ranged from twenty or twenty-five years of age to forty, or even fifty-five.^[8] In the poetry of the troubadours "youth" usually expressed something different from biological age: an ensemble of moral or aesthetic qualities, the sum of the virtues that defined courtesy.^[9]

A well-born youth was a warrior in a defined stage of his military career, armed and dubbed as a knight. Although in modern society he would be considered an adult, he was historically called "youth" until his marriage, and perhaps even after that until he fathered children. Then he became a "man" as a head of household with a family. The social situation was caused by the rules for the management of patrimony, which the father tenaciously held even while he had grown sons. Excluded by social prohibitions from the body of settled men, the youth lived on an unstable margin. The period between entry into active military service and fatherhood could be of long duration, so that youths composed the chivalric culture not only by numbers but also by behavior. In epics and tales youth was a phase of impatience, turbulence, instability, as reflecting its interim status between the fixed stations of childhood in the house of the father or patron and of adulthood in his own household. In that interval the youth was a roamer. The fundamental characteristic of all descriptions of youth was the roving life: the refusal of place. The youth was in departure, or en route. He traveled through many provinces and regions, throughout the earth even, in

quest of adventure and its prize of honor. Vagabondage was regarded as a necessary stage of male development, the study of military matters.^[10]

Military service did not terminate for Loyola with his wounding at Pamplona, since he is introduced while a pilgrim at Manresa as a new recruit for Christ, still a soldier in active service but with a different master.^[11] Pilgrimage was conventionally compared with combat.^[12] Since Loyola died at sixty-five, the designation "youth" comprises most of his recital, which ends at about age fifty-one. Perhaps the papal approbation of the Society of Jesus, father-to-father, is his rite of passage to the age of manhood. The preface by Gonçalves da Câmara portrays him as an elder, from whom his young companions, typically vainglorious, may benefit morally. Acta is an admonitory mirror,^[13] designed to deter them from that vice by the vivid depiction of Loyola's youthful indulgence in its "fantasies and antics." The choice of Hercules between virtue and vice was essentially the choice of youth. The virtue of the classical parable was not Christian conduct, however, but arete ,^[14] defined as "a proud and courtly morality with warlike valour."^[15] This is the ideal in its Basque descent that Loyola rejects as the social and moral norm, exchanging his weaponry for Hercules' club^[16] as the symbol of prudence.

The confessional nature of the text is proclaimed in his very act at the prospect of siege: he makes his confession to a comrade in arms.^[17] Loyola in battle imitates the typical braggart soldier, a stock theatrical character played most popularly on the sixteenth-century stage as a Spaniard, since that nationality was ridiculed as the haughtiest.^[18] The role devolved to "the one and only Pyrgopolinices on earth, peerless in valour, in aspect, and in doughty deeds." That protagonist of the most successful of all Roman comedies, Miles gloriosus , was "a bragging, brazen, stercoraceous fellow, full of lies and lechery." A rival to Mars, he puffed away legions with his boastful breath—he computed killing seven thousand in a day—and even toppled an elephant with a tap. In Plautus's comedy Pyrgopolinices was duped by a lover and a courtesan, both in disguise, so that he did not recognize their plot to convict him of his vainglorious vice.^[19] Like Pyrgopolinices, Loyola does not judge the situation correctly because he does not see it, even though all the other soldiers on the scene do. Loyola does not see what every other man in the fortress sees because he is blinded by the vice to be seen. This personal vice becomes socialized when he persuades the governor to collaborate in his vainglory by defending the fortress. Even the caballeros are said to admire Loyola's firmness and fearlessness, although these apparent virtues will prove to be mere stubbornness and reckless-

ness. By manipulating the other characters toward admiration of himself, his vainglory endangers the garrison and, by implication, the city. Like all vice it portends death.

The literary spareness of this opening displays its subject as typological. Here is agonistic man universally at war. This archetype is symbolized by Loyola's opposition not only to the inimical French but also to his compatriot Basques. The fortress, which is his typical place, is an enclosure. It is the antithetical enclosure to the garden of the preface, the classical and renaissance place for the choice of Hercules,^[20] since war was classically the absence of leisure.^[21] The city under siege on the geographical map may be Pamplona but on the rhetorical map it is Dis. The very detail that the fortress under siege is in Pamplona is delayed until Loyola leaves the place, bound for home,^[22] so that its factuality is typical. Pamplona was on the road of pilgrimage to the famous shrine at Santiago da Compostela;^[23] thus it serves as the point of departure for Loyola's pilgrimage as the narrative plot. Loyola is there in an architectural fortress but also in that moral "fortress" of enormous walls and battlements that another pilgrim, Dante, named the metropolis of hell, capital of sorrow, kingdom of the dead.^[24] It was commonplace of epic to begin, as Horace said, "in the midst of things."^[25] So Dante discovered himself: "Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost."^[26] So Loyola in his vainglory finds himself in the midst of war. And both pilgrims find hell. The imitation of Dante's Commedia as a device for framing Loyola's recital will be patent from their identical closures on a vision of the sun.

Remarkable about this scene is the absence of ekphrastic description, whose epitome was Homer on Achilles' shield.^[27] Even the braggart Prygopolinices began his comedy with a command to polish his enormous shield to rival the sunbeams and dazzle his foes.^[28] In his treatment of the vivid style Quintilian acknowledged that the mere report of war included everything that such a fate involved. He argued, however, that to elicit the full emotional effect of commiseration the writer must expose all its horrifying details. From the sack of Troy the topic of the captured city was early established in epic, tragedy, and historiography. As the stock in trade of the rhetorician, the cruelty and terror of the scene especially allowed the historian a display of skill at vividness in the description of suffering. The staple items in describing the capture of the city were the shouts of the enemy, the wailing of the women and children, the rapid movement of advancing troops and fleeing citizens, fire and sword, the crash of buildings, and the slaughter of the defeated.^[29] There is no em-

ployment of the topic in this text, however, because the reader is not to be aroused to pity for Loyola. There is nothing in him of the magnanimity or skill that distinguished the chivalric code, only brute violence. Loyola is the type of choleric temperament, whose wrath was emblematized by a knight in arms.^[30] It is the acknowledged role of the inimical French to treat him "courteously and amiably."^[31]

The focus is on Loyola's vainglorious visibility and its ruinous consequences. "He" is in a fortress under attack, "he" persuades the governor to its defense, the other caballeros all admire "his" virtues, "he" confesses, "he" is wounded, and, to aggrandize his role as protagonist, "as soon as he fell wounded the others in the fortress surrendered."^[32] This is no idealized Christian warrior but, like the pilgrim from another tale, a profane professional soldier pretending to the dignity of chivalry. In the "Knight's Tale" from the road to Canterbury, Geoffrey Chaucer best satirized the new soldier. With the late medieval breakdown of military honor and social order, the feudal host became a mercenary army. Autonomous companies terrorized and lorded all over Europe, obeying only the law of profit. Whether Loyola's role is patriotic or profiteering is undeclared. What he does share with the lawless brigands and nefarious knights is vainglory, an obsession with pomp and display amid vicious and brutal reality.^[33] A tome that defined the social ideal for the sixteenth-century noble, Baldassare Castiglione's Il libro del cortegiano , frankly admitted that "in war what really spurs men on to bold deeds is the desire for glory." Its advice against ostentation and vainglory in arms only underscored their prevalence.^[34] The Spanish kingdoms were no exception to the phenomenon. Although the most notorious of mercenaries, Sir John Hawkwood, could rise to the position of captain-general to the pope,^[35] moralists criticized the vainglory of war. As Ramon Lull complained, these alleged knights were "the devil's ministers"; and he questioned rhetorically, "Who is there in the world who does as much harm as knights?"^[36]

Loyola introduces himself as vain and rapacious for honor, reveling in military exercises. As Francisco Guicciardini observed of the Spaniards, "In war they have a high regard for honor, and would rather suffer death than dishonor."^[37] The ideal was as ancient as a Greek society based on competitive, not cooperative, activities and excellences. The virtue of the warrior was arete , which embraced goodness, bravery, success, and prosperity. It meant holding firm in the face of bloody carnage and thrusting close-up at the enemy. The successful defense of the city-state demanded complete success in battle to maintain stability and prosper-

ity. It was a culture of results, with an absolute demand for the attainment of certain goals as determining its values. The norm was "'what people will say.'" Although winning was the good, it was also good to die fighting bravely for the common benefit of one's city. If it should fall, the lot of each citizen would become terrible; while, if the warrior were killed in its defense, his recompense was still a good. That was fame, fame for himself and for his posterity, undying fame. Although he might lie in the grave, the warrior was immortal in memory. If he was not killed, he was assured of honor by society.^[38]

The Greek value of "what people will say" itself became the enemy when Christian faith strove to supplant the drive for human glory with the worship of divine glory. A neat example was Lull's juxtaposition of courtly and clerical ideals, in which a character named Quemdería hom, or "what people will say," usurped the divine prerogatives, while Pochme preu personified "little do I matter."^[39] It will be Loyola's conversional task to exchange for himself these roles, from Quemdiría hom to Pochme preu. Glory was defined in Ciceronian rhetoric as "fame with praise," a great good second only to good itself, to which men since the Homeric heroes had aspired. Its desire was classically a native instinct that likened humans to gods. It was a stimulant to action that would yield virtue, and virtue in turn would be rewarded with glory. Glory was morally neutral itself, however, an ambiguous concept that could be real or illusory, durable or fugitive, objective or subjective. Christianity aggravated these conflicts into Augustine's condemnation of glory, with the fall of Rome as his proof. Yet the desire for glory prevailed among the troubadours and heroes of the chivalric romances. Medieval authors accorded glory to the individual who avoided excess and inordinateness and maintained the difficult equilibrium between fortitude and wisdom. In the literature called courtly these qualities were possessed by the good prince, who united personal merit with noble blood. The chivalric ideal comprised largesse, pity, bravery, and courtesy. Glory was the attribute of the adventurous, and between two paths the valorous knight would choose the more difficult. The ideal was in decline by the fifteenth century, however, with a decadent chivalry attacked by many authors. Glory proved unsustained by morality: debased into the glamour of luxury; satisfied with ceremony, pride, and a spirit of class.^[40]

Although there was a renaissance revival of the cult of glory, the theologians of the sixteenth century, like their predecessors, distinguished between divine and human glory. Divine glory was the knowledge God has of his absolute perfection; human glory, the fame a man

might acquire through the eyes of others. While divine glory was established on a real perfection, human glory was more or less illusory. Its inherent dangers especially included its insatiability. The unregulated love of self that substituted for the final good of God was an egotism that the appetite for glory revealed. Theologians supported the argument with Augustine's topic of the two cities: love of self to the disdain of God, love of God to the disdain of self.^[41] As he distinguished these, "Worldly society has flowered from a selfish love which dared to despise even God, whereas the communion of saints is rooted in a love of God that is ready to trample on self. In a word, this latter relies on the Lord, whereas the other boasts that it can get along by itself. The city of man seeks the praise of men, whereas the height of glory for the other is to hear God in the witness of conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own boasting; the other says to God: 'Thou art my glory, thou liftest up my head.'"^[42] The itinerary of Loyola's pilgrimage is plotted rhetorically by similar extremes between two cities of man and God, from Pamplona to Rome.

After an interval Loyola is transported on a litter from the scene of siege to his native province. (Hercules, the protagonist of arete , although usually a comedic figure, made his appearance on the tragedic stage in such a litter.)^[43] With this journey home the epic hero at the center of the massed encounter—the pitched battle—becomes the hero of the romance with its solitary adventures. At his familial castle Loyola is in serious condition. The many consulted physicians and surgeons agree that his fractured leg should be broken again and the bones reset, since either the original job was poorly done or the mend became dislocated during the journey. The bones are out of joint and beyond healing. During this repetition of the conventional "butchery"^[44] Loyola remains silent, only displaying the pain of the operation by tightly clenching his fists. Yet his condition badly deteriorates until he is unable even to eat. The signs of death are upon him. Since the physicians expect his demise, on the feast of St. John the Baptist (24 June) they advise him to make his confession. By the vigil of the feast of SS. Peter and Paul only four days later, he is informed that, unless he improves, by midnight he will surely die. His recovery begins that very hour, a blessing attributed to the invalid's devotion to St. Peter. Within a few days he is pronounced out of danger.^[45]

As this begins Loyola's recovery, thus begins the Petrine motif that will culminate historically in the vow of the Society of Jesus to the papacy. The cure of the man lame from birth was the original Petrine

miracle in the Acts of the Apostles. He had begged alms from Peter at the gate to the temple only to be better rewarded. "But Peter said, 'I have no silver and gold, but I give you what I have; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.' And he took him by the right hand and raised him up; and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong." The man entered the temple walking, leaping, and praising God to the amazement of the crowd (Acts 3:1–10). The incident also adumbrated Loyola's decision to be penurious—a beggar like the lame man and penniless like St. Peter. Neither is St. John's feast negligible, for its celebration in Basque lands reflected an ancient cult of the sun, which peasants claimed they could see at dawn on that day dancing on the horizon. Its emblem was the bonfires around which they danced and over which they leaped ritually, reciting poetic formulas to solicit preservation from or cure for ailments. Taking the waters was a feature of the feast in some locales, while in those lacking famous springs there was aspersion or bathing in fountains and brooks. Houses were decorated with branches of white hawthorn and medicinal plants, and there were traditional vegetable offerings. The feast was medicinal,^[46] yet for Loyola it forebode death and not cure. Only the chief of the apostles, St. Peter, possesses the power of intervention in his case.

When his bones knit, the tibia overlaps the femur to produce an ugly bump and foreshorten the entire leg. Loyola cannot tolerate this deformity since he is determined to "pursue the world." He informs the surgeons to cut off the bump, which they agree to do, although they warn him that the pain will exceed any he has so far suffered and that the operation will be of some duration. In response he is "determined to martyr himself for his own taste." He bears the pain with his usual patience. The physicians, having cut the flesh and the protruding bone, apply various ointments and mechanical devices to stretch the leg, lest it prove too short. Loyola endures for many days even this "martyrdom," until the Lord restores his health. Yet, because he cannot easily stand on that leg he is forced to remain convalescent in bed.^[47]

This description might be real but it is rhetorical. Warfare was classically memorized for recital by imagining some weapon.^[48] Here the effects of the cannonball are recorded. With the mnemonic preference for exceptional aesthetic qualities, for ready remembrance the orator might introduce his personage as ugly and deformed, as "stained with blood" (or even for effect as "smeared with red paint").^[49] Rhetoric did not shrink from gore. Since actions as well as words might be employed to move the court to tears, the orator could present as evidence "blood-

stained swords, fragments of bone taken from the wound, and garments spotted with blood, displayed by the accusers, wounds stripped of their dressings, and scourged bodies bared to view." Such exhibitions produced an enormous impression since they brought the spectators face-to-face with the cruel facts.^[50] With the imitative description of Loyola's suffering, a sympathy is evoked, although only superficially for his physical condition.

His spiritual state is hardly heroic. There is but a conventional Christian piety that confesses on the verge of death and appeals for recovery to saints, and a conventional Stoic morality of indifferent endurance in the grip of pain. Even this morality is fired by vainglory. He seeks Herculean pain as glory.^[51] It is because of his determination for worldly success that abhorrence of his physical deformity—his appearance to others—provokes him to demand further surgery. This "self-martyrdom," twice named, parodies the stretching of the limbs of real Christians on the racks. Illness played a prominent role in the lives of holy penitents, who turned its commonplace assault on society into a triumphant sign of personal election. They bore its burdens not with resignation but with joy, as a share in Christ's passion that would conform the human body to the divine will.^[52] Loyola's prone posture is a travesty of sanctity.

The customary "patience" with which he endures the surgical suffering is not virtue but vice. Some persons so admired their lack of arousal or disturbance by external causes as to lose their very humanity. It did not follow, argued Augustine, that difficulty must be right or insensibility, healthy.^[53] Although the endurance of pain was considered virtuous, some victories were judged morally not worth suffering. Suffering was to be for righteousness, as in the beatitude (Matt. 5:10). Medieval homilists elaborated on Augustine's dictum that a good cause, not suffering, made a martyr. Suffering for a cause less than divine was sinful. The term for this fictive patience of the "martyr of Satan" was duritia , a hardness to pain that allowed the worldly person to pursue a base goal without reckoning the costs of his effort.^[54] Such "savage hardness as endurance" was among Cicero's catalogue of vices parading as virtues, such as pride masquerading as over-valuing honors or audacity pretending at bravery.^[55] "Martyrdom" was also attributed to the militant and the lewd. The knight who died on the road to Compostela in the most extravagant medieval defense and challenge was known as "the martyr of chivalry"; while the death of Trotaconventos (Convent-trotter), the old bawd of Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor , was celebrated

as a "martyrdom" of love that promiscuously merited her salvation in the glorious company of the saints.^[56]

Theologians would not have admired Loyola's self-induced pain. They invented spiritual consolations for all manner of distressing conditions. As compiled by John of Dambach in his influential Liber de consolatione theologiae , there was even counsel for people who were too short. There were scriptural examples of short persons like David and Zacheus, and there was scriptural proof that one could do nothing to affect one's stature (Matt. 6:27), so that God evidently meant for short people to be that way.^[57] Brunetto Latini's moralistic Il tesoretto considered among the sins for repentance taking pride in "beautiful limbs."^[58] So did Spanish confessional manuals. To be boastful about a fine body and its strong and elegant members was "vainglory" and a sin. To be sad about one's body and its small or ugly members God had given; to desire a different body; to try to remedy it with cosmetics or other means—all were "pride" and a sin. To desire beauty intensely as "a very honorable thing" was false, vain, and deceitful.^[59]

Loyola is absorbed with both divine and human observation and judgment: vainglory. Diminution in physical stature meant humiliation in social status. Lameness was a defect. In the medical opinion: "the lame man, an imperfect man."^[60] There would occur in the decade after Loyola's recital a notable parallel to his injury that well displayed its courtly consequences. The left leg of Don Carlos, son of the Spanish monarch Philip II, was notably longer than his right, so that it was bent and splayed. When his prospective bride received a description of his physique that was both flattering and devastating, followed by a portrait that could not conceal his defect, she married his father instead.^[61] Character was classically inferred from the gait.^[62] In the convention physical erectness signified moral rectitude.^[63] Renaissance manuals on courtesy prescribed very precisely on straight walking. Erasmus instructed in De civilitate that a man's gait should be neither effeminate mincing nor headlong raging. The foolish half-halting gait should be left to Swiss soldiers and to those who considered it decorative to sport feathers in their caps.^[64] Giovanni della Casa in his manual on courtesy taught men neither to run in the streets nor to pace slowly like brides. They should not lift their legs prancingly, or stamp their feet on the ground, or bend at every step to pull up their stockings, or wiggle their behinds excessively, or strut like peacocks.^[65] The ideal of Il cortegione was to be of moderate build "with finely proportioned members," so as to be good at all the physical exercises befitting a warrior. The legs were not be

languid in their gait, looking as if they were about to fall off. One of the conversationalists in this famous book thought he possessed such grace and beauty of countenance that many women fell passionately in love with him; but he expressed reservations about his legs, which did not seem to him as fair as he wished.^[66] As to courtly dancing, the seminal treatise by Domenico de Piacenza, De arte saltandi et choreas discendi , declared it useless for a person handicapped by any deformity to become a dancer, since beauty and physical aptitude were prerequisites.^[67] So did Guglielmo Ebreo reject as dancers persons of faulty and feeble limbs "like the lame, the hunchbacked, the crippled."^[68] The soldier was, of all classes, expected to be the most attentive to his body for stamina. A disabled knight, once the strongest and most valiant of men, plunged to the nadir of public esteem.^[69]

Loyola's chivalric aspirations are shattered as surely as the cannonball fractured his leg, although he struggles to maintain the ideal by a spiritual transference. He is displaced by his vainglory from the civic fortress to the familial castle. His place in a castle allegorizes the fallen human condition. Humanity was commonly compared to a castle besieged by temptations and guarded by the wardens of his soul. The allegory was a type of the psychomachy of the virtues and vices, and on a pilgrimage a castle could be an abode or goal of them.^[70] In the medieval Songe du castel the human edifice rested on two slender pillars, its legs, only to be attacked by the seven capital vices until it lay prone on the ground, a desolate ruin.^[71] In Loyola's castle of cure and convalescence his agonistic attitude, externalized in belligerence toward others, becomes internalized. The arena of conflict becomes his own will. Chivalry was commonly tested at a castle, as Parzival at Munsalvæsche.^[72] Castles, palaces, and temples of virtue were in the sixteenth century all rhetorical places in the quest for immortality.^[73] A famous mountainous castle was the very house of Fame, in the classical description of Ovid's Metamorphoses , an open house with brass walls to echo the merest whisper.^[74]

Loyola's vice of vainglory, concerned with "what people will say," debases him morally, as does his disability physically. It was a classical topic that punishment was peg-leg. "But rarely does Vengeance, albeit of halting gait, fail to o'ertake the guilty, though he gain the start."^[75] The description concluded Horace's ode with a memorable verse, which epitomizes Loyola's ideal at Pamplona, "'Tis sweet and glorious to die for the fatherland." The ode exhorted youths hardened by active service to bear difficulties with patience and to spend life with a dreadful lance amid stirring deeds, so that foe and maiden might sigh at the sight. "True

worth that never knows ignoble defeat, shines with undimmed glory . . . True worth, opening Heaven wide for those deserving not to die, essays its course by a path denied to others, and spurns the vulgar crowd and damp earth on fleeting pinion."^[76] By implication of punishment as a limper, lameness is punishment allegorized. This is the fallen human condition.

Still unsteady on his legs, Loyola is bedridden. Since he is very fond of reading chivalric books, he asks for some to pass the time; but, as there are none in the house, he is given the life of Christ and the lives of the saints in romance.^[77] The selection was typical. The popularity of reading had increased in the fifteenth century when Spanish nobles began to collect books as fashionable, and in the sixteenth century literacy spread to the lower classes. Males typically learned to read from the primary schoolmaster or from the village priest or sacristan. Diocesan and Inquisitional records manifest an interest in learning that extended beyond urban centers to small towns and villages, which hired schoolmasters or freelance teachers. There were book owners among laborers, especially farmers. The rural population read from inexpensive chapbooks or broadsheets, but a Latin book was not beyond the expense of a determined reader of whatever financial circumstances. Printing was dominated by prose nonfiction: devotional, moral, and historical. Readers were less interested in advancement in high culture than in the salvation of their immortal souls. The human condition reflected in an exemplary mirror or in a saintly life was topical, and the most common use of a book was as a devotional aid.^[78]

Reading was traditionally formative of the self,^[79] and the opening of a book could signal rhetorically a moral conversion. While reading and re-reading these books Loyola fancies them some. Yet, when he pauses, his musings vacillate between such subjects and the worldly affairs to which he was accustomed. Of these inanities one so possesses his heart that he is absorbed in thinking about it for two and three and four hours unaware. This is his fantasy of the obligations in the service of a lady: how he would travel to her land; then the signals, the words, the exercises at arms he would perform in her service.^[80] Loyola portrays himself as the person "gifted with a vivid imagination" (euphantasiotos ) of whom Quintilian wrote in his discussion of enargeia , the vivid style. The person sensitive to the imaginative impressions (phantasiai, visiones ) that produced vividness had the greatest sway over the emotions. As the possessor of a mind absorbed in fantastic hopes and daydreams, he was so haunted by such visions that he imagined them very realistically, as

if he were not dreaming but acting.^[81] The classical gift was prominent in sixteenth-century culture in fantasy, the inner capacity of the artist to fashion vivid, if fictive, images through the transformation of remembered sensory experience.^[82] Leonardo da Vinci noted that "I myself have proved it to be of no small use, when in bed in the dark, to recall in fancy the outlines of forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by subtle speculation; and this is certainly an admirable exercise, and useful for impressing things on the memory."^[83] Loyola repeats in his fantasy about the lady of his dreams several of Quintilian's examples of this faculty: traveling, addressing people, and fighting. Imagination was a power all might acquire at will, thought Quintilian, and he urged the orator to turn this form of hallucination to a profit.

Loyola's fiction is what the troubadours lamented as amor de lonh , the male lover's aspiration of service in verse and in valor toward a beautiful and virtuous, but inaccessible, woman. Since the love was unrequited, its adoration from a distance echoed Augustine's confession of "loving to love."^[84] Loyola confesses that in dallying with this fancy he did not consider its impossibility, since his lady was not of the common nobility (such as himself), neither a countess nor a duchess, but of much higher station.^[85] Such social discrepancy typified the "courtly" literature of amatory discontent. Its culture arose in periods of demographical imbalance in the ratio of the sexes, causing a shortage of marriageable women for the upper classes and male anxiety regarding marrying upwards.^[86] Although it was promoted by the Provençal troubadours and German minnesingers, its greatest influence was Hispano-Arabic poetry. This culture of cortezia Loyola derives from the chivalric romances, which he denounces as "worldly and false books" that promote "vain things."^[87]

Books on Christian living, or dying, outsold in sixteenth-century Spain the novels and dramas. Although the chivalric Amadís de Gaula , which Loyola favored, was the best-seller in fiction, it was second to Friar Luis de Granada's Libro de la oración .^[88] Ecclesiastical attitudes toward the chivalric novels that Loyola requested for reading during convalescence differed. Most clergy were preoccupied with their danger to the moral conduct of the faithful, but those who fulminated against them censured all secular literature, not only that genre. Some cultured critics thought they merely fell below acceptable literary standards; some recognized exemplary value in them; some applauded certain titles like Amadís de Gaula . Their criticism originated not with a moralist but with a publisher, who was hostile toward their circulation because his reli-

gious tracts were not competitive in popularity of sales. That criticism dated only to near mid-century,^[89] so that Loyola's rejection of chivalric books is either historically precocious or epideictically retrospective. His denunciation, as issued from his place in bed, imitates the conversional crisis of the ascetic St. Jerome, who in bed famously dreamed that Christ judged him a pagan for reading secular literature.^[90] It also reflects moral judgment of the peril of the amatory page, dramatized in Dante's infernal tale of Paolo and Francesca, who imitated the acts of Lancelot and Guinevere they read.^[91]

Loyola blames his imagination for so "idling in inanities" that he is unable to see the impossibility of his courtly performance, just as he was unable to see the impossibility of the civic defense. This blame of self is countered with praise of God, who assists him by succeeding these thoughts with others originating from his spiritual readings. In reading the lives of Christ and his saints Loyola begins to wonder to himself, "'What if I should do what St. Francis did and what St. Dominic did?'" He rambles like this through many good matters, always proposing to himself difficult and serious ones, which he seems to find in himself a facility to perform. His entire reasoning, he says, went like this: "'St. Francis did this, so must I. St. Dominic did this, so must I.'" Although such thoughts linger, they are only to be interrupted by worldly musings, which also linger. And so a succession of competitive fancies persists, detaining him always in the thought of the hour, whether the worldly exploits he desires or the spiritual ones suggested to his imagination. Wearily he drops both and attends to other matters.^[92]

His reasoning imitates the divine accusations Augustine catalogued in a commentary on the psalms: You can not? how can that man: how could the other? Are you more delicate than that senator? Are you weaker than this man or that in health? Are you weaker than women? Women have been able; are not men able? Delicate, wealthy men have been able; are poor men not able?^[93] In medieval hagiography the saint was weakly individualized, morally vague, without psychological characterization of tastes, feelings, dreams, or wishes.^[94] Although Loyola's deliberation is imitative, his interior reflection and discourse also typifies the new renaissance emphasis on the delineation of personality and the revelation of character. As derived from classical models, it distinguished humanist from medieval hagiography in aesthetic sensibility. With the social change from monastic to mendicant rule, personified by Loyola's examples of Francis and Dominic, there emerged a piety of personal commitment. The institutionalized discipline and formalized almsgiving

of the monastic rule were replaced by private asceticism and public charity. Personal conscience became the principal theme of the quest for holiness, and saints' lives were enriched with such details of inner discourse.^[95]

Yet Loyola's mental vacillation between the secular and the sacred remains under the sway of the chivalric ideal. He is entertaining the exchange of one kingdom for another, not deliberating the abandonment of kingdoms. A historical factor in conversion, especially among the young, was the holy preacher, of which type his examples of SS. Francis and Dominic were the luminaries. They inspired a romance of the gospel in which evangelizing the public proved more attractive than contemplating in solitude.^[96] The hagiography of Francis even portrayed him chivalrously as a troubadour, playing a stick across his arm like the bow of a violin and singing in French verse about his Lord.^[97] His friars were commissioned publicly to sing the divine praises and to proclaim, "'We are the jongleurs of God, and the only reward we want is to see you lead a truly penitent life.'"^[98] While their vocation complemented Loyola's chivalric ideal, there was no guarantee of sanctity in the exchange of allegiances from a secular to a spiritual lord. The very visibility of those religious orders in their mendicant ministry exposed them to vainglory and venality.

The questions Loyola poses to himself coincide with the self-accusation of Augustine in his Confessions when confronted with the tale of the conversion of two military acquaintances. Their report mirrored Augustine's own ugly deformity, his abhorrence for "the disease of concupiscence," in which he "walked the crooked ways." He was distraught with questions about his inability to follow their example.^[99] Loyola's questions, "'Can I not do what Francis did? Can I not do what Dominic did?'" are projections of the neophyte whose imitation is mimicry rather than emulation. He supposes that what SS. Francis and Dominic actually did he must literally do. The assumption trespasses on hagiographic tradition, which well distinguished between the admiration and the imitation of the saints. As one hagiographer stated, he had written not to recommend excess but to manifest the saint's fervor. The privileges of a few did not constitute a law for all.^[100] A maturer question for Loyola would have been: Can I not do what Iñigo can do?

Loyola's musings are "rambles" in the lesser faculties of the imagination and reason. They are base groping, inferior to the contemplation of the intellect or the compliance of the will. Yet, even at this ingress to spiritual pilgrimage he discerns a difference in their vacillations. Al-

though he greatly enjoys thoughts of worldly affairs, when he dismisses them he finds himself "dry and discontent." But when he thinks of traveling to Jerusalem barefoot, and of eating only vegetables, and of performing all the rest of the rigors of the saints, not only is he consoled during these thoughts but even afterward their effect is to leave him "content and happy." He neither notices nor ponders these experiences, however, until once when his eyes are opened a little he begins to wonder at their different emotional effects of sadness and happiness. Reflecting on this, he gradually perceives the difference between the spirits that agitate him, the one demonic, the other divine. Gathering not a little light from this lesson, he begins to think more earnestly on his past life and how great a need he has to do penance for it. Desires to imitate the saints present themselves to him, and, without further regarding his circumstances, he promises himself with the grace of God to do what they have done. Especially he desires, upon recovery, the affair of Jerusalem, with as many scourges and such abstinences as a noble valor kindled by God usually desires to do.^[101]

This ideal of the "generous" spirit is chivalric. Loyola is flat on his back. He has not even ventured to swing his legs out of bed onto the floor for the first tentative steps of pilgrimage. He has only entertained fantasies in his imagination, as promoting affective states. These emotional extremes he naively identifies with Satan and God. Loyola's affective self-examination, derived from heterodox notions and popular devotion, is the Achilles' heel of his personality and spirituality. The norm departs from the wisdom of Augustine's argument for the moral neutrality of the emotions, since the intention of the will matters.^[102] The affective fallibility was a fault Loyola shared with holy multitudes in the late medieval to baroque ages. As John of the Cross, surveying the popular indulgence in sensationalism rather than the exercise of the liberty of faith, would define the vice, it was "spiritual gluttony."^[103] Loyola himself suspected it as a personal fault, although he did not relinquish his dependence on sensibility. He confided this much in his diary: "Also considering if I ought to proceed forward, because one part of me seems to desire seeking too many signs, and in times and in Masses past for my satisfaction, when the matter in itself was clear and I was not seeking the certitude of it, but only that the relish was entirely to my taste."^[104]

It was not the discernment of spirits but the disposition of the will that traditionally mattered, and emotion was not theologically equatable with love. The end of the Christian life was not consolation but charity; and charity, as every lover knows, is not necessarily consoling. Loyola's

discernment of dualistic spirits from affective states was not in origin even Christian. It derived ultimately from the Zoroastrian hymns, mediated to Judaic asceticism through the Essene Manual of Discipline , and transmitted to Christian tradition in the eleventh mandate of Pastor Hermae , an early treatise on repentance after baptism. Published by the humanist Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples in a collection of spiritual treatises, it enjoyed in the sixteenth century quasicanonical status.^[105]

Neither spirit, divine nor demonic, is moving Loyola forward or backward as on pilgrimage. Both spirits are indiscriminately "agitating" him (agito ), stirring him, shaking him up. In the seminal Vita Antonii that disturbance producing instability of character had been the role of the evil spirit, while the good spirit was so quiet and gentle that it induced joy and confidence in a calm soul.^[106] Loyola is roaming about in his imagination, fantasizing a personal facility to imitate glorious saints in difficult and daring deeds. Going barefoot to Jerusalem on a vegetarian diet in imitation of saintly rigors is not necessarily progress beyond going shod to Pamplona beefed up in imitation of knightly rigors. Loyola has not yet experienced a true conversion of interior disposition. He is merely exchanging one set of appearances and allegiances for another. Whether in arms or in asceticism, his values remain agonistic. His object is to be observed and praised for excellence: vainglory.

Although he is now motivated by the recognition of a need "to do penance" (hacer penitenzia ), this was a testy term in sixteenth-century religion. As Erasmus corrected the Vulgate translation of poenitentiam agite ("do penance") to poeniteat vos ("repent"), metanoeite meant a conversion of heart, not an exercise of deeds, to be penitent, not to do penance.^[107] Loyola does not disclose the affair of Jerusalem as a pilgrimage: neither as a romería , such as a processional to a local shrine, nor as a peregrinación , a journey to a distant site. He consistently terms it an ida , which can mean "departure" or "trip out" but more pejoratively means "impetuosity," "rash proceeding," "sally." This pejorative connotation will be reinforced by another ida , his enforced walk to military headquarters under arrest as a suspected spy, which incident he compares to his great consolation with Christ arrested for his passion.^[108] Although Loyola's penitential exercise is voluntary rather than judicial, as were most pilgrimages since the fourteenth century,^[109] he promises it to himself, not to God. He does so "without seeing" his circumstances, employing the very philology (non mirar ) that has already marked his misperceptions in the fortress and in the castle. The light (lumbre ) he

has gathered from his ruminations^[110] is not "light" (luz ) but "firelight," or better, "matchlight" struck feebly in the dark.

Yet its affective connotation of warmth is reinforced by Loyola's belief in being "kindled by God." He begins to forget his past thoughts with his saintly desires. These are confirmed to him in a "visitation" (visitación ). Awake one night he clearly sees an image of the Madonna, or Mary with the child Jesus. With this sight (vista ) he receives for a long time extreme consolation. He remains with such loathing for his entire past life, especially carnal affairs, that it seems to him that all the species previously painted on his soul are erased from it. Here intervenes the author Luis Gonçalves da Câmara: "From that hour until the August of 53 that this is written, never again did he have even minimal consent in carnal affairs. From this effect it can be judged to have been the work of God, although he did not dare to determine that, nor to say more than to affirm the aforesaid." Loyola's brother and the whole household are summoned to witness from this exterior change the transformation he has undergone interiorly.^[111]

Such incidents were related literarily according to the classification of Macrobius's Commentariorum in somnium Scipionis on dreams. Loyola's vista might translate visio , the prophetic dream, or visum , the apparition in the drowsy moment between wakefulness and sleepiness.^[112] There was no strict distinction between dreams and apparitions.^[113] The designation "visitation" (visitación ) recurs later during Loyola's travel as "great supernatural visitations" (grandi visitationi sopranaturali ), comparable to those experienced early at Manresa. Yet that description does not square with Loyola's deprecation of his early experiences as rough tutorials, nor with his confession that in Manresa he was spiritually "blind."^[114] The designation "great supernatural visitations" is Gonçalves da Câmara's hagiographic flourish. Although the phenomenology of the visions is vague, what matters in epideictic rhetoric is not fact but function. Loyola habitually practiced and promoted imaginative prayer, so that "image" (imagen ) was his ordinary experience. The noun also designates the statue or painting (imagen ) of the Virgin on which he will spend his final wages. The usual place for a Marian image in a late medieval or renaissance home was the bedroom, where it was hung in a gilt frame with a candle attached. Paintings of the Madonna were sometimes even attached to the headboard of the bed. Display of her small and intimate image in a domestic setting invited her presence and protection.^[115] Loyola's visitation may have been a heightened spiritual awareness of such a statue or painting of the Madonna he physically

viewed in his chamber. The verbal phrase "to see clearly" (ver claramente ) had occurred in the second sentence of the text, where all the soldiers in the fortress except Loyola clearly saw that its defense was futile. The expression encompasses intellectual understanding and judgment.

Loyola habitually described affective states not as welling from within the self, as in modern psychology, but as invading it from without. During this convalescence desires to imitate the saints are "offered" to him. The more common verb is that various states "come" (venir ) to him. Accusatory stirrings about failure of duty "come" to him; the temptation to sloth "comes" to him, its relief "comes" to him; even the assent of his own will to resume eating meat "comes" to him; a temptation concerning righteousness "comes" to him; a great impulse to protest an attempted rape "comes" to him.^[116] This tendency to externalize spiritual influences, as originating from agonistic spirits of good and evil, complicates interpretation if modern empirical evidence is normative. Yet in medieval culture sensory evidence was so blended with spiritual conviction that the concept of the real included much that modern science would term imaginary.^[117] The incident demonstrates how indifferent even a renaissance person could be to the empirical nature of his own most important, salvational experiences. Loyola believed that the divine was apprehended through the imaginative faculty—the Exercitia spiritualia is based on that principle—and it mattered not for the result whether he created the good image in his soul or if God imprinted it. What did matter was pragmatic not theoretical: the moral effect. From the moral effect Gonçalves da Câmara judges that the visitation was "the work of God," although he states that Loyola himself did not dare to determine even that much or to explicate it.

The dominant period for reported apparitions in the Spanish kingdoms was from about 1400 to 1525, when the Inquisition assumed control over ecclesiastical institutions and popular initiatives. Seers with stereotypical revelations of pious remedies for local crises who were once revered were now whipped, even when their testimony was orthodox. The cultural form of the public, lay vision as a mediation between society and divinity waned.^[118] Yet the visitation of virtuous ladies was a commonplace of visionary literature developed from personifications into personages. There was Lady Church in Pastor Hermae , Lady Philosophy in Consolatio philosophiae , Virgin Truth in De secreto conflicto curarum animarum . In Petrarch's dialogue she appeared to the poet in a waking dream.^[119] To Boethius's consolation Philosophy even drove the

Muses from his bed.^[120] In courtly literature ladies also entered bedchambers, especially in trials of sexual temptation, as in the courteous exchange with erotic innuendoes in the castle of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight .

In Loyola's recital the visitor is the Madonna. A castle is her ideal rhetorical place. The most complete and distinctive of the many medieval allegories of the castle was that of the Virgin as the castle of love. It developed from a verse about Jesus' ministry, "He entered a village; and a woman named Martha received him into her house" (Luke 10:38). In the Vulgate translation "village" was castellum , so that the transition to Jesus entering the castle of Mary at the Incarnation was simple. The genre culminated in Robert Grosseteste's Le château d'amour , which detailed every feature of that castle, to which a Christian fled for refuge from the three temptations allied with the seven capital sins. Since the Lukan pericope was common as a liturgical reading and homiletic topic on the feast of the assumption (15 August),^[121] there is an association of Loyola's experience with it, although he does not explicitly so date it. The fundamental theme of his recital is glory. The specific concept in this scene is the glorified body. Loyola enjoys through the visitation of the Madonna the liberation from concupiscence that was her singular privilege. Other mortals were believed to share it only in the body of resurrection. Her bodily assumption into heaven, like her immaculate conception, are the archetypes. Although Loyola has not like Mary been immaculately conceived or celestially assumed, he is by her intercession restored to the preternatural and advanced to the eschatological state of innocence.

The norm even among practiced ascetics was incessant struggle against concupiscence. Loyola's instantaneous cure by the visitation of the Madonna recalls hagiographic claims of marvelous chastity. An abbot called Serene was so gifted that he was no longer disturbed, even in sleep, by natural sexual arousal. Then there was a monk who fled from a convent of women he had founded and dreamed of castration by a trio of angels, so that for forty years he felt no more desire. Another prayed to be made a eunuch, then dreamed of an angel opening his body to remove a tumor. A voice pronounced that God had given him perfect chastity.^[122] Loyola's nocturnal cure of concupiscence is ascribed to the Madonna in the oxymoron of her virginal-maternal role, which merited her bodily incorruption assumed into heaven. Belief in her assumption was also theologically important in relating Mary to his pilgrimage, for she was revered as possessing the "fullness of glory" pilgrims sought.

The assumption justified in folklore her manifestation in bodily, visible apparitions. Because her body vanished from this world at the assumption, she was supposed capable of reappearing in it in a more corporeal way than were other saints, whose bodies remained interred or whose relics were geographically scattered.^[123]

The Madonna of Loyola's sight imitates Lady Continence, who appeared to Augustine in his Confessions . "The chaste dignity of continence began to manifest itself: tranquil and joyful, but not in a lascivious way, inviting me in an upright fashion to come ahead and not hesitate; stretching forth to receive and embrace me holy hands filled with a multitude of good examples." These exemplars were the souls in which continence was the pregnant mother of the joys of divine espousal. And, "with mocking encouragement, she mocked me, as if saying: 'Can you not live as these men and women do?'" Continence assured Augustine that they lived not by their own powers but by the Lord's commendation to virtue. She reproached him as if he were spiritually without legs. "'Why do you stand upon yourself and so have naught to stand on? Throw yourself upon Him, fear not; He will not pull himself away and let you fall. Throw yourself confidently; He will take you up and heal you."'^[124]

The imaginative cure of Loyola's concupiscence, rather than the physical healing of his wounds, is not miraculously odd but rhetorically coherent. Just as Continence appeared to exhort Augustine about the spiritual instability of his legs, so does the Madonna appear to Loyola in the same debility. Among legendary visions of the Virgin there had indeed been miracles to heal physical legs. There was the case of a certain nun, told in Caesarius of Hiesterbach's Dialogus miraculorum , who had injured her leg by overzealous genuflection at prayer. The mother of God appeared in a vision in the infirmary at high noon and anointed her leg with unguent from a vial to effect its cure.^[125] Then there was the miracle, notably preserved in Alfonso X the Wise's Cantigas , of the man suffering from a cancer of the foot. In a moment of despair at the pain he cut it off, only to be cured on pilgrimage during a dream in which the Virgin immaculate descended from her altar to tend it.^[126] In Loyola's recital there is no such physical healing, because the wounds to his legs function as symbolic of the wounds to his soul. Although his injuries may have been real rather than legendary, they were still rhetorically exploitable for spiritual malady. Legs was the rhetorical topic for lust.

The limping hero or anti-hero had an ancient lineage whose significance centered in sexuality, whether generative or impotent. The concept

may have derived from a Near Eastern mythology of sacral kingship that demanded death for fertility. For death was substituted castration and laming, by hamstringing or dislocation of the thigh; and for these acts, circumcision and the wearing of buskins. Although most of the ancient limpers were wounded in the foot rather than the leg, the scriptural Jacob and the classical Aeneas^[127] were analogues to Loyola's patrimonial status as founder of the Society of Jesus. In his mysterious folkloric wrestling with the demon at the ford Jacob was struck in the socket of his hip. It became dislocated, so that at sunrise he left the site limping. Yet he had won the match face-to-face with God and survived. This ancient animistic narrative was associated etiologically with the Judaic taboo against eating the sciatic muscle, since the thigh was the seat of life. Most important, it established Jacob as a patriarch. He wrestled from the spirit a blessing, and his name was changed to Israel as progenitor of the chosen people (Gen. 32:4–33:17).^[128] Aeneas was lamed in the Trojan war when a rock thrown by the enemy crushed a cup-bone. He was rescued and healed by his mother Venus to become father of Rome,^[129] as Jacob had been of Israel. This classical example of an injury in war to the leg, miraculously healed by a heavenly mother, is analogous to Loyola's vision; so is the scriptural example, as his test at crossing the river will prove.

Christian morality and literature commonly employed limping for the antihero, however. A notable figure of sterility was the maimed Fisher King who appeared throughout the Grail legends. By transference of this attribute another lame protagonist was the devil.^[130] Yet limping was an attribute of fallen Adam, and so of Everyman, as in the lament of the most popular of all medieval spiritual authors, Bernard of Clairvaux. As he wrote in his Sermones super Cantica canticorum , with original sin humanity lost its "uprightness," although the soul retained by its greatness a divine image. "But he limps, as it were, on one foot, and has become an estranged son." In this weak condition a person even limped away from the path. In this disabled uprightness the human limper was disturbed and he was wrenched away from the divine image. He bent to the ground and brooded over the earth.^[131] The metaphor was current as late as John Donne's universal anatomy:

Then, as mankinde, so is the worlds whole frame
Quite out of oiynt, almost created lame.

As the poet exclaimed, "How lame a cripple this world is."^[132]

Limping on pilgrimage was the fate of Dante as he initiated his journey, glancing back in confusion at the perilous pass he had barely escaped, yet hobbling toward the summit like a man wounded in the left foot. There developed a medieval tradition about lameness from Aristotelian physics, in which all movement originated from the right, so that the left was the stationary position. The analogy of walking was applied scholastically to the faculties of the soul: to the intellect as to the right foot, which struck out, while to the will as the left foot, which dragged behind. This limping symbolized the imbalance of intellect and will, in which humanity was disabled toward its divine destiny. From original sin the right leg, or intellect, suffered the wound of ignorance; the left leg, or will, the wound of concupiscence. Adam's progeny was afflicted with this limping, unable to order appetite to mind.^[133] The ascetic accusation in Petrarch's Secretum that the poet was dragging his feet in renouncing his art implied such weakness of the will to accomplish what the intellect perceived as the good.^[134]

Loyola is disabled by the cannonball in both legs, the one completely fractured, the other severely wounded. The analogy is patent: Loyola the limper is an Adam. When he "falls," the other men in the fortress surrender to the enemy.^[135] The accident of war in the fall of Pamplona is perfectly symbolic of the human condition after the fall of Adam. Physical erectness was since classical antiquity a vast topic in philosophy and rhetoric for moral rectitude.^[136] The fall was thus developed in the patristic tradition as a physical metaphor for debasement from the erect stature of contemplation. Gregory the Great moralized about Adam moving the foot of his will from a firm contemplative stance toward guilt, so that he fell immediately from the love of God to love of self. Since he had collapsed below himself, he could no longer stand up by himself.^[137] In Loyola's imitation of the scholastic analogy of legs and faculties the intellect is badly injured, but still able to grope while dragging the destroyed limb behind it. The will is shattered and immobile, however, in need of redemption, as his leg bones are of resetting. The wound of concupiscence to the will requires for healing a spiritual intervention, like the visitation of the Virgin with the child Jesus.

Although her iconography is unspecified, if she may be portrayed as the Madonna of Montserrat before whom Loyola will keep vigil as a spiritual knight, then she is like the scriptural woman who is black but beautiful (Song 1:5). The child enthroned in her lap would also be dark. Jesus would function in Loyola's visitation as the antithesis to the figure who in the ascetic lives of the saints, from Vita Antonii to Teresa of

Avila's Vida , personified the demon of fornication: the little black boy (negrillo ). He appeared to the anchorite in the desert, he appeared to the nun in the cloister, to tempt and torment them with carnal images.^[138] Here the sight of the little black Jesus would erase them from Loyola's soul. Mere vision impresses his will with absolute effectivity, in an ascent from the sensory to the volitional, as in his Exercitia spiritualia .

The process was established on the renaissance theory that the imaginative power retains the images seen and imprints them in mind and body. Art involved costume or the virtual life of the image, its psychic presence. Among the many examples of the power of fantasy to affect the body was that of the white woman who gave birth to a black child who perfectly resembled an Abyssinian painting in her bedroom on which she had gazed.^[139] In his analysis of vision Augustine taught that in animals "the fetus usually show some traces of the passionate desires of the mother, whatever it was they gazed upon with great delight." The more tenderly formative the original seeds were, the more effectively they followed the inclination of the maternal soul and the phantasm that arose in it through the body that passionately gazed at it. He cited the example of the patriarch Jacob placing streaked rods in the watering troughs for his sheep, so that in viewing them when they bred there they would conceive striped, speckled, and spotted lambs (Gen. 30:37–42).^[140] That scriptural verse was discussed among the medieval scientific questions.^[141] And that actual practice of husbandry was current in sixteenth-century Spain for the breeding of mares, as testified by the physician Laurent Joubert.^[142] Albert the Great among the scientists thought the interrelationship of soul and body so intimate that daydreaming about a desirable image elicited physical stirrings in the body.^[143] Fantasy was believed efficacious for human conception. Augustine traced the concept to the ancient authority of the most expert physician Hippocrates. In an exegesis of Jacob's breeding practice Augustine told the story of a woman about to be punished for adultery because she had given birth to a beautiful boy who resembled neither of his parents nor any other member of the family. Hippocrates suggested searching her bedroom for a picture resembling the child. It was found, and the woman freed from suspicion.^[144]

In the principal text on gynecology Soranus taught that various states of the soul produced changes in the form of the fetus. If a woman during sexual intercourse saw a monkey she would conceive its likeness. He cited the case of a deformed tyrant who forced his wife to look at beautiful statues during sex; she indeed bore him well-formed children.^[145]

The ancient fear that the maternal imagination would conceive monsters from vision of some aberrant object or from a fantastic dream was rehearsed by Ambroise Paré, among the most excellent of renaissance surgeons. He cited the scriptural and classical authorities; and he told tales, such as the social expulsion of the girl with two heads, lest she impress on pregnant women images that would similarly deform their fetuses. Detailing such horrors in De monstres , he warned women at the hour of conception and during the formative period not to look at or to imagine monsters. He articulated the common belief in "the force of the imagination being joined with the conformational power, the softness of the embryo, ready like soft wax to receive any form." It was dangerous to show a pregnant woman even a picture of deformity.^[146] Leon Battista Alberti urged the husband about to decorate the bedchamber he would share with his wife not to paint anything on the walls except "the most comely and beautiful faces." That choice would be "of no small consequence to the conception of the lady and the beauty of the children."^[147]

In Quintilian's discussion of the effectiveness of gestures he wrote that "pictures, which are silent and motionless, penetrate into our innermost feelings with such power that at times they seem more eloquent than language itself."^[148] Augustine's Confessions rued the example for rhetorical exercise from Terence's Eunuchus of the youth inflamed by a lascivious painting of Danae and the shower of gold.^[149] Gazing on a religious image was no guarantee of consequent beauty and virtue, however. Montaigne related in his essays the fate of a woman who conceived a daughter as furry as a bear because she had gazed during conception on a picture attached to the foot of her bed of the hirsute John the Baptist on a picture attached to the foot of her bed of the hirsute John The Baptist in his animal skins. Montaigne confessed himself to be very impressionable. "A strong imagination creates the event, say the scholars. I am one of those who are very much influenced by the imagination. Everyone feels its import, but some are overthrown by it. Its impression on me is piercing." He considered miracles, visions, enchantments, and other such extraordinary effects as the power of the imagination in common people.^[150] Loyola also confessed himself a classic enthusiast—highly imaginative—and his visionary experience of the Madonna is consistent with the psychosomatic belief about conceptions from images. In his imagination the Madonna impresses his soul with her likeness, whose dazzling purity renders his very body asexual.

Loyola's brother, indeed the entire household, recognizes from his exterior change an interior change.^[151] Such conversion was the interest

in the sixteenth century, whose historiography introduced the onset of maturity as the crucial phase in the quest for identity. That introduction substituted for the significance in medieval hagiography of a birth heralded by portents and a childhood guided by visions. Although the sign of Loyola's change is unspecified, it is not negligible, since sexual inactivity among the nobility was extraordinary. The rule was an aggression linked with the violence of the class. The necessary condition of an ascetic life, therefore, was sexual renunciation. Folk wisdom and religious ideal both identified intercourse as the fundamental division between innocence and worldliness. It was an absolute norm, allowing no degrees or compromises, since there could be no almost-virginal saint. Chastity was the mark universally understood as the rejection of the flesh; thus it was considered the initial and important step toward spiritual perfection.^[152]

It was a virtue for whose aspiration the Spanish clergy, to which estate Loyola already belonged, provided little example. Concubinage was their rule. Newly ordained priests celebrated the first Mass by dancing in the streets with their mistresses and their chief interest was in the acquisition of benefices.^[153] In Loyola's province of Guizpúcoa the large number of illegitimate children of priests in the first half of the sixteenth century was an equally great problem for the ecclesiastical authorities.^[154] Loyola's lameness would not have been any incentive to chastity either. On the contrary, folk wisdom believed that sex with a cripple was the best sex. There was the common proverb "He does not know Venus in her perfect sweetness who has not lain with a cripple." It probably derived from a Greek adage in which the queen of the Amazons declared "The lame man does it best!" In Amazon society the legs of the males were deliberately disabled from childhood so that the females might better exploit them sexually. The lore was circulated in Erasmus's Adagia , from which Loyola likely studied Latin, and in Montaigne's Essais .^[155]

While the healing of his lame will required the imaginative intervention of the Madonna, the wound of ignorance to the intellect might be healed more naturally by reading devout literature. The arts and sciences were believed remedies for the wounds of original sin.^[156] Loyola likens his exercise of reading in bed to striking a match in the dark,^[157] analogous to the doctrine of the "spark" in the soul that is not extinguished even by original sin.^[158] The "kindling" of an ascetic conversion during his pious reading is invented from the rhetorical topic of the opening of the book. A dramatic example was the abrupt conversion of Giovanni

Colombini, founder of the mendicant order of the Gesuati, while reading about Mary the Egyptian in the lives of the saints. His wife had thrust the book at him when he screamed and cursed at her because dinner was not ready. (She lived to regret her pious deed: he became so penitent that he demanded of her celibacy in marriage.)^[159] The topic was celebratory from Augustine's Confessions , from the scene in the garden in which the voice commanded, "'Take it, read it! Take it, read it!'" Augustine's opening of the book of Romans imitated his friend Ponticianus's chance finding of a Pauline volume; that served as a pretext for relating the conversion of the two military agents who had read of the conversion of Anthony, the ascetic archetype to whose life these tales-within-tales regressed.^[160] The humanist imitation was Petrarch's epistolary ascent of Mont Ventoux, in which he happened to open Augustine's Confessions to the accusation, "'And they go to admire the summits of mountains and the vast billows of the sea and the broadest rivers and the expanses of the ocean and the revolution of the stars and they overlook themselves.'"^[161]

Loyola perseveres in his own reading and in his good intentions and he converses with the household to its benefit. Since he greatly enjoys these pious books he decides to excerpt from them the essentials of the lives of Christ and of the saints. He begins a copybook industriously, for he is just beginning to get about the castle. He transcribes the words of Christ in red ink, those of his Lady in blue, on shiny lined paper in a good hand, for his penmanship is quite fine. Thus he spends part of his time in writing, part in prayer.^[162] These pastimes parody the monastic exercises of transcription and prayer. In the art of memory it was a practice to visualize the color, shape, position and placement of letters on a manuscript.^[163] Yet Loyola is fascinated by the surface of the spiritual: the polished paper, the striking colors, the fine script. Sheen, color, shape are the matter of the letter, not the spirit. He is playing a comedic role like Polyphemus, the liar and rake. A character in Erasmus's Colloquia , Polyphemus was based on the author's amanuensis and messenger, Felix Rex. Erasmus introduced him in "Cyclopes sive evangeliophorus" as an ass carrying a copy of the gospels he had painted bright red and blue. As Erasmus explained in correspondence, "Polyphemus used to carry with him a beautifully decorated volume of the Gospels, though nothing could be more soiled than his own life." And as his colloquy accused him, "'But it would be well if, as you've decorated the Gospel with various ornaments, the Gospels in turn adorned you. You've dec-

orated them with colors; I wish they might embellish you with good morals.'"^[164]

Even in his alternative pastime of prayer Loyola is bedazzled. The greatest consolation he receives from it is "to look at the sky and the stars," which he often does for hours, because from this exterior vision he feels interiorly a magnanimous courage to serve the Lord.^[165] The saint at the open window considering creation was a detail of medieval hagiography.^[166] Yet stargazing was also a philosophical topic exploited in epideictic rhetoric for praise or for blame. For Plato, since only sight could regard the heavens and incite wonder at the celestial movements and laws, vision penetrated philosophically from sensation through intellection to the ultimate good, beauty, and truth.^[167] The erect posture able to behold the stars distinguished humans from other animals (like the gnu) with their earthbound stare, in a popular topic repeated by classical, patristic, and scholastic authors.^[168] Seneca specifically contrasted stargazing with warring, which he likened to a file of ants scurrying in a small plot. The mind engaging the celestial regions expanded and, bursting its chains, returned to its origin. Stargazing was a Stoic proof of human divinity, for in it one was pleased with divine affairs and inhabited this realm intellectually, not as an alien but as a kindred spirit. "Here, finally the mind learns what it long sought; here it begins to know god."^[169]

This human excellence inferred from an erect anatomy was a much criticized doctrine. There was from Plato the exemplar of Thales the natural philosopher, who tumbled into a well, so eager to explore the heavens that he could not see what was before his feet.^[170] The astronomer in The Canterbury Tales was typically portrayed:

He walked the fields stargazing, to foresee
What might befall; and suddenly fell in
A clay pit—something that he'd not foreseen.^[171]

Erasmus in his Moria ridiculed cosmologists as touched by "a pleasant form of madness, which sets them building countless universes and measuring the sun, moon, stars and planets by rule of thumb or a bit of string, and producing reasons for thunderbolts, winds, eclipses and other inexplicable phenomena." Although they were too purblind to notice the plainest manifestations of nature—a stone in the path, a ditch in the road—they claimed to see such insubstantial forms as ideas, universals, quiddities, even prime matter itself. This variation on the topic of Thales lampooned the alliance of nominalist logic with natural phi-

losophy at the Collège de Montaigù in Paris, renowned as a center for dynamics and kinematics. Erasmus matriculated there only to acquire more lice than learning,^[172] and it is in that very college that Loyola will enroll in arts toward philosophy.^[173]

It was influentially Augustine who enlarged this astral topic for spiritual blame. In De beata vita he charted the courses of voyagers to the port of philosophy. The confused pilot, who was moored at sea while he gazed at the sinking stars, was typical of Augustine the procrastinator, who postponed his conversion to the safe haven of the Catholic faith.^[174] He accused himself in his Confessions of stargazing rather than self-examination in the sentence famously cited by Petrarch, "'And they go to admire the summits of mountains and the vast billows of the sea and the broadest rivers and the expanses of the ocean and the revolution of the stars and they overlook themselves.'"^[175] This topic of human dignity focused on introspection rather than extrospection—self rather than stars—was the norm. As Montaigne would moralize in concluding his essay on experience: "It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs."^[176]

Loyola as wobbly-legged and starry-eyed is the novice at divine science. At prayer he seeks consolation from the revolution of the heavens rather than the reform of the self. In his celestial aspirations he is vainglorious. Glory as an elevation to the stars was a renaissance rhetorical topic to exalt the fame of personages as piercing the heavens. The poet himself was an archer toward the skies; his pen lent the wings on which to fly.^[177] Such vainglorious stargazing so encourages Loyola toward divine service that he is eager to be on the road. Yet for the moment he must content himself with dispatching a servant sixty miles to Burgos to inquire about his destination. In anticipating his future beyond the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, so that he might live in perpetual penitence, the idea occurs to him of enclosure in the charterhouse at Seville. He thinks of doing this without divulging his identity, so that he may be less regarded. He also plans to eat nothing there but vegetables. When he reconsiders the penances he desires to perform at large in the world, however, the desire for the charterhouse abates. He fears that he will not be permitted to exercise there the self-disdain he has aroused. Although the servant returns from Burgos with information about the Carthusian

rule that seems satisfactory, Loyola's reservations about its laxity and his preoccupation with the sally to Jerusalem persuade him to postpone a decision about enclosure. Although he does not reconsider the matter,^[178] Carthusian profession would have been an appropriate moral choice, since the order was founded for the vigilance of the eye against all diabolical ambushes, especially as arms against vainglory.^[179]

The soldier and the Carthusian was a comparison of vocations Erasmus explored in a colloquy of that very title. The Carthusian exemplified the humanist ideal of virtue and learning, while the soldier was a glutton, lecher, and gambler. He was also portrayed as a cripple, which accident he attributed to "'the chances of war,'" while the monk rejoined, "'No, it's your own folly.'"^[180] The protagonist of Erasmus's colloquy "Militaria" was also lame:

HANNO : How is it you come back a Vulcan when you left here a Mercury?

THRASYMACHUS : What Vulcans or Mercuries are you talking about?

HANNO : You left as though wing-footed; now you're limping.

THRASYMACHUS : The usual way to come back from war.

(To tell the truth he was wounded when he fled fearfully from battle, fell, and banged his leg on a stone.)^[181] In "Militis et Cartusiani" the soldier criticized the monk for exactly the loss of liberty Loyola fancies for himself, even as a penitent. "'You're not free to walk about wherever you like.'"^[182] It is Loyola's reconsideration of the penances he expects to perform while "walking about through the world" that cools his interest in Carthusian enclosure. The Carthusian of the colloquy would have rejoined that regret for entering an order only came to those who "throw themselves into this mode of life as if into a well."^[183] Loyola may be starry-eyed in his religious ambitions but he is not about to trip like Thales into that well. There is a certain measure of practical deliberation, as in his resolve to postpone a decision about enclosure until his return from the outing to Jerusalem.

Since he has regained some strength, it seems time to leave the castle. Loyola approaches his brother with the ruse that, since the duke of Nájara, whom he serves, knows that he has recovered, it would be good to join him at Navarrete. His brother tours him through the castle from room to room and with flatteries begs him not to ruin himself, to consider how much hope the family has for him, how much he is able to accomplish, and pleads similar arguments—all contrived to detach him from his good desire. Loyola replies evasively and slips off.^[184] The usual

precipitants of an adult conversion were the death of a loved one, serious illness, the preaching of a holy evangelist, an acute sense of worldliness, and the sudden intervention of the supernatural. Its consequences were difficult, because an adult was already involved in an established network of comforts and demands. The vocation to holiness was experienced typically in a social setting in which parents, siblings, spouses, and children were affected by the penitent's decision for a change of life. They could be protagonists or antagonists, but not bystanders.

Conversion in adulthood, which tended in medieval hagiography to be sudden, involved enormous difficulties of extrication from secular attachments and responsibilities. Lay saints were usually urban patricians, with many more canonized from the upper than the lower classes. It was a phenomenon of the landed elite, not the tenant laborer. The saintly aristocracy largely coincided with the social aristocracy, for the institutional Church protected and rewarded the class of its hierarchy. Canonization supposed cult; cult, visibility; visibility, social status. The gospel may have blessed the poor and the meek with the kingdom of heaven, but few were the canonized who embodied those beatitudes by station of birth. The lower class lived the apostolic life by necessity. The marvel of conversion was that the upper class could live it by choice. The act of conversion mirrored these elitist social values, with the dominant image as the prince or merchant—like SS. Francis and Dominic, those nobles Loyola so admired—who renounced a patrimony with its wealth and power.^[185]

Social position entailed family obligation, whether to progeny or to property.^[186] Loyola's elder brother intervenes in this crisis of conversion. He has already been noted as daunted by the pain of Loyola's operation on his legs, which he himself would not dare suffer. He has also interpreted Loyola's exterior change after the Madonna's "visitation" as a sign of an interior change.^[187] Now in touring him through the rooms of the castle he is cast in a diabolical role. He is like Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness with a panorama of the glorious kingdoms of the world (Matt. 4:8–10). Although his part is dialectical and does not extend to the shocking details of abuse, even murder, which could intrude in hagiography, the temptation is real enough. Loyola does not rebuke but evades him, much as Jesus outwitted his enemies by verbal parry or avoided them by slipping into the crowd.