Loyola, IGNATIUS DE, is the name by which history knows Íñigo Lopez de Recalde, the youngest son of Bertram de Loyola and Marina Salez de Baldi, who was born in the year 1491 at his ancestral castle of Loyola, in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa. After the scant training of that age in letters, he was received as a page in the court of Ferdinand; but the restraint and inactivity of court-life were distasteful to his enthusiastic mind, and under the auspices of his relative, the Duke of Najura, he embraced the profession of arms. The details of his career as a soldier display both the excellency and the irregularities of his ardent temperament, thrown undirected among the temptations as well as the duties of a military life. Of his bravery and chivalrous spirit many remarkable instances are recorded, and one of these proved the turning-point of his career. In the defence of Pampeluna he was severely wounded in both legs, one being fractured by a cannon-ball, and the other injured by a splinter; and having been taken prisoner by the French, he was by them conveyed to his paternal castle of Loyola, where he was doomed to a long confinement. After an operation, the results of which had well-nigh proved fatal, he eventually recovered; and with his returning strength he appears to have resumed his habitual levity. In order to remove a deformity which had resulted from the first setting of his wounded limb, he consented to the painful remedy of having it re-broken in order to be reset. After this operation his convalescence was even more slow; and, the stock of romances by which he was wont to relieve the tedium of confinement having been exhausted, he was thrown upon the only other available reading, that of the Lives of the Saints. The result was the creation of a spiritual enthusiasm equally intense in degree, although in kind very different from that by which he had hitherto been drawn to feats of chivalry. The spiritual glories of St Francis or St Dominic now took, in his aspirations, the place which had been before held by the knights of medieval romance. With souls like his there is no middle course: he threw himself, with all the fire of his temperament, upon the new aspirations which these thoughts engendered.
Renouncing the pursuit of arms, and with it all other worldly plans, he tore himself from home and friends, and resolved to prepare himself for the new course which he contemplated by a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. With a view to his immediate preparation for this holy task, he retired in the garb of a beggar to the celebrated monastery of Montserrat, where, on the vigil of the Feast of the Annunciation, in 1522, he hung up his arms, as at once a votive offering significative of his renunciation of the works of the flesh, and an emblem of his entire devotion to the spiritual warfare to which he was from that moment vowed. From Montserrat he set out barefooted on his pilgrimage, the first step of which was a voluntary engagement which he undertook to serve the poor and sick in the hospital of the neighbouring town of Manresa. There his zeal and devotion attracted such notice that he withdrew to a solitary cavern in the vicinity, where he pursued alone his course of self-prescribed austerity, until he was carried back, utterly exhausted, to the hospital in which he had before served. To this physical exhaustion succeeded a state of mental depression, amounting almost to despair, from which, however, he arose with spiritual powers renewed and invigorated by the very struggle. From Manresa he repaired by Barcelona to Rome, whence, after receiving the papal benediction from Adrian VI., he proceeded on foot, and as a mendicant, to Venice, and there embarked for Cyprus and the Holy Land. He would gladly have remained at Jerusalem, and devoted himself to the propagation of the gospel among the infidels; but finding no encouragement, returned to Venice and Barcelona in 1524.
Taught by his first failure, he now resolved to prepare himself by study for the work of religious teaching, and with this view was not ashamed to return, at the age of thirty-three, to the study of the very rudiments of grammar. He followed up these elementary studies by a further course, first at the new university of Alcala, and afterwards at Salamanca. In both places he incurred the censure of the authorities by some unauthorised attempts at religious teaching in public, and eventually he was induced to repair to Paris for the completion of the studies thus repeatedly interrupted. Here, again, he continued persistently to struggle on without any resources but those which he drew from the charity of the faithful; and here, again, he returned to the same humble elementary studies. It was while engaged in these studies that he first formed the pious fraternity which resulted in that great organisation which has exercised such influence upon the religious, moral, and social condition of the modern world. From the close of his residence in Paris Loyola's history has been told in the history of his order (see JESUITS). From the date of his election as the first general of his society he continued to reside in Rome. To him are due, not alone in the general spirit, but even in most of their details, all its rules and constitutions; from him also originated several works of general charity and benevolence, the germs of great institutions still maintained in Rome. But the great source of his influence upon the spiritual interests of the world is his well-known Exercitia Spiritualia, of which an account has been already given. He died at Rome, prematurely, worn out by his long austerities, July 31, 1556. He was beatified in 1609, and canonised in 1622.
His Life has been written in almost every European language. The biographies of Ribadaneira (1572), Maffei (1585), Bouhours (1679), Daurignac (1865), Denis (1885), are well known; and there are books by Stewart Rose (1891), Father Hughes (1892), Gothein (Halle, 1896), and H. Joly (trans. 1899).