Nine Spiritual Exercises

Massimo Pigliucci explains how to get Philo-Sophical.

- Massimo Pigliucci

On 20th May, 1521, Spanish troops fought against a Navarrese contingent supported by the French at the fortress of Pamplona. The Spanish lost the battle, but a little more than a month later, on June 30th, they decisively defeated the combined Navarrese and French forces at the Battle of Noáin, thus ending the Navarrese rebellion. One of the Spanish soldiers wounded at Pamplona was the Basque captain Íñigo López de Loyola, who was injured in both legs. While convalescing at the Benedictine abbey of Montserrat in Catalonia, Íñigo, who later took the name of Ignatius and founded the religious order known as the Society of Jesus, started working on a book of spiritual exercises. These practices were organized in four thematic weeks, meant to help Christians recommit to their faith. Yet as famous as Ignatius's exercises became, he was not the originator of the idea of spiritual exercises. Several ancient Greco-Roman schools, including the Epicureans and the Stoics, had long before discovered that certain practices could be invaluable in living a good life.

The most comprehensive discussion of the history of philosophical exercises, including a comparison between the Hellenistic and Christian approaches, can be found in a classic book by French scholar Pierre Hadot, aptly entitled Philosophy as a Way of Life