Ignatius of Loyola on Original sin & the human will
Nature wounded but not destroyed; grace perfects it
Likewise, we ought not to speak so much with insistence on grace that the poison of discarding liberty be engendered.
THE POSITION
The First Week has the retreatant consider Adam and Eve, who lived "without the original justice which they had lost", and "how much corruption came on the human race" through their sin. Yet the rules on thinking with the Church warn against preaching grace so insistently that "works and free will receive any harm, or be held for nothing". The fall is real damage and grace is necessary (no one is saved without it, the fourteenth rule says), but the will is not destroyed. Read together, the three passages fit the wounded view, though he states it as a caution about preaching rather than as an account of the will, so the cell leans rather than affirms.
6 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
Basque soldier turned pilgrim, founder of the Society of Jesus (1540) and its first superior general. His Spiritual Exercises, begun at Manresa in 1522–23 after his conversion at Loyola in 1521 and approved by Paul III in 1548, are still widely used for retreats; their closing rules for thinking with the Church are his nearest approach to doctrinal statement. This entry rests on the Exercises in Elder Mullan's 1914 translation and the Autobiography in the 1900 English edition by J. F. X. O'Conor.
Cite this page
"Ignatius of Loyola on Original sin & the human will", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/ignatius-loyola/original-sin (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/ignatius-loyola/original-sin).