Ignatius of Loyola on the Trinity

One substance, three persons, co-equal and co-eternal

THE POSITION

Devotion to the three Persons runs through both texts. The Autobiography says that at Manresa he prayed every day to each of the three Persons and also to the Trinity, wondered how there could be four prayers to the one Divinity, and was then given an understanding of the Trinity under the image of a single instrument. He could not hold back his tears that day, and for the rest of his life prayer to the Trinity brought him great devotion. The Exercises open the Second Week with "the Three Divine Persons" looking on the world and deciding together that the Second Person should become man. He never argues the doctrine; he prays it, and the prayer presupposes three Persons in one God. The 1900 English edition renders the image as "a lyre or harp"; modern translations from the Spanish give three keys of a keyboard instrument.

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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.