In the early 1990s, my soccer teammates and I had several terse but evocative labels for those we considered to fall short of our adolescent standards of virile independence. One of the mildest was tool. If you let your girlfriend persuade you to watch the big game at her house (instead of with the guys), for instance, or respected your parents’ curfew (instead of staying to close down the party), you might meet a swift rebuke: “Don’t be such a tool.” One implication was, of course, that you were weak, letting yourself be used or controlled by others.
But such a derogatory use of tool is hardly unique to the locker rooms of the 1990s. In ancient Greece, Aristotle described slaves as living tools or animate instruments. I doubt he meant it as a compliment. And ever since the Enlightenment raised autonomy to a supreme human value, it has perhaps become ever more villainous to instrumentalize others than to be instrumentalized. The whole semantic field of tool and instrument is fraught with negative moral connotations. I suspect few are disappointed, therefore, not to find it in most contemporary accounts of Ignatian spirituality, alongside terms like spiritual freedom, discernment and mindfulness.
Ignatius’ writings themselves, however, show a different tendency. There, instrument both serves as a central spiritual category and bears a positive connotation. In the Constitutions, the governing document of the Jesuits, Ignatius describes good candidates for his order as “apt instruments” (No. 30), Jesuits already incorporated as “weak instruments” (No. 638) and the whole Jesuit order as a “human instrument” that must dispose itself to be “wielded by the divine hand” (No. 812). The term also appears dozens of times in Ignatius’ letters, both before and after the arrival of his indispensable secretary, Juan de Polanco, in 1547.
The disappearance of the notion of instrument from contemporary Ignatian vocabulary, I would like to suggest, is a loss. When given a proper interpretation, it captures a style of Christian discipleship and holiness much needed today. It has the potential to recenter the Christian life on something more stable than feelings, giving importance to the arduous apostolic preparation that sometimes interferes with sentiments of peace and union. By the same token, it has the potential to reconnect private spirituality to the Christian religion, encouraging Christians to imbue their feelings and efforts alike with the supernatural energies flowing from the church and the sacraments.
A Theological Basis
Ignatius’ use of the term instrument, despite preceding Polanco’s arrival, does not predate Ignatius’ time at the University of Paris (1528-35). This suggests that he first encountered the term in his academic studies. How could such an ostensibly abstract scholastic category catch the attention of a mystic like Ignatius? Some light can be gained by considering the way it was used by St. Thomas Aquinas, whom Ignatius designated the theologian of reference for his fledgling order.
Aquinas often invokes the notion of instrument in relation to Christ’s humanity. All theologians of his day agreed that the Word assumed a human nature. But debates persisted about the role this human nature plays in our salvation. Does it serve merely to render the divine Word audible and visible, making doctrinal instruction and inspiring example possible? Or does it also transmit the very power by which we are saved?
Several passages in Scripture seem to favor the second opinion. The Gospel of Luke describes Christ’s body almost as if it were a live wire from which energy “arcs” when the crowds press in: “Power went forth from him” (Lk 6:19). Paul speaks of Christ as the “last Adam,” as if his activity somehow impinged upon the whole human race (“Adam”), even those distant in time and space.
It was precisely to account for such prodigious effects that Aquinas opted to describe Christ’s human nature as an instrument of his divinity. For an instrument is, by definition, a cause that works in tandem with a higher cause to produce nobler effects than it could produce by itself.
Take the homely example of a pencil. By itself, it is inert. But wielded by the hand of an author, it produces intelligible script, becoming jointly responsible for effects of a higher (human and intellectual) order. According to Aquinas, something analogous holds for Christ’s humanity. By itself, Christ’s human nature can do no more than any other. Wielded by the divine Word, however, it generates effects of a supernatural order, transmitting grace and miraculous healing. Christ’s human nature is “disposed” to serve as such a perfect instrument, of course, because the Spirit imbues it with all virtues and gifts.
This theological backdrop perhaps permits us to see how Ignatius resonated with the language of instrument. For a divine instrument is the sort of cause that, when wielded by the divine hand, conducts divine strength to others. The better disposed the instrument, the closer it approaches the condition of a superconductor, dissipating none of its divine current through internal resistance. As the founder of an order dedicated to “helping souls,” especially by the ministry of the word, Ignatius intuited that success would involve drawing on both human and more-than-human energies.
Instrumental Discipleship
This brings us to the earlier mentioned benefit of decentering feelings in the spiritual life––something necessary if we are ever to serve God beyond our comfort zone and for his own sake. As Cardinal John Henry Newman once remarked in “Self-Contemplation,” a sermon addressed to an Anglican congregation: “They who make self instead of their Maker the great object of their contemplation will naturally exalt themselves.” Reconceiving Christian maturity as perfect instrumentality begins to address this danger. For through this model, the pursuits of consolation or peace, without being simply written off, take a back seat to the demands of honing the instrument with a view to some objective service.
These demands exert pressure from two directions, inasmuch as every classic tool has two ends. One end fits the tool to its task, like the tip of a pencil fits it to mark paper. The other end adapts the tool to the artisan, like the length of the pencil offers a grip to the hand. Similarly for Ignatius, Christians become better instruments in two ways that need not involve spiritual exhilaration: by fitting themselves to deal with their fellow human beings and by adapting themselves to the divine hand.
Ignatius drives home the importance of honing the human end of the instrument in his so-called “Letter on Perfection” of 1547, addressed to the 80 young Jesuits who were then studying in Coimbra. Given to fits of fervor, the Jesuit students had begun flogging themselves in the streets and displaying a fresh corpse indoors as a memento mori. When these exuberances—which no doubt made the scholastics feel very fervent—divided the community, Ignatius intervened to explain the implications of the “instrumental” style of holiness to which they were called. He identified two principal ways they could become “perfect instruments of God’s grace” during their time of studies: learning and virtue.
Each requires discretion. Studies require the whole person, he observed, and virtue grows more from steady application than from erratic bursts. The goal of preparing the instrument for future ministries of the word should regulate fervor, even time spent in prayer, not vice versa. You must sharpen the pencil, in short, if you want the divine hand to write clearly with it.
At the same, of course, even a sharp pencil remains useless unless it offers a grip to the divine hand. Jesuits, accordingly, should make room in their prayer for a variety of exercises, not only those that foster devotion and mold affectivity, but also those that charge the instrument with the spiritual power to touch hearts. With this latter end in view, Ignatius habitually sought to involve intercessors of a higher order, approaching them at sacred times, in sacred places and through sacred objects. In his Spiritual Exercises, for instance, Ignatius suggests that retreatants beg the graces they seek by a triple colloquy—that is, by presenting their petition first to Mary, then to Christ and finally to the Father.
To help struggling Jesuits in Goa, he sent the skull of one of St. Ursula’s 11,000 virgin companions, which was later said to work miracles. To Jesuits in vocational crisis, he was known to prescribe a pilgrimage to the Holy House of Loreto, explaining that “God usually helps more in a place where he is venerated than in another.” It behooves the instrument to pray not only so as to cultivate the right inner dispositions, in short, but also so as to place itself in the right “hands”—that is, under the influence of the angels, saints and sacraments who can wield it to greater effect.
For a classic example of this instrumental discipleship in action, one can look to Ignatius’ way of securing ecclesiastical approval for his fledgling order. The Chronicon, Polanco’s chronicle of early Jesuit history, recounts how Pope Paul III was unwilling to approve the Jesuits against the judgment of a certain Cardinal Guidiccioni. The latter, citing the laxity of religious life as he knew it, had repeatedly declared himself opposed to all new foundations. Ignatius, sensing that only an extraordinary influence could change his heart, organized a counteroffensive on two fronts.
On the one hand, he solicited testimonial letters from all the nobles and theologians he knew, flooding Rome with weighty pleas for the creation of this new order. In this way, he primed the instrument at the human end. On the other hand, Ignatius asked his fellow companions collectively to offer 3,000 Masses for Guidiccioni’s change of heart. A letter of Francis Xavier from India survives that begs Ignatius to let him know what “fruit in the church” his hundreds of Mass intentions produced.
Though no answer ever managed to reach Xavier, Polanco’s Chronicon preserves one for our benefit:
And he [Guidiccioni], though he had written against the multiplication of religious orders, and would not assent to this new one, was now being assailed by many sacrifices and prayers. After he had dragged the affair out for a full year, he, overcoming his own reasons through internal impulses and motions, thought his way to a solution: that the Society would be approved as a religious order, but could admit only sixty persons until time itself should teach what is expedient for the church.
Polanco (and no doubt the other early Jesuits) was convinced that Guidiccioni’s inner transformation owed something not only to human diplomacy but to the power of the Mass.
A Tool for Christ
The first Jesuits found the soundness of this instrumental style confirmed time and again in their apostolic work. Human learning, talent and rank contributed greatly to winning others for Christ. These should be carefully cultivated. But care should also be taken to charge these human efforts with a divine energy, doing so with a view to bringing about even richer effects. Drawing from the field reports of early Jesuit missionaries, the Jesuit historian André Ravier generalizes: “They had a very strong feeling of disproportion between acts and effects, especially the spiritual effects of their acts.” Significantly, this feeling was more than an inner experience, more than consolation or peace. It was an observation of dynamics in the world and in history, of a fruitfulness unexplainable by natural gifts alone.
In this lies the potential of Ignatius’ instrumental model of union for reconnecting spirituality and religion. Though inner attitudes and movements do help dispose the instrument, they do not suffice. The instrument achieves its full potential only by being inserted into what Ignatius calls the “hierarchical church”—that is, into the ensemble of angels, saints, superiors, sacraments and sacramentals that conduct this divine energy to us. To flee from the all-too-human church into a non-sacramental spirituality of philanthropy and mindfulness would be to remove the instrument’s “handle.” “Apart from me,” Jesus reminds us, “you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5).
Though this disproportion between natural gifts and spiritual impact is seldom expressed today in the idiom of instrument, many Christians today will still recognize it. In the Baptist South where I grew up, they used to speak of “anointed preachers” much as Ignatius spoke of “apt instruments.”
When I think of apt instruments closer to my own experience, I often think of a Jesuit with whom I lived at Jesuit High School in New Orleans. Bespectacled, soft-spoken, never an athlete, he was hardly the typical magnet for high school boys. And yet he became so. With methodical effort he communicated his interest in the students, watching their games, chaperoning their dances, teaching them the games Diplomacy and Settlers of Catan during lunch breaks. And he crowned these efforts with the church’s public prayer, joining to the petitions of the Liturgy of the Hours every day all those whom he had encountered and all those to whom he had promised prayer.
Not a few Jesuits of my generation would consider him the human instrument of their vocations. And a much broader circle of his former students still trace their spiritual awakening back to the peace and joy with which he succumbed to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (A.L.S.).
If you had called him a tool, I suspect he would have taken it as a compliment. Nowadays, I would too.
