Loyola′s Acts – The Rhetoric of the Self: Volume 36 (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics) - Hardcover

Boyle, Marjorie O

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520209370 ISBN 13: 9780520209374

Publisher: University of California Press, 1997

Synopsis

This revisionist review of Ignatius Loyola argues that his "autobiography" - until now taken to be a literal, documentary account - is in reality a work of rhetoric, a moral narrative that exploits the techniques of fiction. In radically reinterpreting this canonical text, the main source of information about the founder of the largest and most powerful religious order in Roman Catholicism, Boyle paints a vivid picture of Loyola's world. She surveys rhetorical and artistic theory, religious iconography, everyday custom, and an array of scenes and subjects: from curiosity, to codes of honour, to the holy places of Spain, the significance of apparitions and flying serpents. Written in the tradition of Renaissance studies on individualism, this work engages current interest in autobiography and the history of private life. The book also provides a heuristic for interpreting a range of texts of the Christian tradition. Finally, this secular treatment of a canonical saint provides insights into how a prestigious 16th-century figure like Loyola understood himself.

About this title

About the Author

Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle is a cultural historian specializing in the rhetoric of religion. She is the author of five previous books, most recently Divine Domesticity (1996) and Petrarch's Genius: Pentimento and Prophecy (California, 1991).

From the Back Cover

"Fascinating, brilliantly argued . . . makes a genuinely original contribution to understanding one of the seminal figures of the Reformation/Counterreformation. It exemplifies scholarship of a range and seriousness unusual these days."—Anthony Low, author of The Reinvention of Love

From the Inside Flap

"Fascinating, brilliantly argued . . . makes a genuinely original contribution to understanding one of the seminal figures of the Reformation/Counterreformation. It exemplifies scholarship of a range and seriousness unusual these days."Anthony Low, author of The Reinvention of Love

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self

By Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle

University of California Press

Copyright 1997 Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520209370


Introduction

Once upon a place: A man out for a walk sat down on the bank of a deeply coursing river and, with his face toward its surface, experienced his supreme understanding. What did he, Iigo Lpez de Loyola, see reflected in that natural mirror? Although from there he went on to found the Society of Jesus, renowned in the sixteenth century for its reformatory and missionary endeavors, and in the twentieth century the largest religious order in the Roman Catholic Church, his climactic experience is virtually unknown. This obscurity even after his quincentennial (14911556) is arresting in comparison with the celebrity of the historically parallel experience in the Protestant tradition, Martin Luther's illumination in the tower about justification by faith.

This book is about the renaissance rhetoric of the self, as focused on a character tempted by fame. Autobiography has attained status as a genre only within the past several decades, with criticism concentrated on texts of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. There is a commonsense definition of autobiography as writing about the self by the self,1 with the paradigm as Augustine's Confessions . Yet that text eludes that norm, for it was not autobiographical but epideictic: rhetoric invented from the self about God. "The thirteen books of my Confessions praise the just and good God from my evils and from my goods and they arouse the human intellect and affection toward him." The self was not the object of the text but a source from which Augustine invented those divine praises. Augustine was not an autobiographer; God was the Creator. The author of the text was ultimately the creative indwelling

Spirit, who formed and stimulated his tongue to confess. As an epideictic rhetorician, Augustine was a confessor in prudence, the parts of which virtue formally structured his text: memory, intelligence, and foresight.2

Prudence, the virtue that classically elected between good and evil, governed the medieval and renaissance literature since then mislabeled "autobiography" by a historiographic zeal to assert a modern empirical self. The virtuous structure of this imitative literature may be less formal than in Augustine's prudential paradigm, or in the triple-headed Prudence of art;3 but prudential conventions such as the choice of Hercules, which informed Augustine's conversion,4 still prevailed. In a sophistic parable Hercules, that most popular of Greek heroes, was adapted to idealize the human faculty of deliberation and its power of decision. Hercules in his passage to youth also went, like Loyola, to a quiet place and sat down pondering which path of life to choose. Two contrasting female figures appeared and addressed his doubts with the divergent attractions and promises of vice and virtue.5 From that exemplar, the classical ancestor of medieval and renaissance masters of choice, a character was typically plotted as a traveler on the path of life, confronted at crossroads with moral decisions. Although autobiography has been dated to the invention of the silvered mirrors of Venetian technique,6 in which an individual could accurately examine himself, even late in renaissance literature that visionary mirror could still be the exemplary mirror of medieval morality. As in Guillaume de Deguileville's Pelrinage de vie humaine :

In thys boke, yf they rede yerne,
. . .
Ther they may, as in a merovr se
holsom thynges, & thynges full notable;
What ys prevyd, & what thyng ys dampnable,
What ys holsom, the solve for to save,
Whan the body ys leyd in hys grave.7

Loyola's experiences are related in a text titled Acta , to which modern translations into English have insinuated the novel title "Autobiography."8 The critical edition states that "this Acta contains his life (vita )," from the time of his wounding at Pamplona in 1521 to the favorable opinion given of him and his companions by the pope to the governor at Rome in 1538.9 The premise of modern interpretation is that this "life" is an autobiographical narrative as a factually historical document. Loyola's Acts will not convert such an "autobiography" into a biogra-

phy. Other authors have essayed that, even as a literal foundation for psychoanalysis.10 This book intends to argue that the text is not an autobiography, to question the validity of treating it as a historical document on the modern empiricist model, and to offer a heuristic for the interpretation of similar texts in the Christian tradition composed in the epideictic genre. It proposes an alternative to historical literalism.

Loyola indicated to the Society of Jesus in 1553 his decision "to declare whatever had passed through his soul until then."11 He acceded to its explicit request "to explain how from the beginning of his conversion the Lord had governed him."12 The title Acta might be hagiographic; the text of St. Francis of Assisi translated into Italian as Fioretti was originally titled Actus . The title more probably derives from the scriptural Acts of the Apostles, in which "they gathered the church together and declared all that God had done with them" (Acts 14:27; 15:4). The text of Loyola's recital was occasioned by such a spiritual accounting (dar cuenta ) by its Jesuit author, Luis Gonalves da Cmara, to the Society's founder, which Loyola reciprocated. The Jesuits had petitioned an explanation from Loyola of how the Lord had governed him. Like Augustine he responded as a prudent confessor of values. The text is epideictic rhetoric, in conformity with Loyola's determination in his Exercitia spiritualia of the primary purpose of life as epideictic: "to praise" God.13 Epideictic rhetoric was the genre that classically treated praise or censure, from panegyric to invective, as derived from the personal topics and as aimed at the honorable. It was distinguished from the deliberative rhetoric of the forum, which debated an issue for the civic moral good, and from the juridical rhetoric of the court, which defended or prosecuted a legal case. Although epideictic rhetoric assumed the matters for praise or blame to be true, it could by the rules exploit the techniques of fiction, so that every detail was not necessarily factual. Even when the matter was factual, it was not factual qua factuality but factual qua evaluation. The intent was not on the conveyance of information but on the persuasion of judgment. Its import was moral not empirical.14 Loyola's Acts will explore that moral sense of the text. It will do so by situating the morality in its cultural context. Venturing beyond a close literary reading of the text, this book will research its milieu to expose its values as cultural conventions. The very exposure of its conventionalitypopular pietywill also allow the disclosure of its rare but important countercultural innovations.

Acta is not autobiography. Loyola, unlike Augustine, did not even compose the text. It was five times removed from his lips: after recital

were audition, memorization, notation, composition, transcription. Erasmus complained of a devotion that preserved the dirty handker-chiefs of saints in gilt reliquaries, while "the books into which they put so much work, and in which we have the best part of them still living and breathing, we abandon to be gnawed at will by bug, worm, and cockroach."15 There remains not even an infested exemplar of Loyola's recital. The original manuscript is reported by the modern editors as lost, with the critical edition compiled from partial versions.16 Until that publication in 1943, even a Latin translation was used, rather than the Spanish and Italian copies of the lost original. Loyola speaks with the hollow voice of medieval texts, for which the original was anonymous, lost, forgotten, disappeared, with only copies of copies extant.17 That factor of distance between self and text will necessarily figure in its interpretation; the function of memory in its invention will be emphatic.

The text was invented by imitation. The imitation of models was a pancultural precept and activity that flourished in the sixteenth century as both focal and diffuse theory and technique in literature.18 In humanist aspirations imitation was not a crude reproduction but an elegant resemblance of texts. An author was not an ape. Imitation was in the superior theory of Erasmus not mimicry but emulation, a transcendence of the style of the ancient master by cultivating one's own native beauty in harmony with the persons and conditions of contemporaneous life. The author reflected the individuality of his own mind as in a natural mirror. Any mimicry of another's gifts distorted the reflection, as if the author were masquerading.19

Renaissance literature thus requires for its interpretation a discernment of the latent texts of tradition, or intertextual allusions. Of the metaphors for imitation that were commonplace since early in the periodthe apian, the digestive, the filial, the echoic, and the choral20 it is the filial that governs this text. The metaphor derived from Seneca's theory of imitation, which advised a resemblance to the original without an exactness, much as a son might resemble his father.21 As Petrarch explained, "While often very different in their individual features, they have a certain something that our painters call an 'air,' especially noticeable about the face and eyes, that produces a resemblance." Imitation consists of concept and style, not exact words, so that its art is concealed rather than blatant. The similarity of copy to exemplar is so profound that it can only be extricated by a quiet meditation.22 Gonalves da Cmara refers deferentially to Loyola as "the Father,"23 although as a priest he himself was entitled to that appellation. Just as he identifies

himself spiritually as a son, so is his composition literarily a filial imitation of Loyola's discourse.

The initial sentence of the preface of Acta signals the elision of history into morality: it begins with a date but ends with a vice. "The year of 53 one Friday morning, 4 August, the vigil of Our Lady of the Snows, while the Father was in the garden adjoining the house or apartment which is called the Duke's, I began to give him an account of some intimacies of my soul and among other things I spoke to him about vainglory." He details the circumstances of its composition. At dinner after their intimate conversation in the garden about vainglory, Loyola mentions how often Jernimo Nadal and others of the Society have especially requested something of him, about which he has never decided.24 This matter proves to be, as Nadal's preface reveals, "something after the manner of a testament, to give them advice that they might be assisted in the perfection of virtue," such as "the holy fathers, authors of some monastic institutes, confided to posterity."25 As Gonalves da Cmara relates, Loyola explains at dinner how after the conversation in the garden, having retired to his room, "he had quite a devotion and inclination to do that; and (speaking in a manner that showed that God had given him great clarity that he ought to do that) that he was wholly determined. That matter was to declare whatever had passed in his soul until now. He had also determined that it was I to whom he would expose these matters." Although Loyola is quite ill and unaccustomed to promise himself even a day of life, he expresses the hope of survival for three or four months to complete the affair.26

Gonalves da Cmara reports their collaboration. Although Loyola requires a daily reminder of this duty, he postpones it daily for many days, until because of other commitments he asks only for a reminder every Sunday. In September on an unremembered date Loyola summons him and "begins to tell his entire life and the lively fancies or antics of youth clearly and distinctly in all their circumstances." There are three or four more meetings in the same month that bring the account up to the first days in Manresa, as indicated by the difference in the penmanship. Although Gonalves da Cmara dates their causative conversation, he cannot recall the dates of the recitals and he is vague about the number of early encounters as "three or four." There is no vagueness in the original discourse, however, as he reports it. "The Father's manner of narration is as in everything; that is, with such clarity that it seems to render a man present to the entire past."27

Clarity of style was a classical virtue of rhetoric. A clarity so vivid as

to render the absent present was enargeia . This was the rhetorical term for the representation of reality that evoked a physicalprimarily visualscene in all its line, texture, and color. It was a stylistic effect that appealed to the senses and so described the scene that the listener became a spectator. With emphasis on the sense of sight, it thrust itself upon his notice by displaying facts in living truth to the eye of the mind. This vivid pictorial description penetrated to the very emotions. Although the comparison of writing to painting was a humanist habit, enargeia was the essential painterly skill. As an ornament its achievement was the greatest of all rhetorical gifts. It displayed this excellence in historiography and poetry.28 Erasmus, whose popular textbook on style was included in this very year of Loyola's recital in the regulations governing all Jesuit colleges,29 instructed on enargeia . It was employed "whenever, for the sake of amplifying or decorating our passage, or giving pleasure to our readers, instead of setting out the subject in bare simplicity, we fill in the colours and set it up like a picture to look at, so that we seem to have painted the scene rather than read." Vividness derived from a mental review of the entire subject and its associations, which was then given substance with apt words and figures.30 Unlike medieval description, which prescribed a set of techniques, the renaissance revival of enargeia suggested a creative approach to composition. There was a shift of categories of formal thought to an intuitive domain of vast potentiality.31

The mental visualizations of enargeia resulted from phantasiai or visiones . The term was almost synonymous in later classicism with ekphrasis ; while Latin translations were demonstratio, evidentia, illustratio, repraesentatio , and sub oculos subiecto .32 The common equivalents, evidentia and illustratio , were often synonymous among rhetoricians. Yet illustratio was the most exact rendering, since en-argeia means a "bringing into light." To bring things into the light is also to bring things into a field of visual perception. From enargeia derived Argos of a hundred eyes,33 the mythological monster who will serve as an interpreter of Loyola's morality. Acta is a text that proves the later maxim "The style is the man."34 A style was classically illustris if the words were selected for their gravity and applied metaphorically, exaggeratedly, adjectivally, in duplication, synonymously, and in harmony with the actual action and representation of facts. Dante used it as his term for the high vernacular style corresponding to the grand Latin style of epic, tragedy, and canzone .35 The vividly representative style of Acta is integral with

Loyola's vividly representative piety. Its climax on the riverbank in his life and in the text he will precisely term enargeia: illustracin .

The collaboration of Gonalves da Cmara and Loyola coincides with the cultural change from orality to literacy, which from the midsixteenth century experienced the complex relationships of writing and speaking.36 Their situation is secondary orality, an orality influenced by the printing press, as distinguished from the primary orality of a society before print. In the twentieth century the Iberian Peninsula still affords the richest examples of vigorous poetic traditions maintained without writing.37 Oral delivery may thus have been Loyola's native habit. Perhaps in continuity with the humble theme of his recital, however, its delivery was a conscious attempt to evade the fame the printing press would ensure.38 The text is not an original composition or a dictated transcription but a memorization and an imitation. Gonalves da Cmara is in the clerkly tradition of the translator-adaptor, whose witness was fundamental to hagiography.39 He states that he listened, memorized, "then went immediately to write, without saying anything to the Father, first in point-form in my hand and then more copiously as it is now written."40 This immediacy displays a culture of literacy, in which postponement weakens recall. In an oral society the teller of the tale would have delayed his repetition to assimilate it into his store of themes and formulas.41 Quintilian observed that rapid memory as a rule usually failed to endure, but that whatever could not be recalled on the spot was easily coordinated the following day. Time traditionally strengthened memory.42

Memory was the mother of the Muses.43 Although but one of the five parts of rhetoric,44 it was "the guardian of all the parts of rhetoric"45 and "the treasure-house of eloquence."46 The ancient art of memory derived from the poet Simonides, who was able to identify for burial the corpses of guests in a banquet hall that had tragically collapsed by remembering their locations at table. By inference, the orator training his memory for the accurate delivery of a lengthy speech should mentally form images of the facts and select places for their storage. The most complete pictures were formed by sensory impression, especially sight. As Cicero instructed, "The keenest of all our senses is the sense of sight, and that consequently perceptions received by the ears or by reflexion can most easily be retained if they are also conveyed to our minds by the mediation of the eyes." The mnemonic process was like an interior writing that placed the images on the places, like inscribing the alphabet on a papyrus, tablet, or parchment. The placement was serial, with

markers for every so many images, usually five, so that the orator could summon his speech by progressing through the model.47

There was a memory for things and a memory for words. Although the rhetorical ideal urged a firm perception of both, the difficulty of allotting an image to a place for every word was acknowledged. And so memory for thingsthe subject matterwas allowed as sufficient.48 As Quintilian advised, the rhetorical model was not to memorize verbatim but "to secure a good grasp of the facts (res ) themselves and to leave ourselves free to speak as we will."49 This is what Gonalves da Cmara means when he explains that he retired immediately after Loyola's recitation to write it down "in point-form" (en puntos ): the rhetorical matters. He would not have memorized by rote Loyola's words, although certain diction may be original; rather, he concentrated mentally on his subjects. The text is a filial imitation of the paternal speech, in which by Seneca's theory there is a resemblance to the original without an exactness, much as a son might resemble a father.

In mnemonic theory and practice ordinary images easily slipped the memory, while novel ones stimulated it. A solar eclipse was a better mnemonic image than the daily sunrise. Images were to be active, not vague. The classical recommendation was for images that were base, dishonorable, unusual, great, unbelievable, ridiculous, or comic. Exceptional aesthetic qualities of beauty or ugliness, whether ornamental or disfigured, were advised. The medieval scholastic practice, which shifted memory as the first part of the virtue of prudence from rhetoric to ethics, acknowledged that gross and sensible things were more easily remembered than subtle and spiritual ones. For the easier remembrance of intelligible notions, Thomas Aquinas advised their linkage in Ciceronian method with some kind of phantasms. Since human cognition was stronger in regard to the sensible, corporeal likenesses and images were to be invented lest simple and spiritual intentions slip from the soul.50

The visual imagery of the text, derived from Loyola's vivid recollection, is thus required by its memorial nature. Recollection was the recovery of knowledge or its base in sensation by a deliberate hunt through the corridors of memory according to principles of association and of order. The common mnemonic model was architectural, such as palaces and churches. Thoughts were assigned and arranged sequentially in rooms, even entrusted to its furnishings or statues, then recalled at will from their custodians.51 Another mnemonic device, which Quintilian recommended, was "a long journey."52 Loyola and Gonalves da C-

mara may each be imagined as plotting the memorial pilgrimage that structures the recitation and the text.

Not only was the rhetorical skill of memory derived from places, so also was the rhetorical art of invention. Places were fundamental to recall and to argumentation. The topical art indicated the location to search and develop, as Cicero explained. Topics were seats and domiciles of arguments, like cubicles from which the oratorical themes must be tracked down or dug out. They were the sources of speech. Rhetoric was developed from such "places," then entrusted for memory to other "places," so that place was fundamental to its interpretation. The practice implied a classical association of mental and physical realms in which intellectual apprehension depended upon sensory grasp. To understand an idea was to locate and recall its position.53

Loyola's piety is established in the renaissance revival of that rhetorical culture. The Exercitia spiritualia begins with a comparison to the physical exercises of moving in place, by strolling, walking, and running. These three speeds of travel allude to the three traditional "ways" (viae ) of religionpurgative, illuminative, unitive. The person making the Exercises is even advised to retreat from home to another dwelling. The prelude of each meditation is "artful structure seeing the place" (composicin viendo el lugar ). He is to note where the object to be contemplated or meditated is situated. For a visible object such as Christ, the artful structure imaginatively pictures the corporeal place where his house may be located, since he may be in the temple or on the mount. For an invisible object such as sins, the artful structure imaginatively pictures and considers the soul imprisoned in a corruptible body, while the total composite of body and soul in this valley is exiled among brute animals. The meditator is instructed to use the sense of touch to embrace and kiss the places where holy persons are positioned. In the examination of conscience the penitent is to recall his sins after a lapse of time by locating the place and house where he lived, his conversations with others, and his occupations. The meditations depend on recalling and retaining in memory.54

The journey of chivalric literature also employed geography as a mnemonic device. By connecting events with their background, an atmosphere was developed through a technique of linking emotion with scenery.55 Loyola's habit before his conversion to asceticism was to fantasize from such romances.56 They influenced not only certain scenes in his Exercitia spiritualia such as imagining oneself a knight in the presence of the king and court, ashamed and confused for grievous offenses

against a generous benefactor57 but its very concept of mnemonic movement through places. This concept was also literarily indebted to accounts of pilgrimage, the paradigm for which was Jerome's description of Paula in Palestine: how at the stable of the Nativity she meditated with the eyes of faith the infant wailing, the magi adoring, the star shining, Mary nursing, the shepherds arrivingall the details vividly and affectively. And she kissed those places.58 Meditation in movement proved too arduous for some late medieval pilgrims, who took to their beds; but others, like the friar Felix Fabri, relished their devotional exercise from place to place. Loyola's own pilgrimage to Jerusalem influenced his conception of the Exercitia spiritualia , as is evident from a detail like the apparition of Jesus first to Mary after his resurrection. Although the incident is unscriptural, it was included in the processional of pilgrims, at the chapel of the Virgin in the church of the Holy Sepulchre where they knelt, sang, prayed, and received plenary indulgences. The instruction of the Exercitia spiritualia to kiss the mnemonic places imitates the actual practice of pilgrims at the holy sites.59 The setting of Acta is not mere scenic backdrop for its protagonist; it invents and informs the plot. Setting is structural.

Quintilian argued against the contention that language in the rough is more natural and virile for artistic structure (compositio ). Art depended on discipline and cultivation. Structure gave force and direction to thoughts as the bowstring did to the arrow. "All the best scholars are convinced," he wrote, "that the study of structure is of the utmost value, not merely for charming the ear, but for stirring the soul." The qualities of composition were decorum, pleasure, and variation. Its parts were order, connection, and rhythm. Since composition was the counterpart in prose to versification in poetry, it virtually equalled rhythm. The triads extended to the parts of a sentence, the comma, the colon, and the period.60 And they were applied to the parts of rhetoric itself: invention or discovery, disposition or arrangement, elocution or performance. In Leon Battista Alberti's seminal theory of art they explained circumscription or the drawing of figures in outline; composition or the indication of planes within the outline; and reception of light or the rendering of color.61 Similarly the meditations of Loyola's Exercitia spiritualia are all punctually triadic: first point, second point, third point.62 The methods of meditation are also rhetorically rhythmic. Each word of a composed prayer, such as the Lord's Prayer, is to be considered serially, then coordinated with breathing. In such measured praying a word is aligned with a thought and with a forced respiration or loud breath.63 The Ex-

ercitia spiritualia is in method rhetorical. So is Loyola's recital as imitated in the text Acta .

The onset of this oral and literary pilgrimage is marked by procrastination. Delay was typically a female wile, as in the quip from the favorite military comedy, "Woman is certainly the daughter of Delay personified! Why, any other delay, even one of equal length, seems shorter than what a woman lets you in for. I really do believe they do it just out of habit."64 The procrastination of Loyola culturally reverts to a female character in another tale of quest, the sagacious Penelope, who nightly undid her weaving to postpone the deadlines of her amorous suitors until Odysseus might return.65 Morally his antecedent is another lover, Augustine, who in contradiction of her virtue implored, "Give me chastity and self-restraint, but not just yet."66 In performance delay was associated with the temperament of Quintus Roscius Gallus, the consummate Roman actor. He was introduced in Cicero's De oratore in the context of the profound disturbance of even first-rate speakers, for the greater the orator's talent the more nervous he could be. Such an orator could be "out of the humour or hindered by indisposition (people say, 'Roscius was not in the mood for acting today,' or 'He was a little out of sorts')."67 A renaissance painter who delayed the delivery of his portraits was imitatively called "a humorist," because he worked when he pleased, inventing excuses.68

It is to obviate any allegation that Loyola postpones his promise of delivery from the vice of sloth that both prefaces, in detailing his procrastination, explicate the reasons for it. The preface by Gonalves da Cmara is almost consumed with procrastinations. He relates how, immediately after Loyola's determination and revelation of this duty, he fails it. The excuse is illness. Although Loyola never expects a single day of life, ironically when others voice their own procrastinations"I'll do that in five days from now or in eight days from now"he chides them. "The Father ever astonished says, 'What! so do you think you will live so long?'"69 This chastisement echoes a scriptural lesson against pride. Those who are talkative about their plans for the future are admonished, "You do not know about tomorrow. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we shall live and we shall do this or that.' As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil" (James 4:1316).

Although Loyola humbly expresses the hope that he will live to complete the recital, the project is desultory. When Gonalves da Cmara

questions him about beginning it, Loyola replies that he should be reminded daily until he feels ready to do it. "I cannot remember how many days!" cries Gonalves da Cmara, in a feigned lapse of memory that is hyperbolic. The excuse is illness, then business. Loyola is then to be reminded only every Sunday (the day of leisure).70 The recitation commences on some unremembered date in September 1553, followed by three or four more sessions during that month. Then the procrastinations resume. "The Father was always making excuses, with some illness or various affairs that occurred, telling me, 'When that business is finished, remind me'; only, when it was finished and I did remind him, to say 'Just now we are involved in this other business; when it is finished, remind me of it.'" Upon the arrival of Nadal (who will write yet another preface) on 18 October of the following year, Gonalves da Cmara is ordered by him to "importune the Father, telling me many times that in no matter could the Father do more good for the Society than in doing this; and that this would be to have founded the Society truly."71 This statement replicates a favorite topic of the exordium, the belief that the possession of knowledge or virtue required its dispensation.72

Nadal himself many times speaks to Loyola, as amply recorded in his preface. At the opportune moment he asks him for a "testament" and "paternal instruction." Loyola offers business matters as an excuse for refusal, stating that he has neither the time nor the inclination for it. He indicates, nevertheless, that three of the Jesuits are to offer Mass for this intention and after prayer to report to him their thoughts. Loyola promises to comply with them. The following year when Nadal returns he asks Loyola if he has done anything about the promise. "'Nothing,' he said." After return from yet another journey, he inquires once more. Loyola has not yet undertaken the recital. Nadal insists that for almost four years the Jesuits have implored as a benefit to their Society an explanation of his instruction since the beginning of his conversion. He adds boldly that, if the request is granted, the Society will put it to its best use; but that, if not, it will maintain the same confidence in the Lord "as if you had written everything." There is no reply.73

Yet, perhaps the same day, Loyola summons Gonalves da Cmara and begins his recital. Nadal remarks that "this Father, as he is of excellent memory, afterwards wrote it."74 The Constitutiones of the Society of Jesus require of candidates an aptitude for memory to learn and to retain. Lack of memory is an impediment to membership in the Society. Mnemonic skills were a fundamental part of the curriculum in rhetoric and ethics at the Jesuit College in Rome; scholastics were instructed to

commit their studies to memory.75 One avid student of the system would be the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who notably constructed for the Chinese nobility a memory palace.76

The commendation of the memory of Gonalves da Cmara does not establish his accuracy but his ethics, however, since the faculty was not one of rote communication but of familiarized understanding. Memory distinguished moral character. It was common in the process for canonization to praise the prodigious memory of the saint as an indicator of his fundamental humanity.77 The credentials of Gonalves da Cmara are stated: elector at the General Congregation and assistant to Father General Diego Lanez; later, tutor in letters and Christian manners to Sebastian, king of Portugalin sum, "a Father distinguished in religion and virtue." The preface is noted as written partly in Spanish, partly in Italian, depending on the availability of amanuenses. Another "learned and pious" priest, Annibal de Codretto, translated the text into Latin. Nadal concludes by stating that "both the author and the translator are living." Although this testimony is for authentication, Gonalves da Cmara, not Loyola, is credited as the "author" (auctor ) of the text.78 This designation departs from medieval practice, which considered the initiator the author (auctor ) and the guarantor the authority (auctoritas ).79

When with Nadal's encouragement Gonalves da Cmara persists, Loyola tells him to remind him of his commitment after the business of securing an endowment for the Jesuit College at Rome is arranged. The next excuse becomes "the question of Prester," the issue of supplying Jesuit missionaries to Abyssinia. Loyola will not meet with him until the courier has departed. The continuation of the recital begins on 9 March, only to be interrupted on the 23rd by the death of Pope Julius III. Loyola refuses to meet again until the election of a new pope, but that successor, Pope Marcellus, soon falls ill and dies. The tale is yet again postponed until the election of Pope Paul IV. Then there are "too many hot spells and too many occupations" that summer, so that Loyola keeps delaying until 21 September, when Gonalves da Cmara is about to be ordered to Spain. With his departure impending, Gonalves da Cmara urges Loyola to fulfill his promise.80

A meeting is arranged for the morning of the 22nd. After Mass (and here the Spanish copy ends, with the remainder of the preface only extant in the Latin translation), Gonalves da Cmara inquires if this is indeed the time. Loyola instructs him to go and wait for him in the Red Tower and to be there upon his arrival. Since Gonalves da Cmara assumes from experience that he will have to wait for quite a while, he

engages in conversation with a brother in the hall. Loyola reprimands him for failing in obedience, since he has not been waiting in the appointed place. The meeting is cancelled. "He wished to do nothing that day." A delegation of Jesuits urges Loyola to continue. Loyola returns to recital in the tower but breaks it off abruptly when Gonalves da Cmara's disobedient and rude behavior again provokes him. He returns after some time to complete the recitation, as written.

Gonalves da Cmara's preparations for his journey to Spain disallow him the leisure to write everything out in detail. The very eve of his departure is the final occasion of conference with Loyola. So he is left to dictate from his notes to an Italian scribe in Genoa and to put the finishing touches on the composition there in December 1555, two years and four months after the original conversation in the garden.81 The unfinished manuscript shares the fate of the medieval fragment82 and the renaissance epic, that peerless genre with the scope for the heroes of its journeys, crusades, wanderings, pilgrimages, and explorationsof which ambitious projects few were ever finished.83

Classical rhetoric emphasized the importance of the introduction as paramount. Aristotle tersely explained that "the most essential and special function of the exordium is to make clear what is the end and purpose of a speech."84 Gonalves da Cmara complies with this in exposing the vice of vainglory. In Ciceronian rhetoric, which influenced him even more, the introduction was designed to dispose the listeners to regard the argumentation of the speech with benevolence. Because an audience desires to hear first just what is within its competence and judgment, Cicero advised against bounding emotionally into a subject, arousing passion rather than understanding. He recommended an unhurried style.85 Gonalves da Cmara's preface with its tedious tale of procrastinations obeys this law of languor. It serves classically to capture the benevolence of the reader.

By another favorite topic of the exordium, the promise to relate news,86 the difficulty of obtaining the recital establishes Gonalves da Cmara's authority to transcribe it. This authorization originates from the personal conversation in the garden, during which he filially imitates and repents the sin of the Father. As Gonalves da Cmara discloses of his confession of vainglory, "The Father gave me as a remedy that I should often refer to God all my affairs, endeavoring to offer him all the good that I might find in myself, recognizing it as his and giving thanks for it. And in this matter he spoke to me in a manner that greatly consoled me, so that I could not restrain my tears." He relates how Loyola

confided to him particulars of his own struggle with vainglory and the peace of its solution.87 Gonalves da Cmara's tears of consolation at Loyola's speech are models of the affective response to be evoked in the reader of the text. His authority to write is further established in an explicit decision of Loyola to recite to him, a decision stated as a divinely inspired duty and shared with the Society at its communal supper. Readers are finally disposed toward him by his undaunted perseverance in the trials of obtaining the substance of the text, despite rejection and reproof. His integrity is reinforced in the preface of Nadal, who states what the convention of modesty would disallow Gonalves da Cmara himself to mention: that he is learned and pious, of excellent memory, of service to church and state, and (should anyone wish to verify his testimony) still living.88

The preface is especially intended to capture the benevolence of readers toward Loyola in filial piety. Loyola's procrastinations are ambiguous. If he is postponing a humble confession of vice, he is not being humble but vain. The excuses that are cited, howeverillness, business, mourning, and even the weatherare designed to obviate this accusation. So it is the rhetorical topic of modesty that governs the preface and its interpretation. Since classical antiquity the principal device for the capture of benevolence was a modest manner. The modesty of the author became the model for eliciting the modesty of the audience: to listen, to learn, to assimilate, to assent. It was an affected modesty, a necessary convention of the author as the condition of a favorable response from the reader. The concept depended, before Christian humility, on Ciceronian humility. The classical orator protested his inadequacy to the task. The theme was projected as beyond his talent; he feared the criticism of learned men; he dared not hope to accomplish it successfully; but he resigned himself only because the request was justified. It was conventional to emphasize that the work was undertaken only at the beseeching of others. A form of affected modesty was fear and trembling at the venture: literary trepidation. There were various formulas of this disparagement of the self as a mite and the text as a trifle. Loyola's illnesses mimic the most common affected modesty, which was a protestation of feebleness (infirmitas ).89

Gonalves da Cmara's introduction complies with conventional affected modesty. The self-abasement implied in his deference to Loyola as "the Father" echoes formulas of submission to a literary patron.90 The acknowledgment that his memory may be faulty, although he promises to tell as well as he can, is stylistic hesitancy.91 The topic of modesty was

often conveyed in a declaration that the author dared to write only at the request or command of a friend, patron, or superior.92 This is true of both Gonalves da Cmara and Loyola. Gonalves da Cmara initiates the task only at the command of his religious superior, who is Loyola, and persists only at his command and with the repeated urgings of the Society. Loyola initiates the recital and persists in it only by divine inspiration and at the insistences, pleadings, and exhortations of the Society. The device of delay in the topic of modesty introduced texts from Cicero's Orator to Castiglione's Il libro del cortegiano : "For a long time I debated earnestly with myself, Brutus, as to which course would be more difficult or more seriousto deny your oft repeated request, or to do what you ask";93 and, "I have spent a long time wondering, my dear Alfonso, which of two things was the more difficult for me: either to refuse what you have asked me so often and so insistently, or to do it."94

The detailing of the desultory project is required by the nature of the text as a mirror of vainglory. It is because Loyola characterizes himself shamefully as vainglorious that Gonalves da Cmara and Nadal must emphasize, even exaggerate, his character as unvainglorious. This rhetorical device is imperative to capture benevolence toward the founder of the Society and to legitimate as moral their own imitative vocations and vows as its filial members. Loyola must be introduced as decisively converted from vainglory, so as to exonerate the father, if not the sons, from the capital vice. This is hagiographic. While Loyola as father would exaggerate their similarity, the Jesuits as sons must exaggerate their difference.

The prefaces even contradict the text. The subversion of Loyola's intentions is patent in the preface by Nadal, who exploits Loyola's grace as the very occasion for inviting the oral recitation and written text. As he relates, once when they were together Loyola remarked, "'Just now I was higher than heaven.' He had experienced (I think) for a while an ecstasy or rapture, as he was frequently accustomed. Reverentially I inquired, 'What of that place, Father?' He changed the conversation to other matters. Judging this the opportune moment, I therefore asked and beseeched the Father to set forth for us how from the beginning of his conversion the Lord had governed him, so that that relation would be for us in the manner of a testament and paternal institute."95 Nadal infers a sublime interpretation of Loyola's remark, buttresses it with mention of the frequency of his raptures, questions him with reverence, and seizes this odd occasion as the "opportune moment" for petitioning

a recital for the Society. Loyola does not comply. It is not Nadal's reverence that elicits his response but Gonalves da Cmara's weakness. The intentions of Loyola may, nevertheless, be inferred from his preface and text. As a hermeneutic principle, where the text blames the sinner it is authentic to Loyola's recitation, where it praises the saint it is Gonalves da Cmara's intervention.

The preface establishes the text as a mirror of vainglory for repentance and consolation. It captures the benevolence of the reader toward Loyola by justifying him as unvainglorious through the emphatic modesty of his procrastination. In recommending a remedy for vainglory, Loyola confesses to Gonalves da Cmara how he himself struggled with the vice. His counsel to refer everything good in oneself to God imitates the epideictic conclusion of Augustine's Confessions , in which the author praised himself as good in the divine image and referred that praise to its Creator.96 The weeping of Gonalves da Cmara in response also imitates that exemplar, the contrite Augustine in the garden of conversion. Yet although Augustine's tears had streamed in the aqueous imagery of the Neoplatonist topic of departure and return,97 here they have no such metaphysical import. They are moral tears. Gonalves da Cmara becomes the model for the reader of the text, who is to respond to it by weeping.

Crying was classically recommended as an oratorical practice. Cicero advised that the speaker must feel the emotions he wishes to excite, so as to be reduced to "tears of compassion."98 Preachers like Bernardino of Siena, or in Catalonia, Vincent Ferrer, were renowned for their ability to incite their listeners to weeping.99 A certain preacher, much admired by the humanist Angelo Politziano, would collect his falling tears in his cupped hands and throw them at the congregation for effect.100 The weeping of Gonalves da Cmara indicates his spontaneity toward morality and thus establishes his sincerity of character. The inclusion of this personal detail is also conventional, well within the rhetorical purpose of an introduction: to gain the reader's confidence. Weeping presumes a naive belief that emotional spontaneity is more sincere, thus more credible, than literary artifice. The eyes were the most important physical feature for oratorical expression since they revealed the temper of the mind, either twinkling with merriment or clouded with grief. As Quintilian instructed, "Nature has given them tears to serve as interpreters of our feelings, tears that will break forth for sorrow or stream for very joy."101 Weeping is also appropriate penitence for the vice of vainglory, which is sensuously ocular.

Tension about eyes mars the recital, however. As Loyola paces in recital, Gonalves da Cmara relates, "I, so that I might observe his face, kept approaching steadily a little at a time, while the Father said to me, 'Observe the rule.' And when, neglecting this, I approached another time and relapsed in the same matter two or three times, he said this to me and went off."102 It was classical theory that sight impressed the memory better than the other senses. Heraclitus attested that "the eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears," and Quintilian repeated that "the perception of the eye is quicker than that of the ear."103 Since sight was the keenest sense, Cicero instructed that the perceptions received by the ear were most easily remembered if they were also conveyed to the mind by the mediation of the eyes. Cicero also signaled the importance of the eyes for expressing feeling in delivery, "for this is the only part of the body capable of producing as many indications and variations as there are emotions, and there is nobody who can produce the same effect with the eyes shut."104 Quintilian agreed that in the expression of the emotions the greatest influence was exercised by the glance. "It is on this that our audience hang, on this that they rivet their attention and their gaze, even before we begin to speak. It is this that inspires the hearer with affection or dislike, this that conveys a world of meaning and is often more eloquent than all our words."105

Gonalves da Cmara thus has a legitimate basis for desiring to observe Loyola's facial expressions, the better to understand and remember his delivery. Yet Loyola rebuffs his advances. The memorization that Gonalves da Cmara would reinforce by close-up observation is explicitly negated by his forgetfulness of Loyola's reminder of the rule. Since Gonalves da Camara fails to avert his eyes, Loyola protests, then quits the scene. Such intrusion of personal boundaries is commonly met with defensive gestures, postural shifts, even attempts to move away.106 Aversion of the eyes is among the psychological techniques for establishing distance,107 especially during intimate conversation. In most cultures staring is taboo.108 Courtesy, as traditionally instructed at the courts, monasteries, and schools, assumed a certain alliance of inner virtue and outer gesture.109 Courtesy was believed ordained by God as a perfection. There was a coherent pattern in which even small mannerly acts were meaningful, as informed by the divine courtesy that desired to assist and please people. It was not mere nicety. By the concept of just measure God's vengeance on the erectors of the tower of Babel could be termed "courtesy."110

So it is that Loyola's rebuke is not discourteous. Beyond social con-

vention, monastic rule expressly forbade staring at others.111 The Rule of St. Benedict stated the final twelfth step of humility as the monk's exterior manifestation of interior virtue. "Whether he sits, walks, or stands, his head must be bowed and his eyes cast down."112 The Constitutiones of the Society of Jesus also regulate comportment. "All should take special care to guard with great diligence the gates of their senses (especially the eyes, ears, and tongue) from all disorder, to preserve themselves in peace and true humility of their souls . . . the modesty of their countenance, the maturity of their walk, and all their movements, without giving any sign of impatience or pride."113 During the Exercitia spiritualia the penitent is to observe restraint of the eyes, even to experience the sensory deprivation of light by closing the doors and shutters of his room.114

Unrestraint of the eyes, or curiosity, was in classical and Christian cultures pejorative. Curiosity was the appetite to know what was beyond the essential and it could penetrate into forbidden areas. It was not only vain and illicit but even sacrilegious. Curiosity, which dallied with the occult, the heretical, and the speculative, opposed the knowledge of faith as ordained to the proper human end of salvation.115 Plutarch specified curiosity as the desire to know the evil in another.116 The physical advances of Gonalves da Cmara move beyond his legitimate sphere of knowledge; he is curious about Loyola's vainglory. Bernard of Clairvaux chastised such vain curiosity as a frivolous consolation.117 Gonalves da Cmara errs by choosing a superficial goodliterally, facial appearance.

Curiosity is allied with vainglory. As Michel de Montaigne would explain, "Glory and Curiosity are the two scourges of our soul. The one prompts us to stick our noses everywhere, the other undoes us by leaving nothing unresolved or undecided."118 Both are social sins and both are ocular in origin: curiosity as the inordinate desire to peer into others; vainglory as the inordinate desire to be observed by others. The consolation Loyola would offer requires a penetration beyond corporeal appearances to spiritual realities. Gonalves da Cmara's curiosity involves him in disobedience to the rule of the Society. His sin repeats Adam's primal sin of appetite for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He portrays himself as fallen man. By this employment of the topic of modesty he confesses his unworthiness to be the recipient of Loyola's recital. He is a sinner who forgets a rule of the Society while striving to memorize the face of its founder.

Loyola's concern for manners reflects the social regrouping from the decline of the nobility of feudal knights to the transition to courtly ar-

istocracy. Yet for the Society of Jesus the medieval rule about comportment of the eyes is anachronistic to its active apostolate, with its need to know the social conventions and to behave with the civility characteristic of renaissance culture. With the increase of sensibility, emotional restraint began to replace moral simplicity, as revealed in an altered tone about manners. Observation from experience replaced the impersonality of tradition. This observation of self and others was reflected in a more deliberate molding of character and a more emphatic demand for civility. As the code of behavior became stricter, the imperative not to offend became more subtle and more coercive. The problem of social behavior was so important in renaissance culture that even celebrated persons like Erasmus were concerned with it. It was his treatise De civilitate morum puerilium that marked the transition from medieval courtesy to modern civility as a symptom and composition of social processes.119 Of enormous circulation in texts, translations, imitations, adaptations, and sequels, it was unexcelled in force, clarity, and personality. As the most esteemed schoolbook in the sixteenth century, from it generations of children in the intermediate grades learned to read and write Latin, for it was used not only to teach mores and manners but also grammar and style. Dedicated to the eleven-year-old son of a prince who did not attend school but was instructed by a tutor, it was likely the manual that would soon be used by Gonalves da Cmara to tutor young Sebastian, king of Portugal, in letters and manners.120

Its premise was that, while decorum was the crudest part of philosophy, in the current climate of opinion it was very conducive to securing good will and to commending intellectual gifts. In the conviction that a well-ordered mind was most strongly displayed in the face, Erasmus began with the deportment of the eyes. "The eyes should be calm, respectful, and steady; not grim, which is a mark of truculence; not shameless, the hallmark of insolence; nor darting and rolling, a feature of insanity; nor furtive, like those of suspects and plotters of treachery; nor gaping like those of idiots; nor should the eyes and eyelids be constantly blinking, a mark of the fickle; nor gaping as in astonishmenta characteristic observed in Socrates; nor too narrowed, a sign of bad temper; nor bold and inquisitive, which indicates impertinence; but such as reflects a mind composed, respectful, and friendly." He repeated the adage "The seat of the soul is in the eyes." Well-composed ocular gesture, even to the comportment of eyebrows, rendered what was naturally decorous even more attractive.

This new civility contradicted the monastic aversion of the eyes. "The

eyes should be directed at the person to whom you are speaking, but should be calm and frank, with no trace of boldness or insolence. Looking down at the ground as the catoblepas does gives the impression of a bad conscience. Looking sideways at someone gives the impression of being an embezzler. Turning the face this way and that is a sign of inconstancy."121 A catoblepas , meaning "down-looking," was a gnu, known from ancient natural history for its grim expression and narrow, bloodshot eyes.122 Leonardo da Vinci recorded in his notebooks that a catoblepas was a small, sluggish animal, its head so large that it carried it with difficulty, so that it always drooped toward the ground. This was a blessing, he decided, because anyone on whom it fixed its eyes died immediately.123 That observer of customs Erasmus provided the probable rationale for Loyola's retention of the monastic custody of the eyes. "Old pictures tell us that is was once a mark of singular modesty to observe with eyes half-closed, just as among certain Spaniards to avoid looking at people is taken as a sign of politeness and friendship."124 Loyola reverts to a native Spanish habit.

Gonalves da Cmara is reduced to the status of an auditor. He is forbidden by the Jesuit rule, and reprimanded by Loyola on this very point, to observe his face closely. For the interpretation of oral delivery the observation of the speaker, especially his facial expressions, but also the comportment of hand and arm, foot and leg, was essential. As Quintilian epitomized, "The temper of the mind can be inferred from the glance and gait."125 Although Gonalves da Cmara praises Loyola's delivery for its clarity, he remains deprived of the primary sensory aid for its comprehensionsight.

What he does not lose vision of is Loyola's focus on vainglory, a moral in a milieu that is literally fascinating.

Continues...

Excerpted from Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self by Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle Copyright 1997 by Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520209370
• ISBN 13: 9780520209374
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 292