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IGNATIAN DISCERNMENT, SOCIAL WISDOM & THE COMMON GOOD

Philip Sheldrake

“Finding God in Unsettled Times”London Centre of Spirituality, 11 May 2013

Today I want to talk about Ignatian discernment as a form of practical,

social wisdom which I believe offers us something radical and vital as we

seek God in unsettled times. Ignatius himself slowly learned this approach

to decision-making and choice through his profound struggles – with the

changing world around him, with the Church and above all with himself.

I’m going to begin with a vivid but shocking story from Ignatius’ so-

called autobiography. After his conversion experience while recovering

from serious wounds at the battle of Pamplona, Ignatius decided to visit

the shrine of Our Lady at Montserrat. On the way he met a Moor, meaning

a Spanish Arab Muslim from Andalucía. They got into a religious

argument about Our Lady but eventually the Moor rode off. Ignatius was

furious and instinctively felt he should defend Our Lady’s honour by

chasing after and killing the Muslim who was heading for a nearby town.

But he had some doubts so he let his mule decide the direction to take

when they came to a fork in the road. This led either into the town or

away from it. If the mule went into the town he’d seek out and kill the

Moor. But the mule didn’t, so Ignatius accepted that it wasn’t God’s will.

Ignatius includes this tale to contrast his early unreflective naïve passions

with his later growth in the wisdom of discernment. I mention it also

because, first, attending to our human narratives is so central to Ignatian

wisdom and, second, because Ignatius’ instinctive dislike for someone of

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another faith and race – the stranger in our midst – sadly has so many

contemporary parallels.

Today we continue to live in a world divided by racism, by suspicion

of other faiths, particularly Islam, by terrible social and economic

inequalities with a range of violent conflicts around the world, a fear of

terrorism, a major global financial crisis, and a serious loss of confidence

in the institutional Church provoked, in part, by abuse scandals and how

they have been mishandled. There are no simple answers but, for those

of us motivated by faith and a commitment to the spiritual journey, the

Ignatian tradition of discernment has powerful things to say.

To begin, there are two aspects to discernment. First, Ignatius’

Rules are more than just a way of interpreting inner “spiritual”

experiences. They also concern finding God in the midst of ambiguous

everyday realities and making daily life itself a spiritual practice. The

great theme at the end of the Exercises, “finding God in all things”,

involves discerning that God communicates and acts in all aspects of our

world.1 Second, the longer Christian tradition of discernment that lies

behind Ignatius embraces a collective understanding of human life and is

relevant to society as much as to individuals.

Origins

The English word “discernment” means “to distinguish between things”.

In Christian tradition this implies the wisdom to recognise the difference

1 The references to the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola throughout this talk follow the standard paragraph numbers used in all modern editions. These will be shortened to Exx followed by a paragraph number or numbers. Thus, the Rules for Discernment appear at Exx 313-336.

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between desires and courses of action that are positively life-directing and

others that are potentially destructive and out of harmony with our

relationship with God and with our true self. “Discernment of spirits” in

Ignatian spirituality is meant to offer a spiritual and ethical framework for

the whole of our lives and how they are oriented, whereby we instinctively

recognise our deepest truth and respond to God’s communication in daily

existence. As a form of practical wisdom, discernment invites us to a

critical reflection on our experience – critical because all experience is

fundamentally ambiguous. Faced with choices, whether obviously moral

or not, we are subjected to contradictory influences from inside and

outside ourselves. Some of these move us towards what is spiritually

authentic or morally constructive (what Ignatius Loyola calls consolation),

others to what is spiritually inauthentic or morally flawed (what he calls

desolation).

The English word “discernment” also derives from the Greek

diakrisis and the Latin discretio which have roots in ancient philosophy, in

the scriptures and in Christian tradition. I want to begin briefly with a little

Greek philosophy because the wisdom underpinning Ignatian discernment

goes back via Cicero’s discretio to Aristotle’s ethics, specifically his third

kind of knowledge which he calls phronesis or “practical wisdom”. I should

add that we know very little about Ignatius’ specific sources for his

teaching on discernment. However, I think we can be sure that, apart from

his own experience, he had learned something about the longer tradition

while studying theology in Paris. In any case, by looking at Aristotle, we

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may deepen our understanding of important aspects of the Christian

tradition of discernment.

Aristotle’s ethics have had a massive impact over the centuries on

our Western culture and on Christianity. For example, his “practical

wisdom” is the origin of one of the seven “cardinal virtues” of the Catholic

catechism – prudence. “Prudence” relates to decision-making and action –

how to read our situations accurately and then act shrewdly. In Aristotle’s

thought there are three kinds of knowledge: theoretical (epistome), the

application of theory (techne), and then practical wisdom or prudent

judgment. For Aristotle, practical wisdom or prudent judgement is not

abstract but comes from our intuition, imagination, emotional

engagement and above all our desire. Now desire is a big word in

Ignatian spirituality so we’ll come back to this. Interestingly, Aristotle

thought that practical wisdom applied particularly to our social lives – our

life in society - and to promoting the “common good. This kind of wisdom

actually grows in and through our involvement in everyday events.

Broadly speaking this idea of the “common good”, which plays a major

role in Catholic and Anglican social teaching, is that the true good of each

of us is ultimately dependent on the good of everyone.

The key text is the Nicomachaean Ethics. When Aristotle talks about

ethics – and Ignatian discernment is also broadly ethical – it is not simply

a question of identifying good and bad actions. Aristotle is clear that we

humans of our nature need relationships with others. What is distinctive

about being human is that our true fulfilment places demands upon us

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that do not necessarily equate with purely individual freedom. Two books

of the Ethics (IX: 8 & 9) discuss human relationships. Here, Aristotle

contrasts mere self-seeking with authentic self-love which is related to the

quest for real friendship and for true society. A deeply fulfilled life is not

merely pleasurable but is also “noble” because it involves a degree of

self-giving to other people.2

Practical wisdom also relates to a broadly-based sense of how to live

a fulfilled life. What is crucial is that neither Aristotle’s practical wisdom

nor Ignatian discernment are a matter of slavishly applying rules or

merely of acquiring certain skills. They both refer to the development of

underlying character or habits.3 A virtuous life involves choices made for

clear reasons and aligned with our sense of identity and ultimate purpose.

Ignatian discernment also demands that we reflect about our identity and

purpose. 4 Aristotle’s practical wisdom and Ignatian discernment both

involve our emotions as much as our reason. A balanced emotional

sensitivity is an important part of what goes to make up good decision-

making. Thus Ignatius teaches us to attend to our desires as the basis for

discernment. For Ignatius, “consolation” involves what he calls “the good

spirit” guiding us via life-enhancing desires rather than superficial

“urges”. Equally, Aristotle’s “practical wisdom” is related to the

achievement of what he calls eudaimonia. This can be translated literally

2 Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, See Gerard J. Hughes, Aristotle on Ethics, London/New York: Routledge, 2001, p 179.3 For a detailed analysis of Aristotle’s understanding of phronesis, see Hughes, Chapter 5 “Practical Wisdom”.4 This connection had been noted by Cardinal John Henry Newman in his theological reflections on knowledge, especially in the Grammar of Assent. See Mark A. McIntosh, Discernment and Truth: The Spirituality and Theology of Knowledge, New York: Crossroad, 2004, Chapter 7, also pp 7 & 16.

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as “happiness” or “fulfilment”. However, like Ignatius’ “consolation”,

Aristotle’s “happiness” is not the same as mere enjoyment or simply

feeling good. Rather, true happiness is a way of thoughtfully living out a

virtuous life within society.

According to Aristotle virtues are character habits that make us

react consistently to situations with appropriate feeling-responses. But

“feelings” here are not raw emotion or mere instinct but may be subject

to rational guidance and involve some kind of belief. This is very different

from instinct. As I’ve said, among Aristotle’s list of feelings is desire. We

can learn to shape our desire. Aristotle specifically writes of cultivating

“moderation” – keeping our desires in balance because, like all feelings,

they can get out of order. This is the origin of another of the Christian

cardinal virtues, “temperance” – that is, to behave in a balanced way.

So, how is desire shaped? Aristotle suggests that, apart from a good

childhood upbringing and moral education, we can train our emotional

responses by undertaking appropriate actions even when at first we don’t

feel like it. This closely resembles Ignatius’ teaching in the Exercises of

agere contra – that is, literally “going against” those instincts that are self-

serving rather than directed towards the good of others. These instincts

are what Ignatius calls “disordered attachments” and they indicate a lack

of spiritual freedom. In the First Week Rules for Discernment, Rule 6,

paragraph 319, “Although in desolation we must make no changes in our

former decisions, it is however very helpful to make an intense effort to

change oneself in a sense opposed to this desolation, e.g. by more

insistence on prayer and meditation….”

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The notion of “going against” our instincts also appears at the

beginning of the Second Week in the key contemplation called The Call of

the King, Part II, The Call of Christ (Exx 97). The response to Christ’s call

demands that Christian disciples go "against their sensuality and their

carnal and worldly love”. By “sensuality” and “carnal” Ignatius doesn’t

mean sexuality! What he’s getting at is an obsession with material

satisfaction, human status or power. However, it’s clear that for Ignatius

“going against” isn’t simply a question of will-power. For Ignatius we also

need “the grace”, that is the power of God. So, in the later contemplation

on the Three Kinds of Persons (in the note in paragraph 157), when we

feel attachments to riches and are not indifferent or free we should pray

that we be chosen by God for actual poverty – that is, to be put in

concrete situations that go against our instincts. As Aristotle puts it (II, 1,

1103b 21-25), “In a word, habits are born of similar activities so we have

to engage in behaviour of the relevant kinds, since the habits formed will

follow upon the various ways we behave”.

Discernment in Christian Tradition

I now want to turn briefly to some scriptural and other Christian sources

for Ignatian discernment. The Hebrew Scriptures implicitly speak of

discernment in Moses’ exhortation to the people of Israel “to choose life”

(Deut 13, 15-20). “Wisdom” (see Wis 8, 9 or Proverbs 6, 7) is described in

terms of a power that makes it possible for humans to order their lives in

accordance with God’s desire. The New Testament shows an early

Christian community preoccupied with the need to test out the influences

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that affected it. For St Paul, discernment is a gift of the Spirit (1

Corinthians 12, 10) and, like al, genuine spiritual gifts, should be tested in

terms of whether it builds up unity and a desire for the common good in

the Christian community (1 Corinthians 12, 7 & 12f). St Paul’s letters

suggest ways of telling the difference between “the works of the flesh”

(worldly concerns) and the works of the Spirit of God (Gal 5, 16-26; 1 Cor

3, 3). The First Letter of John is often quoted in works on discernment –

“test the spirits to see if they are of God” (1 Jn 4, 1).

From the fourth century CE onward discernment became a key

value in early monastic spirituality. How are we to lead the ascetic life?

Echoing Aristotle, the important value is “balance” for which discernment

is the guiding principle. As St Antony the Great is said to have asserted

about some early monks, “Some have afflicted their bodies with great

asceticism, but they lack discernment, and so they are far from God”.

Why? Because the value of balance is closely linked to the need to

cultivate humility – that is, to be freed from a preoccupation with spiritual

success. Importantly, among the signs of true discernment in monastic

spirituality are the social virtues of compassion, charity and attentiveness

to other people.

An early Western monastic writer John Cassian (late 4th & early 5th

centuries) in his famous spiritual Conferences draws on first-hand

experience of desert monasticism and knowledge of Greek philosophy.

Cassian’s approach to discernment again preaches moderation or balance

as the virtue that measures everything else and avoids the excesses of

other deceptively spiritual values. John Cassian also offers an explicit

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portrayal of the social character of discernment. As he puts it, it means

behaving “with discretion”. That is, we are to act in ways that avoid

causing offence to other people and we should decide responsibly as a

social action. In Cassian there is a fundamental contrast between those

people who pursue an individualistic understanding of prayer and the

spiritual life and those who listen to the advice of others and always

behave with a thought for the wider good. In Cassian, discernment is

related both to drawing upon the wisdom of the community and to

cultivating wisdom for the benefit of the community.5

In later reflections on the life of virtue, for example in the Rule of St

Benedict, in mystical writers like St Bernard of Clairvaux, or in a great

theologian like St Thomas Aquinas, teaching on discernment (based partly

on Aristotle) is again connected to the virtue of “practical prudence”.

Discernment regulates all other virtues. Also, the ability to distinguish

good and bad influences is directed both at deepening our love of God

and at reinforcing our commitment to the common good.

Ignatian Discernment

Basically, Ignatian spirituality pulls together the various elements of this

discernment tradition. At the beginning of the Exercises, in the Principle

and Foundation (Exx 23), the basis of discernment is freedom from what

Ignatius calls “disordered attachments” so that we are able to judge and

to choose in the light of our true purpose. The core principle is what has

become known in Latin as tantum quantum, literally “in a much as”.

5 See Colm Luidheid, ed., John Cassian: Conferences, New York: Paulist Press, 1985.

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Material things are to be used only “in as much as” they enable us to

“pursue the end for which we are created”. In other words, you take only

what you need. The less is more effective than the more. At the heart of

this spiritual vision is the virtue of balance or proportionality which runs

counter to the excesses of market capitalism or the culture of choice for

its own sake. Ignatius understood well that the purpose of life is to shape

our characters so that we are able to live productively and in peace with

ourselves and others. For this to be the case, everyone is called to make

difficult decisions and choices on a daily basis. These will concern the

things we use, the people we associate with, the values we embrace, the

projects we take on, and the attitudes which direct our thinking, judging

and decisions.

Within the dynamic of the Exercises the gift of discernment

becomes the means by which we come to know ourselves truly and to

recognise the movement of God’s Spirit in our lives. For example in the

daily Examen (Exx 43-44), or prayer of attentive reflection on God’s

communication within everyday events, discernment is the guiding light.

At the very end of the Exercises, in the “Contemplation to Attain Love”,

the desired climax of the process is the gift to choose consistently with

God by dwelling “in Christ”.

In Ignatius, discernment works in a kind of narrative sequence. First,

we reflect on our life story then our contemplative cultivation of spiritual

insight leads to, second, the skill to distinguish between good and bad

influences resulting in, third, our ability to maintain a balanced life. Thus,

discernment comes from a contemplative attentiveness to God that

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gradually reinforces our deepened awareness. For that reason,

discernment and contemplative prayer go hand in hand. The ability to

judge and choose wisely is practised through contemplation of Jesus’ life

in the gospels and through the daily practice of spiritual attentiveness,

known as the Examen. The method of scriptural meditation or

contemplation described in the Exercises is a spiritual discipline through

which we become increasingly open to God’s presence and through this

have our powers of judgement and decision-making refined.

Desire, Discernment and Choice

Now I’ll return to “desire”. Ignatius recognised that desire is what drives

all our spiritualities. However, as in Aristotle, the question is how we focus

our desire. Ignatius’ teaching on discernment emphasises the need for

“detachment” from our dependence on material things in favour of what

he calls “the more” or “the always greater” which is ultimately God.

“Detachment” may sound austere and moralistic but it actually means

achieving a healthy inner spiritual freedom. This can’t be artificially

constructed. It is God’s gift.

For each of us, certain desires have the potential to shape our most

serious choices and therefore to give direction to our lives. These are what

Ignatius calls “great desires”. Discernment enables us to become aware of

the full range of the desires we experience. From this starting point we

are slowly led to understand how our desires vary in quality.

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As already noted, a key to Ignatius’ teaching is his understanding of

the two basic kinds of motivation that he calls consolation and desolation

(Exx 313-336). For Ignatius, it is much less helpful to search for the origins

of our desires than to focus on the direction in which they are leading us.

Certain desires, if we follow them through, tend towards spiritual

fragmentation (desolation). Other desires point towards harmony and

spiritual centredness (consolation). What is sometimes confusing is that

the less healthy desires are more immediately attractive because they

make us feel good.

Thus, according to Ignatius, the basic characteristics of consolation

are an increase of love for God as well as a deepening of human love, an

increase of hope and faith, an interior joy, an attraction towards the

spiritual, a deep tranquility and peace. However, it is vitally important to

remember that consolation, “interior joy” or “deep peace” are not

necessarily immediately pleasurable. They may initially be deeply

challenging.

Equally, desolation is not always obviously unpleasant but may feel

quite attractive at first. So, Ignatius suggests that for those who have

made progress in their spiritual journey, “it is characteristic of the bad

angel [or spirit] to assume the form of an angel of light….he proposes

good and holy thoughts well adapted to such a just soul, and then little by

little succeeds in getting what he wants, drawing the soul into his hidden

snares and his perverted purposes” (Exx 332). This is “temptation under

the guise of good”. The point is that such experiences or influences, on

deeper reflection, ultimately reveal themselves as destructive.

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Throughout the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius returns again and again

to the subject of desire, which is always directed towards a healthier way

of living and choosing. For Ignatius, the spiritual journey is basically away

from fragmentation towards harmony, away from being imprisoned by

“inordinate attachments” towards spiritual freedom, and away from the

surface of life to the centre of our true selves and of life’s deeper

meaning. Again, in Ignatius’ terms, the whole point of our “spiritual

activities” is to be gradually rid of what he calls “disordered affections”

(Exx 1).

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Individual or Social?

Unfortunately, Ignatian “discernment of spirits” is frequently understood

purely in terms of individual interiority but this misses the point. The great

Ignatian scholar Hugo Rahner is clear that Ignatian discernment involves

our growing ability through scriptural prayer to respond to the whole of

life with the mind and heart of Christ.6 What does this imply? In 1

Corinthians, St Paul makes it clear that having the mind of Christ - and

living in “the Body of Christ” - involves a commitment to mutual up-

building beyond our instincts for personal satisfaction. This teaching

doesn’t simply apply to the Christian community because it exists to

promote a vision of renewed humanity. So, a sharp question for any

Christian is: does our life-practice break down divisions between people

6 Hugo Rahner, Ignatius the Theologian, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990, pp 146 & 154.

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that tend to encourage envy, hatred, fear, competitiveness, oppression or

rejection? If we take St Paul seriously, this is a major factor in

distinguishing between what Ignatius calls “the good spirit” and “the bad

spirit”. 7

Interestingly, Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, which

helped shape Catholic social teaching and which appeared at a time of

acute economic and political turmoil, explicitly highlights the Ignatian

Exercises as “a most precious means of personal and social reform” and

as a tool for the renewal of society. Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuit Superior

General 1965-1983, explicitly linked Ignatian spirituality to the promotion

of social justice. This emerged particularly in Decree 4 of the XXXII

General Congregation of the Society in 1975, “Our Mission Today: The

Service of Faith & The Promotion of Justice”. Perhaps not surprisingly

more and more Jesuits, as well as people associated with the Ignatian

spiritual tradition, began to work with the poor and to contribute

substantially to a spirituality of social justice notably in the writings of

Jesuit theologians of Central and Latin America, Juan Luis Segundo, Jon

Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría (one of the Jesuits martyred in El Salvador in

1989).

Ignatius’ teaching on discernment is radically self-forgetting. True

spiritual wisdom, as well as the ability to choose well, is embodied in

service of our neighbour – who may, as in the Good Samaritan parable (Lk

10: 29-37), be the despised outsider. To put it another way, the kind of

practical wisdom implied by Ignatian discernment promotes a relational

7 For insightful comments on these points see McIntosh, pp 116-117.

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approach to life as we are drawn more deeply into the inner life of God-as-

Trinity. The Contemplation on the Incarnation at the beginning of the

Second Week of the Exercises invites us to contemplate the Trinity as the

starting point for seeing and understanding human life and “the world”

through God’s compassionate eyes.

Two other key meditations of the “Second Week” have powerful

social implications. For example, the issue of discernment presented in

the Two Standards meditation (Exx 136-48) is not to choose between what

is obviously good and what is obviously evil but between what initially

seems to be good in the abstract and what is really good in the concrete

circumstances of life. In this meditation, Ignatius uses the imagery of two

contrasting cities, Jerusalem and Babylon, and a narrative of forms of

leadership – that of Christ and that of Lucifer as they invite humanity to

follow their divergent ways. Through this imagery, Ignatius poses two very

different ways of working for the Kingdom of God – the way of power or

the way of love. Christians face a temptation to use seemingly good

things such as wealth and power to follow Jesus and to serve others but

the ultimate word spoken by Jesus is that of vulnerable risky service

rendered only out of love. Those who wish to follow Jesus must choose the

way of love and “humility” that risks suffering and the cross.

Another meditation, on Three Ways of Being Humble (Exx 165-68),

is part of the preparation for what Ignatius calls “an election” – that is,

choosing a way of life that is single-heartedly concerned with what he

calls “the purpose for which I am created” (that is, who I truly am) and

with “desiring to serve God” (that is, my sense of ultimate purpose). In

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modern understanding, “being humble” isn’t always positive because it

implies either something false or self-demeaning. However, for Ignatius

“humility” is the opposite of the prevailing sin of his own aristocratic class,

hidalguía, “pride” in being “the son of a somebody” – having an inherited

social status and dismissing as insignificant other people who do not share

this status. In the end, humility is to take on the mind and heart of Jesus

Christ. Interestingly, Ignatius describes the third way of being humble as

“the most perfect”. This moves beyond duty. Here, our desire is simply to

imitate Jesus Christ who came to serve others rather than to be served.

Discernment and the Common Good

As we’ve seen, the foundations of Christian discernment in Aristotle’s

“practical wisdom” are essentially social. That’s to say that it’s bound up

with a quest for what is called “the common good” which plays such an

important part in Catholic social teaching. In passing, last year I co-

chaired an ecumenical and interfaith meeting at St Paul’s Cathedral here

in London, called in the aftermath of the serious riots of August 2011 in

three major cities. We were talking about Christian social teaching and

how churches and other faiths in economically deprived areas of England

could better contribute to promoting the common good “on the streets”.

But, as we talked, visible through the windows was the “Occupy London”

camp of protestors (mirroring “Occupy Wall Street”) set up outside the

cathedral after the police removed them from the financial district.

Needless to say this protest against the destructive social impact of

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unrestrained capitalism deeply challenged us as we discussed how to

discern the common good!

So what is the “common good” and how are we to discern the goals

that enable a truly “good life”? The key is that such a life is orientated

towards what is shared with others. In other words, what is truly good for

me is inseparable from what is good for you and what is good for both of

us is ultimately inseparable from what is good for all. This “common good”

isn’t just a pragmatic arrangement but expresses something essential to a

truly human life. Thus, as Aristotle puts it (Nicomachaean Ethics 1094b)

“the attainment of the good for one person alone is, to be sure, a source

of satisfaction; yet to secure it for a nation and for cities is nobler and

more divine”.

Aristotle’s phrase “more divine” is echoed strongly in Christian

writings. The great theologian St Thomas Aquinas (Summa Contra

Gentiles III, 17) writes that “the supreme good, namely God, is the

common good, since the good of all things depends on God”. For St

Thomas community is central to human flourishing. According to him, the

true purpose of human “politics” is therefore to promote goodness in

human affairs.8 St Thomas Aquinas like Aristotle saw cities as the image of

our social public existence. He noted that while we create cities for

pragmatic reasons such as commerce, they should survive for the sake of

“the good life” which embraces the virtues of courage, temperance,

8 Thomas Aquinas, Sententia Libri Politicorum. Opera Omnia, VIII, Paris, 1891, Prologue A 69-70.

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liberality, greatness of soul and companionable modesty. These can only

be learned by social interaction.9

Ignatius studied Aquinas in Paris where he may have picked up this

notion of “the common good”. In Ignatius’ later teaching this becomes

“the more universal good”. This phrase appears several times in the Jesuit

Constitutions (e.g. paras 618 & 623) and is the defining framework for

discernment about mission and ministry. His key question is “what will

serve the more universal good here?” I suggest that “the common good”

and Ignatius’ “more universal good” sharply challenge how we think about

contemporary society and, more specifically, about how to discern what is

needed to make “the good life” available to as many people as possible in

the radically diverse, unequal and challenging contexts of our

contemporary world.

The Common Good, the City & Making the Good Society

There is a famous dictum about Ignatius’ spiritual vision. In English it runs:

“St Bernard loved the valleys, St Benedict the hills, St Francis the towns

and St Ignatius the great cities”. So, following Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas

and Ignatius, I’m going to take the notion of “the city” as a kind of

paradigm of seeking the common good and making a good society in our

contemporary world.

The meaning and future of cities is one of the most critical spiritual

as well as economic and social issues of our age. In 1950 roughly 29% of

the world’s population lived in cities. By the 1990s this had passed 50%

9 Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, Chapter 2, in R. W. Dyson, ed., Aquinas: Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp 8-10.

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and is now predicted to reach more than 66% by 2025. We are also

dealing increasingly with mega-cities, many of them in the newly-

emerging economic giants of India, Brazil and China: Mumbai 18+ million,

Sao Paolo 17 million, Shanghai 14 + million. This mega-urbanisation often

simultaneously produces a growth of slums and shanty towns. Roughly 1

in 6 people in cities is currently a slum dweller and if the rate of increase

remains constant this will be 1 in 3 by 2050. In this context, we

desperately need to relate city-making to some vision of the human spirit

and to what is needed for the “good life” to flourish for the many rather

than for an elite few in upscale apartments or gated communities.

It is vital to construct some kind of compelling moral and spiritual

vision for cities – both as social communities and as built environments –

and to recover a sense that a city can be sacred to its inhabitants. A key

question is what are cities for? If cities are to have “meaning” rather than

simply be irreversible and often oppressive, there needs to be greater

reflection on how to unlock their civilizing possibilities. At best cities have

a unique capacity to focus a range of physical, intellectual and creative

energies precisely because they combine differences of age, ethnicity,

culture, gender and religion.

Indeed, the city is quintessentially the public arena. It has not been

regarded as a spiritual reality because “the spiritual” has become

associated less with “the street” and more with personal interiority, the

realm of family or faith community networks. As an environment of

strangers who are largely unacquainted with each other, the public arena

has often been interpreted by social commentators as fundamentally

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barren. Human encounters were presumed to be largely unreflective. For

this reason, as well as the increasing multi-cultural diversity of larger

cities, shared values and a genuinely common purpose were no longer

thought possible. This has begun to change. Some of our politicians, for

example, have been busy preaching the need to recreate “the Big

Society”, meaning a society of involved citizens, policy-makers are

rethinking what values make “the good neighbourhood” and other writers

are reflecting, sometimes from a religious viewpoint, on new

understandings of “the good city” – creative communities built upon

negotiation, collaboration and compromise as positive virtues.10

In this context, two Jesuit social thinkers strongly influenced by

Ignatian spirituality, the Frenchman Michel de Certeau and the American

ethicist David Hollenbach, offer interesting insights. The late Michel de

Certeau (1925-1986) was arguably one of the most creative

interdisciplinary thinkers of the late 20th century – historian of Christian

spirituality, mysticism and early Ignatian sources but also philosopher,

cultural theorist, student of psychoanalysis and social scientist.

Michel de Certeau wrote a volume called The Practice of Everyday

Life, co-authored a second and wrote other scattered reflections on cities.

In the Jesuit Constitutions the Jesuit way of life is characterized as “our

way of proceeding” (Part 1, Chapter 2, para 152) to be adapted to “times,

places and persons”. Throughout The Practice de Certeau uses this

Ignatian terminology in his “the procedures of everyday creativity”,

10 See Kathryn Tanner, ed., Spirit in the Cities: Searching for Soul in the Urban Landscape, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004; also Andrew Walker, ed., Spirituality in the City, London: SPCK, 2005 and Andrew Walker & Aaron Kennedy, eds., Discovering the Spirit in the City, London/New York: Continuum, 2010.

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“everyday procedures” or “ways of proceeding”. Equally, Ignatian fluidity

and adaptability is echoed in de Certeau’s preference for the everyday

tactics of ordinary people on the street as opposed to the totalitarian

strategies of the politically powerful which he critiqued. De Certeau’s

approach to everyday practices is value-laden. In describing everyday life,

its practices and “ways of proceeding”, he was not making a detached

social scientific observation. Rather he sought to inspire his readers “to

uncover for themselves, in their own situation, their own tactics (a

struggle for life), their own creations (an aesthetic) and their own

initiatives (an ethic)”.11

Michel de Certeau wrote that “daily life is scattered with marvels”

and his reading of “the everyday” has a transfigured, even mystical

quality. His main collaborator, Luce Giard, is quite clear that he was

predisposed to discern wonder in the everyday world by the Ignatian

Exercises. She even suggests that The Practice of Everyday Life discloses

daily life as mystical.12 Another Jesuit Philippe Lécrivan has recently

underlined that the foundations of de Certeau’s book lie in his

understanding of discernment in relationship to the Ignatian theme of

“finding God in all things”. The key to the latter is the “Contemplation to

Attain Love” at the end of the Exercises (Exx 230-237). The

“Contemplation” expresses our desire for an all-embracing realisation of,

11 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, volume 1, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p ix. 12 Luce Giard, “Introduction to Volume 1: History of a Research Project”, in Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard & Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, volume 2, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, pp xiii-xxxiii. See also Luce Giard “The Question of Believing”, in New Blackfriars 77/909, November 1996, Special Issue on Michel de Certeau, p 478.

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and response to, God present in all things as we move through the

everyday world.

Here [what I desire] will be to ask for interior knowledge of all the

great good I have received, in order that, stirred to profound

gratitude, I may become able to love and serve the Divine Majesty

in all things (no 233).

Philippe Lécrivan also notes that de Certeau had written back in

1966 a ground-breaking article on the “Contemplation to Attain Love”.13

There he described Ignatian discernment as a movement from prayerful

contemplation to a “spiritual reading” of the everyday world. This was the

source of what he called “a mysticism of practice”.14 Now de Certeau was

influenced by Maurice Giuliani, another French Jesuit, and one of the

creators of the modern approach to making the Exercises in daily life. One

of Giuliani’s striking themes was that true discernment takes place in and

through daily life and reveals our everyday life as potentially itself a

“spiritual exercise”.15

Alongside Michel de Certeau’s “transfigured” experience of

everyday life, David Hollenbach, the American Jesuit social ethicist, poses

some down-to-earth questions. The sheer size and radically plural nature

of today’s cities make a sense of “commonality” much more elusive than

before. So, is it even possible to recover a sense of “the common good”?

13 Philippe Lécrivan SJ, “Theologie et sciences de l’autre, la mystique ignatienne dans les ‘approaches’ de Michel de Certeau SJ”, 2010. See the link to this on the French Jesuit website, www.jesuites.com 14 Michel de Certeau, “L’universalisme ignatien, mystique et mission”, in Christus, vol 13, no 50, 1966, pp 173-83. 15 See an English translation, Maurice Giuliani, “The Ignatian ‘exercise’ in daily life”, in The Way Supplement 49, Spring 1984, The Spiritual Exercises in Daily Life, pp 88-94.

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Can people of different ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds identify

aspects of “the good life” that they agree are desirable? Some people

nowadays sense in references to the “common good” either attempts to

expand “the State” or a pressure to assimilate difference into the ethos of

dominant social groups. “Why can’t they be more like us?” Such people

suggest that passive tolerance of irreconcilable difference is the best we

should hope for.

However, there are key social thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic

who believe we can do better than this and are exploring the idea of

public virtues. For example the American urban philosopher Eduardo

Mendieta, who also studied theology, writes about society’s current need

to recover the value of “frugality” to counter consumerism and the

absolute priority of individual “choice”.16 And in the Demos book Civic

Spirit: The Big Idea for a New Political Era, the British writer Charles

Leadbeater argues for the importance of recovering the principle of

“mutuality”. This balances social diversity with the reconciliation of

competing claims. “Mutuality” demands “renunciation” - specifically of our

absolute claims to individual choice. Leadbeater recognizes that this is a

considerable challenge. “Persuading people to be self-denying is a

delicate and time-consuming process. It requires us to value restraint as

a virtue as much as choice - a counterintuitive view in consumer society.” 17

16 Eduardo Mendieta, “Invisible cities: A phenomenology of globalisation from below”, City 5/1, 2001, 1-25.17 Charles Leadbeater, Civic Spirit: The Big Idea for a New Political Era (London: Demos, 1997), Demos Arguments 14, p 30.

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The parallels with Ignatius’ comments about countering “disordered

attachments” and promoting the value of “the more universal good” are

striking. David Hollenbach also believes that we must go beyond passive

tolerance. He offers a challenging exposition of the continued importance,

in contexts of social, religious and ethnic diversity, of seeking “the

common good” or Ignatius’ “the more universal good”. This has to come

about not through top-down imposition but by negotiation. As Hollenbach

makes clear, negotiation is not a quick fix. However, what matters more

than the prospect of a successful result is the solidarity that we create by

our commitment to a process of conversation to make meaning, create

values and negotiate a common ethical and spiritual vocabulary. This

process may be never-ending.

This common pursuit of a shared vision of the good life can be called

intellectual solidarity……for it calls for serious thinking by citizens

about what their distinctive understandings of “the good” imply for

a society made up of people with many different traditions. It is a

form of solidarity, because it can only occur in an active dialogue of

mutual listening and speaking across the boundaries of religion and

culture. Indeed, dialogue that seeks to understand those with

different visions of the good life is already a form of solidarity even

when disagreement continues to exist.18

David Hollenbach’s concept of creating an atmosphere of profound

human solidarity by the on-going process of negotiation, based on mutual

18 David Hollenbach, The Common Good and Christian Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp 137-138.

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respect, listening and interchange, is a striking example of the potential

social and public application of Ignatian discernment. A concept of

communal discernment (as opposed to purely individual discernment) did

grew out of the collective decision-making of Ignatius and his first

companions as they decided on various aspects of Jesuit life. And of

course there is a remarkably similar tradition of collective decision-making

amongst Quakers. I think that we need to tap into this tradition of

communal discernment once again as it has rich potential in relation to

the creation of effective social communities in our contemporary world.

Not least it strongly counters the dominance in current political debates of

the “disordered attachments” of factionalism, self-interest, self-

righteousness, mutual ignorance and deep prejudice. Just before the

United States Presidential election in 2008, I was walking past Old South

Church in Boston and read on a poster a quote from the great Fr Hesburgh

of University of Notre Dame: “Voting is a civil sacrament”. What a

provocative phrase! The public realm is sacred and politics should be

thought of as a kind of spiritual practice. A rediscovery of the communal

aspects of Ignatian discernment could offer a spiritual, yet practical,

dimension to the quest for truly social values at a very difficult time as

well as underpin the search for global understanding in the face of mutual

hatred and violence.

Finding God in our unsettled times is not a simple matter of piously

papering over the cracks in the fabric of our lives or of our society.

“Finding God” is not a question of cultivating a spiritual peace that

enables us to bypass, rise above or make ourselves feel better about

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distress, uncertainty, upheaval and insecurity. Not at all. Truly “finding

God” is to discover that, first, God is irrevocably committed to our world

and to each of us, right in the midst of all that is difficult, messy and

painful.

In his poem “Redemption” the great seventeenth-century religious

poet George Herbert describes seeking God, “knowing his great birth”, in

“great resorts” – that is among the rich and powerful. However, he

eventually finds God among the “ragged noise and mirth/ Of thieves and

murderers”, that is, among the despised and the unworthy. God is not

self-protected - God is in the mess. “Finding God” is, second, also to

discover a power that God alone can give that enables us to survive and

to maintain our integrity in unsettled times. But, more than any of this,

“finding God in unsettled times” is also to discover that this God is

persistently challenging us to follow Jesus Christ in choosing a way of love

and service but also empowering us to become prophets of profound hope

and agents of radical change even in the most challenging circumstances.

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