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Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self

University of California Press

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...