Annotations
20 notes
Instructions to the person giving the Exercises, before anything begins.
Volume Five of Five
The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius
Not a book to be read but a method to be given. Ignatius wrote it as a manual for the person directing a retreat, which is why reading it straight through feels like reading someone else’s instructions.
Saint Ignatius of Loyola, 1491–1556 · translated by Father Elder Mullan, S.J. · Translated from the autograph, 1914
110Chapters
27,300Words by the author
154Explanatory panels
254Typeset pages
Choose this volume when you want a structured method rather than a book to read through — examens, meditations, and rules for discernment you can consult.
What it asks of you: Accepting that it was written for a director, not a reader. · Difficulty: Not hard to read; hard to use alone
Where readers get stuck
The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, and what it asks of you
The text presupposes a director on one side and a retreatant on the other, and says almost nothing to a reader who is neither. Its structure is also the most intricate of the five: annotations, weeks, additions, notes, and five separate sets of rules.
What this edition adds
- ▪The design made visible: what belongs to the director, what to the person making the Exercises, and what a reader outside a retreat can profitably do.
- ▪The rules for the discernment of spirits laid out so they can be consulted, with consolation and desolation defined in Ignatius’ own sense.
- ▪The four weeks charted, with the meditations, contemplations and examens in their order.
- ▪A clear statement, wherever a practice calls for it, that some of this asks for preparation and guidance, and that the edition is not a substitute for a director.
The shape of the work
Four weeks, methods and rules · 110 sections
First Week
15 sections
Principle and Foundation, the examens, the five exercises, and the additions.
Second to Fourth Weeks
30 sections
The Kingdom, the Two Standards, the Election, the Passion, the Resurrection, the Contemplation to Gain Love.
Methods and Rules
45 sections
Three methods of prayer, the mysteries of the life of Christ, and five sets of rules.
The whole work, with a guide at your side
All 110 chapters, unabridged, in 254 typeset pages. Read it straight through or study it a chapter at a time.
Volume Five of Five
The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius
Saint Ignatius of Loyola · Four weeks, methods and rules · 110 sections
$27USD
One payment. Yours to keep.
- The complete work in the Father Elder Mullan, S.J. translation — all 110 chapters, nothing abridged, nothing rewritten.
- 154 explanatory panels, placed only where the text is genuinely difficult. Whole chapters go by without one.
- Opening apparatus: a note on the edition, a guide to reading it, an introduction to the author and the work, and a map of the argument.
- Summaries and study questions at the close of every part, each question pointing back to a named chapter.
- A glossary defining terms in the sense the author gives them, not the dictionary’s.
- A thematic index whose every reference was opened and checked before it was printed.
- 254 typeset pages at 170 × 240 mm, with clickable contents and internal links.
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The historical translation is in the public domain. What you are paying for is the edition built around it: the explanations, the apparatus and the typesetting.
Reading more than one? The complete collection of five volumes is $97 — a saving of $38.