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Life Arts    H4'ed 6/6/18

What Men Today Can Learn from St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Quest (REVIEW ESSAY)

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What Ong describes as the agonistic orientation toward life involves what the late Jungian theorist Robert L. Moore (1942-2016) of the Chicago Theological Seminary describes as the Warrior archetype in the human psyche. Moore describes Jesuit training as Warrior training. See Moore and Douglas Gillette's book The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (New York: Morrow, 1992).

According to Moore, all human beings have both a masculine Warrior archetype and a feminine Warrior archetype in their psyches. Consequently, both men and women need to work to access the optimal forms of the masculine Warrior/Knight archetype and the feminine Warrior/Knight archetype.

In addition, Moore claims that both men and women need to work to access the optimal forms of the masculine King archetype and the feminine Queen archetype and the masculine Magician/Shaman archetype and the feminine Magician/Shaman archetype and the masculine Lover archetype and the feminine Lover archetype in their psyches.

In the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, Christ the King represents the masculine King archetype, and the Blessed Virgin Mary represents the feminine Queen archetype.

Now, McGinn says, "We know enough about Inigo's [Ignatius'] family and early life (especially through the Acta) to tempt psychoanalytic study, such as that found in [the late American Jesuit psychiatrist] W. W. Meissner [1931-2010], Saint Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Meissner regards his [Freudian] psychoanalytic account of Ignatius' 'phallic narcissism' as 'reductive but not reductionistic' (p. xxvi), and he insists that his interpretation is only hypothetical" (page 101).

After Inigo (later known as Ignatius) was wounded in the battle at Pamplona in 1521, he was carried back to his Loyola family home, where he was cared for by his brother's wife. As Inigo recuperated under her care, he was being cared for by the woman who had previously been a mother-figure in his life -- from about the age of seven when his brother had married her. In Inigo's famous conversion experience, a work of art that she had received as a wedding gift from the real-life Queen of Spain played an important role in his conversion experience. The work of art was a representation of the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary -- an archetypal mother figure. Thus, between the real-life mother-figure who was taken care of the recuperating Inigo and the archetypal mother figure in the Annunciation, we can speculate that the Queen archetype in Inigo's psyche was involved in his famous conversion experience.

In effect, Ong writes about the Queen archetype in his article "The Lady and the Issue" in the journal The Month (London), volume 192 (December 1951): pages 358-370; reprinted in Ong's book In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1967, pages 188-202).

For all practical purposes, Inigo's real-life sister-in-law and the art work of the Blessed Virgin Mary evoked his Anima in his psyche (in Jungian terminology).

After Inigo had recuperated at his family home, he then set forth on his journey of spiritual quest. All of the male spiritual director that he consulted represented his way of activating the Old-Wise-Man archetype in his psyche.

In my estimate, Jung's most instructive remarks about the Old-Wise-Man archetype and the Anima archetype in the male psyche can be found in his 1,600-page commentary titled Nietzsche's Zarathustra : Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 by C. G. Jung, 2 vols., edited by James L. Jarrett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988; for specific page references, see the index entries for Anima and for Old Wise Man).

More generally, I have set forth Jung's thought to the best of my ability in my online essay "Understanding Jung's Thought" that is available at the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy:

http://hdl.handle.net/11299/187433

So, what exactly can men today learn from the spiritual quest of the mystic St. Ignatius Loyola? In Jungian terminology, men can learn that the spiritual quest involves activating, on the on hand, the Anima archetype in the male psyche and, on the other hand, the Old-Wise-Man archetype in the male psyche.

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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