The Ignatian Interlude

Abstract Eliot and Ignatius? Most students of Eliot would be at a loss to describe any familiar relationship. Though Eliot found his way to Ignatius through John Donne, there is no mention of Ignatius in Eliot’s prose before he wrote his Clark Lectures on metaphysical poetry in 1925-26. He knew from Isaak Walton’s Life that Donne was brought up an English Catholic under Jesuit influence (two uncles were eminent Jesuits)) and that his mother was a recusant until her death. “I had my first breeding and conversation,” wrote Donne, “with men of a suppressed and affiicted religion, accustomed to the despite of death and hungry of an imagined martyrdom.” Though Eliot began studying Donne in 1906, and writing on him in 1917, he seems not to have explored Donne’s Jesuit background or picked up a copy of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises (1548) until he began preparing his Clark Lectures. Eliot knew, of course, that after Donne passed from the Roman to the Anglican church, he attacked the Jesuits generally in PseudoMartyr (16ro) and satirized Ignatius particularly in Ignatius His Conclave (16rr). In his lectures Eliot was himself a severe critic of Ignatius and the Spiritual Exercises, but when a Jesuit in the audience reproved him for his incautious remarks, Eliot was embarrassed into a serious study of the Exercises. It was one of the most unsettling checkings in his intellectual life: over the next seven years he would work through a cycle of visions and revisions of Ignatius as a mystic, and he would become absorbed in working out the effect of Ignatius’s method on seventeenthcentury mysticism, particularly on Donne.