The Dynamics of Personal Experience and Normative Experience in St. Ignatius’s The Spiritual Exercises

초록

This essay aims to investigate the relationship between the personal experience and the normative experience in St. Ignatius’s The Spiritual Exercises. The tension between them seems to be unavoidable in Christian spirituality. However, this essay will argue that St. Ignatius’s writings provide a possibility of how both of them need to work together for religious experience. His writings represent a normative experience in that it is an objective guide which the retreatants are expected to follow. Yet the text implies that this normative rule should not be applied to each individual in a standardized way because he/she has his/her own unique situations. Presupposing that God communicates Himself directly to the unique situations of the retreatants, St. Ignatius shows the complementary interaction between the normative and the personal. In order to show that, this essay will examine the structure and contents of the Exercises: the journey of the Four Weeks, issue of purification and conversion, the Director’s guide, and the dynamics of discernment

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