A Cannonball, Manresa, and the Discernment of Spirits

In May 1521 a French cannonball shattered Inigo de Loyola's right leg during the defence of Pamplona. He was thirty, a minor Basque nobleman with a soldier's ambitions, and he spent months in bed at his family castle while the bone was broken and reset twice out of vanity about how the leg would look.

He wanted romances to read. The house had none, only a life of Christ and a collection of saints' lives, so he read those, and then noticed something he later treated as the foundation of everything he taught. When he daydreamed about chivalric exploits he was absorbed at the time and left dry and restless afterwards. When he daydreamed about outdoing Francis and Dominic in austerity he was absorbed at the time and left content and quiet afterwards. The difference was not in the daydreams but in what they left behind, and he concluded that interior movements can be examined and told apart by their aftertaste.

That observation became the discernment of spirits, and everything else grew out of it. He hung up his sword at Montserrat, spent about a year at nearby Manresa in prayer, extreme austerity and a period of scrupulosity so severe he considered suicide, and there had an experience beside the river Cardoner which he said taught him more than everything else in his life together. He began writing notes for others. Those notes became the Spiritual Exercises.