Meditation on God’s word now seems so central to Christianity that we can easily forget how much that practice depends on an invention of early modernity: the printing press. Ignatius and the classical Reformers lived in the first generation for whom the printed word was an everyday reality. Perhaps it is no coincidence that they both now appear as harbingers of a new form of religious consciousness. Both discovered in the printed text a divine Word, confronting their guilt and ambiguities with an experience of grace as wholly other, as undeserved, as beyond our control. Ignatius called this kind of experience of the sheer grace of God ‘consolation’, and contrasted it with the ‘desolation’ that results from self-obsession and self-absorption. Perhaps a spirituality centred on the experience of the wholly other God is in the end a spirituality specific to modernity. But perhaps the spirituality for a postmodern world will not set aside what we have inherited both from Ignatius and (in their way) from the great Reformers. Perhaps, rather, it will set religious modernity’s sense of the spirits’ movements within richer, more inclusive contexts.
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