Karl Rahner: Ignatius as Theological Inspiration

Howard J. Gray, S.J.

Bagging Ignatius Series ’05-‘06

December 15, 2005

Introduction. As we review the various ways in which Ignatian spirituality has been interpreted and adapted we are aware, too, of how much the scholarly and cultural climate of the times influences how scholars read Ignatius and his heritage. This influence is important in understanding the influence of Ignatius Loyola on the theological approach of Karl Rahner. In turn, Rahner’s theological insights focus attention on aspects of Ignatius that need to be noted and appropriated.

There are three moments in Rahner’s interpretation:

1. The theological climate of his own education, especially the approach towards experience, grace, mysticism, personal call, and the Church.

2. The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises as a process of spiritual conversion that leads to a theological conversion

3. Rahner’s reformulation of theology as at once mystical and secular.

I. Ignatian Core:

“The one giving the Exercises ought not to move the one receiving them more to poverty or to any other promise than to their contraries, nor to one state of life more than to another. Outside the Exercises it can indeed be lawful and meritorious for us to move all who seem suitable to choose continence, virginity, religious life, and every form of evangelical perfection, but during these Spiritual Exercises it is more opportune and much better that the Creator and Lord communicates Himself to the faithful soul in search for the will of God, as He inflames her in His love and praise, disposing her towards the way she will be better able to serve Him in the future. Hence, the giver of the Exercises should not be swayed or show a preference for one side rather than the other, but remaining in the middle like the pointer of a balance, should leave the Creator to work directly with the creature, and the creature with the Creator and Lord” [Exx. # 15].

II. Rahner’s Dialogue with the Text as a Window of Interpretation of Ignatian Spirituality: freedom and influences, the sense of transcendence and immediacy in harmony in the personal search for God, the Person of Jesus as Creator and Lord for Rahner [the Incarnation and the Resurrection as the “book ends” of Christ’s “birth into restriction” and our participation in these events; Christ as mediating the mystery of God’s presence in prayer and other more mundane human experiences from exaltation to the “drudgery of life.”

III. Ignatian spirituality is a spirituality of experiencing God within the labor and the limits of the human. Christ is the unique model of this encounter with the divine within the human and beyond the human. The Church is both an occasion and a community that places this encounter as its major mission = that God is with us and within us. Thus the need to discern in individual life and church life the authentic movement of God towards this dialogue and ultimate surrender to Love [the Suscipe/’Take and Receive” of the Exx].