Exercising the Senses, Exercising the Soul: The Spiritual Exercises and the Uses of Jesuit Art

Thesis of the Day:

The Jesuits used the power of imagination to persuade people all over the world to live a life devoted to Christ and the Church. They employed external stimuli, such as architecture and art, to create internal change. Although their means of persuasion were very powerful, Jesuits were not propagandists. Nor could they fully control individual responses to their techniques of persuasion.

I. Propaganda versus Visual Rhetoric: Is There a Difference?

Adolf Hitler, July 1941:

"When all's said, we should be grateful to the Jesuits. Who knows if, but for them, we might not have abandoned Gothic architecture for the light, airy, bright architecture of the Counter-Reformation? .... [T]he Jesuits restored to the world the joy of the senses"

Hitler considers Catholic examples.

A. Jesuit Control of Artistic Design

• Approve every building in Rome; use their own architects
• A form of corporate architecture

B. Comparison with Propaganda in the Third Reich

• Third Reich: state as author, mass manipulation, global domination
• Jesuits: participatory elements; mass persuasion, global conversion

C. Origins of the Word "Propaganda"

• "Propagating the faith" -- Pope's Office of Propaganda Fidei
• When does rhetoric end and propaganda begin?

II. Gymnastics of Sight and Soul

A. "A Picture Worth a Thousand Words": Early Modern Ideas about Sight

• Images penetrate and change bodies
• Ignatius' own experience
• How to memorize a speech

III. The Spiritual Exercises

A. A Unique Book

• To be experienced rather than read; teacher's manual not student's textbook
• Jesuits undertake and give these exercises world-wide
• Modifications for individuals, but goal is always the same

B. Instructions for Making the Right Choice ("Election")

1. Four Weeks, Three Stages
   • Purgative: Turning away from sinful life (week 1)
   • Illuminative: Turning to a devout life, following Christ's example (week 1-3)
   • Unitive: Achieving state of union with God and his Church (week 4)
2. Self-reform plus reform of others: "throughout the world to spread his doctrine among people of every state and condition" (Standard of Christ, p. 297)

C. Working the Senses

1. Imagining the Place - again, and again, and again
2. For example: Hell

BUT: just like everyone's daily experience, so everyone's hell is unique

IV. Let's Help You Imagine Things: the Example of St. Michael and Facade

1. Meet Satan , enter the house of God

2. Three stages of the soul, three spaces of the church
   • First Step: Repentance (a proverbial sinner; confessional)
   • Second Step: Walk with Christ (infancy, suffering, resurrection)
   • Third Step: Union with God and His Church
   Find a new family (familiar faces one and two)
   Church as Gate to Heaven
   Jesuits as gate-keepers

V. External stimuli, internal change: Can guided imagination really change a person?

• Even the Jesuits say conversion depends on free will as well as grace
• Individual must decide to walk or not walk, and how to walk
• Michel de Certeau (Jesuit, important thinker, 20th c.)
  • Strategy: being able to exercise power through control of space
  • Tactics: being able to resist power through creative movement in other people's spaces

In case you are thinking of leaving lecture early, St. Ignatius has an exercise for you: "[W]hen a thought of commiting a mortal sin comes to me (....) I resist it immediately, and it remains banished."(Spiritual Exercises, p. 282)