The Spiritual Exercises

The Spiritual Exercises is Ignatius of Loyola's own manual of structured meditations, prayers and discernment practices, composed from his own religious experience and first formally approved by the papacy in 1548, and it remains the foundational text of Ignatian spirituality and the formation of the Society of Jesus he founded. As Ignatius's own text it is the correct primary source for what the exercises actually prescribe, in the founder's own words, rather than a later devotional summary of the tradition he began. Its limit is exactly what any founder's own practical manual carries, it is a guide meant to be undertaken under a trained director rather than read as abstract theology, so a claim about how the Exercises are historically interpreted or adapted needs a scholarly secondary source alongside this primary text.