The Discernment of Spirits in the Spiritual Exercises
I’d like to rise in my own defense, and attempt to spell out my reasoning. This is indeed a subject worth discussion. I contend that “Head versus Heart” is at best an oversimplification and, in the context of Ignatian spirituality, it may also be a strawman.
I remember back to my college days, sitting through rambling one-note sermons of the Newman chaplain at Dartmouth, Father Bill Nolan. He came from the rigid, classical Thomistic theology taught in all seminaries pre-Vatican 2 (he’d been a Redemptorist before returning to the regular priesthood). Looking back it seems a rather defensive position at one the premiere liberal arts colleges in America, and in the end, didn’t hit the mark. He articulated in a rather rudimentary way what was a pretty widely held position that there was no essential conflict between faith and reason; that a good Catholic could hold the “supernatural” doctrine of the Church, and still be a thoroughly modern, scientific, clear thinking, rational human being. That in fact some doctrinal statements were amenable to the process of reason. After all, we had Saint Thomas Aquinas as our guide.
I graduated from college in 1966 and entered the Society. In Philosophy Edward MacKinnon, S.J., and a few others were trying to continue the appropriation of modern philosophy to the doctrinal bandwagon of Catholic theology. Foggy Mac, a slur more than a humorous Jesuit style nickname that reflected in my view some deep anti-intellectual bias in the rank and file, Ed left the Jesuits and, we imagined, the Church, as if a purely intellectual pursuit inevitably led one astray. Actually I think that he just decided to honor his sexual instinct in the normal way and give his emotional, sexual life a larger playing field. A simple explanation, but religious discourse is sometimes susceptible to far fetched and exaggerated stories.
However, before moving onto considering the post-Vatican 2 fallout, especially in the new playing field of sexual freedom, let me make one observation: the fields, or domains, of faith and reason were held as essentially separate. Christianity is a revealed religion of the book. It has its roots in (quasi) historical personages and events which are themselves not easily amenable to reason. They behave more like myths. Thus the narrative of faith and its doctrines have to be held in an essentially different way than, say, the Laws of Thermodynamics or Euclidean Geometry. As long as the wall between the domains stands, we confidently claim that we maintain our integrity. This is not to deny that grace, charm, even fun and play are available in the faith domain. That can be seductive which is also problematic.
Post Vatican 2, emotion, sexuality, our immediate feelings and their expression entered the world of religious practice. They just did. And as with the release of any repression, it lead to both a whole new world as well as unleashing a host of issues heretofore unattended. I may be exaggerating, but certainly in my own case, I would describe it as a kind of unravelling.
Enter, or rather re-enter Father Ignatius and his revolutionary spiritual insight at Manresa. In 1522, he began an interior search to discern the will of God for himself as an individual, and eventually for his burgeoning religious order. Never veering from the given commandments and injunctions of the established Church (and perhaps fearing the harsh sentence imposed by the Inquisition), he sought to discover his personal destiny. What was the Spirit calling him to do? Where, or in the service of what mission, should he devote all his energy, his life, his entire will? When we undertook this discernment ourselves, he counseled us to weigh actual feelings, consolation and desolation, in a focused, orderly way which, over time, led to an “election” or an informed spiritual choice.
Voila! Here in this morass of unleashed emotional religious enthusiasm, sexual feelings, exploration of our underlying subconscious motivations, we have the example of a revered saint who used these very human parts of our psyche to discern the will of God. We got to play in a new ball park, and include an unexplored domain in our spiritual lives.
There have been many positive things that have emerged from this exploration. Not only did we learn to use “I” statements, but therapists began to experiment with meditation as a tool for resolving or at least relieving the effects of trauma, while other psychologists mapped the distinct language of the emotions. They invented the new field of Emotional Intelligence. We have even begun to pinpoint the locus of the origin of emotions in the brain, and distinguish between what are broadly described as base emotions--fear, anger, and derivative feelings such as shame and guilt. The same can be said for distinguishing between the human sexual instinct and love.
The above description of the “Heart Domain” is not intended to be in any way definitive, but rather to indicate that the terrain is rich, varied, and bumpy, with lots of threads, sometimes conflicting, that require our attention. It is also a relatively new discipline, a work in progress. But we have to acknowledge that it is a far step from what Ignatius described in the early 16th century as the movement, conflict, even outright clash between the spirits of good and evil. I would contend that even though his mental model was viscerally real, his descriptive language was charged with an almost gnostic flavor which is very different from what we understand today as the science of mental health.
It is not a bridge too far to take what we understand of our emotional life and interchange it with Ignatius' experience of conflicting spiritual forces. This exchange or interpolation, however, is not simply a case of X = Y where Y has all the attributes, causes and conditions of X!
How are we to use this new rich “heart” vein to inform our spiritual lives and the real life decisions that we face in our day to day lives? I have spent a great deal of time over the past 35 or 40 years actually trying to understand the inner-working of our emotional lives, our basic drives, our instincts--the many facets of what we might generally for convenience call our “spiritual” selves. In the beginning of my search I immersed myself in Enneagram studies with Claudio Naranjo, then I explored every human potential school that I could find. I described my experience in the post Vatican 2 opening to the world of emotion, feeling, and sexuality as an unraveling. And to some degree, all those pieces remain in heaps on the floor where they fell.
At the beginning of this short paper, I began to defend myself against the observation, perhaps opinion, that my use of Ockham’s Razor in analyzing the flow of emotions, felt impulses, attraction and antipathy, and trying to use this “information” was “head-driven.” Reading emotions is not the objective exercise where creating a list of pro’s and con’s helps yield a larger profit on the bottom line. On the other hand, listening to the language of our hearts is not learning to decode the strange language of Mars or Venus. It does not require that we suspend our intellectual judgement. It simply requires that we pay attention in a different, inclusive way. We have to bring all of ourselves to the endeavor of arriving at a good decision, especially one driven by a desire to do the will of God.
I talked about the pre-Vatican 2 attempts to reconcile Faith and Reason. Following Aquinas, Bill Nolan et al tried to use the structures of Aristotelian analysis to negotiate the world of faith, but, I contend we had to maintain a wall between the world of Faith and that of our ordinary lives, which includes everything from making coffee to deciphering the algorithms of a Google search. Aristotle might help us distinguish between the human and divine natures of Jesus as long as the virginity of his mother Mary remained intact as a matter of faith.
It may be a useful practice to suspend our habitual intellectual judgement when we first experience an onrush of newly discovered or released thread of emotions. In fact, it’s recommended in most psychological practice, a kind of agere contra to our normal head-driven way of experiencing the world. But this does not mean that the heart, our emotions deliver a kind of coded message that is separate from our heads, or normal intellectual processing. There is no need to erect a wall between our reason and emotions, our heart and our head. In fact, I would argue that the exact opposite is called for--to tear down any walls that exist. This is why Ignatius recommended the careful weighing of consolation and desolation over time. They have a natural way of sifting themselves out, and providing useful input for our decision making.
Ockham’s Razor for our emotional life.
