A Young Noble and Courtier
Don Iñigo de Oñaz y Loyola was born in 1491 in the castle of Loyola, in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa. His father, Don Beltrán de Oñaz y Loyola, a member of the select nobility of Spain, had eight sons and five daughters. Iñigo was brought up for military service. He studied little and had no interest in religion; his reading was limited to the Amadis of Gaul and similar chivalric romances. At seven he was sent to Don Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar to be prepared for a soldier's career, and in his household he gained entry to the court. In his teens he fell in love with Germaine de Foix, the new queen of Ferdinand the Catholic, chose her as the "lady of his heart", wore her colors, and dreamed constantly of winning a lace handkerchief as a prize from his beloved queen in the tournaments. At the same time he did not give up the passing love affairs and night-time brawls that made up half of a soldier's life.
In the plain and honest account of his life that he dictated between 1553 and 1556, there is no attempt to hide these natural follies of youth.
The Wound at Pamplona
His carefree youth ended when he was sent to the front at Pamplona, the capital of Navarre. According to the source he stayed there four years, dreaming each night of victory and advancement and waking each morning to the same dull routine. Then came the chance to make his name. The French attacked Pamplona, and although Iñigo encouraged the defenders to hold out with his courage, the attackers captured the city's fortress. In the fighting a cannonball shattered his right leg (20 May 1521). The victors treated him kindly, set the bones and sent him in a litter to his ancestral castle. Because the bones had been badly set, they had to be broken and set again. The second operation turned out worse than the first, for a piece of bone protruded from the leg. A third operation lined up the bones of the leg straight, but the leg was now shorter, and weeks of enduring the stretching apparatus left him weak and emaciated without further improvement.
Conversion
During the wearisome months of recovery Iñigo wanted to read more tales of the thrilling adventures of brave knights and endangered princesses, but the castle library held only two books: a Life of Christ and a collection of saints' lives, both by Ludolph of Saxony. At first the soldier found them tiresome. Gradually the figures of Christ and Mary took shape in his mind and gained strength, and the legends of the saints became as stirring to him as the epics of courtly love and valor. Were Christ's soldiers any less brave and manly than the knights of Castile? Slowly it took hold of his mind that the noblest of all wars in history was the war of Christianity against Islam. He resolved to go to Jerusalem and free its holy places from the infidels' domination. One night he dreamed of Mary and her child, and from then on, as he later confessed to Father Gonçalves, he never again felt the pull of sexual desire. Iñigo rose from his bed, knelt, and swore to be a devoted soldier of Christ and Mary until his last breath.
Montserrat
He had read that the Holy Grail of Christ had once been hidden in an ancient castle at Montserrat, in the province of Barcelona. According to the best-known account, it was there that Amadis kept vigil before the image of Mary for a whole night to prepare for knighthood. As soon as Iñigo was able to travel, he mounted a mule and set out for that remote shrine. Until recently he had thought of himself as a soldier equipped and ready for physical combat. But the saints he had read about had neither weapons nor armor; they were adorned with the plainest robes and the firmest faith. After reaching Montserrat he cleansed his soul with three days of penitence and weeping, exchanged his fine clothes for rags and put on the rough robe of the pilgrims. He spent the whole night of 24 March alone in the chapel of the Benedictine monastery, standing or kneeling before the altar of the "Mother of God," and vowed to God to spend his entire life in chastity and poverty. The next day he took part in the Mass, gave his mule to the monks, and set off on his limping way toward Jerusalem.
Manresa
The nearest port was Barcelona. On the way he stopped beside a hut in the town of Manresa. An old woman showed him a cave as a temporary refuge. Iñigo made it his lodging for some days, and in his eagerness to outdo the saints in hardship and suffering of the body, he practiced exhausting austerities that nearly cost him his life. Deeply remorseful over the vain attention he had once paid to his appearance, he gave up keeping his hair clean, cut and combed, trimming his nails, washing, and bathing altogether. He lived on the little food he got by begging, never ate meat, sometimes fasted for several days in a row, and spent many hours in prayer. A devout woman who learned of his state, fearing these hardships would destroy him, took him into her house and nursed him back to health. Later, when he was moved to a cell in the Dominican monastery of Manresa, he resumed his harsh self-discipline.
The memory of his past sins troubled him deeply. He waged war on his body, which he held to be the instrument of those sins, and he afflicted it with firm resolve to drive out every temptation. At times the struggle seemed futile to him, and he fell into black despair. Then visions appeared to him and encouraged him with hope. Once, during the Eucharist, he was sure he saw Christ himself, living and present, in place of the consecrated bread; on another occasion Christ and his mother appeared before him; and once he saw the divine Trinity with his own eyes and grasped the mystery of three persons in one God not through words or reasoning but in a flash of revelation. Again, as he himself related, "on another occasion the Lord allowed me to understand the origin of creation." These visions calmed his inner conflicts and wiped away the stain of his youthful follies. He then eased his bodily austerities, hoping that by overcoming the body he could now purify and refine it without feeling pride.
Out of these experiences, which lasted about a year, Iñigo shaped his method of "Spiritual Exercises," by which a spiritless body could be placed under the command of a Christian will. He now thought himself fit to set out for Jerusalem.
Jerusalem and the Return
In February 1523 he sailed from Barcelona. During the journey he spent two weeks in Rome, and fled it before that city's irreligious spirit could shake his faith. On 14 July he left Venice for Jaffa. After many hardships, and with spiritual visions that encouraged him, he reached Palestine. But his stay in Jerusalem was painful. The Turks, who controlled the holy place, did not bar Christians from entering, but they did not allow anyone to preach Christianity. When Iñigo declared that in spite of those rules he wished to convert Muslims to the faith of Christ, the local head of the Franciscans, who was charged by the pope with keeping peace in that region, asked him to return to Europe as soon as possible. In March 1524 Iñigo set foot again on the soil of Barcelona.
Study and Suspicion
Perhaps he felt then that although he had mastered his body, he was still a captive of the grip of his imagination. So with firm resolve he set about training and ordering the powers of his mind. Although he was now thirty-three, he joined the schoolboys to learn Latin; but in people the urge to teach is generally stronger than the will to learn. Soon Ignatius of Loyola, as the learned came to call him, began preaching to a small group of devout women. This led admirers of those women to take him for an unworthy companion and give him a sound beating. He went to Alcalá (1526) and studied philosophy and theology. There too he busied himself guiding a small circle of women of modest means, among them several repentant former prostitutes, and tried hard to drive sinful inclinations from their bodies and souls by teaching his Spiritual Exercises. Instead, several of his followers suffered nervous attacks and fainting fits, and the Inquisition summoned him.
He spent two months in prison but at last convinced the inquisitors of his orthodoxy and was released; he was ordered, however, to stop teaching. Ignatius moved to Salamanca (1527) and went through the same stages again in turn: guiding others, summons to court, imprisonment, release and a ban on teaching. Now disillusioned with Spain, he turned toward Paris, once more traveling on foot in the pilgrim's robe, but this time driving before him a donkey heavy with books.
Student in Paris
In Paris he was admitted to a hospice and earned his daily bread and his school fees by begging in the streets. He enrolled at the Collège de Montaigu. With his pale, gaunt face, starved body, unkempt beard and ragged cloak he drew poisonous looks, yet he threw himself into his studies with such interest and diligence that some of the students came to respect him as a saint. Under his guidance they turned to spiritual exercises such as prayer, penitential austerities and deep inner contemplation.
In 1529 he moved to the Collège Sainte-Barbe, where he gathered followers again. Two of his roommates came to believe in his holiness, each by a different path.