When St. Ignatius Loyola was wounded in war by a blow from a cannonball, he was forced to remain bedridden for an extended amount of time. It was during this time of convalescence that he had a great deal of time to read and think.
At the time, he wanted to read stories of knightly adventures. Providentially, there were no such books available in his room. This forced him to read two books that deeply shaped him and transformed him into another person. Ignatius explains what happened next in his autobiography (written in the third person).
As Ignatius had a love for fiction, when he found himself out of danger he asked for some romances to pass away the time. In that house there was no book of the kind. They gave him, instead, “The Life of Christ,” by Ludolph, the Carthusian, and another book called the “Flowers of the Saints,” both in Spanish. By frequent reading of these books he began to get some love for spiritual things. This reading led his mind to meditate on holy things.
Those two books were recently translated into English.
The first book, The Life of Jesus Christ, was translated by Milton T. Walsh for Cistercian Publications in 2018.
This book, according to the publisher’s synopsis, “is the most comprehensive series of meditations on the life of Christ of the late Middle Ages. Ludolph assembles a wealth of commentary from the Fathers of the Church and the great medieval spiritual writers and weaves them into a seamless exposition on the Gospel.”
The second book, sometimes referred to as the “Flowers of the Saints,” was in truth the Golden Legend, a medieval compilation of stories on the saints.
Jacobus de Voragine was the original author and it was translated by William Granger Ryan in 2012 for Princeton University Press.
The synopsis from the publisher explains, “Depicting the lives of the saints in an array of factual and fictional stories, The Golden Legend was perhaps the most widely read book, after the Bible, during the late Middle Ages. It was compiled around 1260 by Jacobus de Voragine, a scholarly friar and later archbishop of Genoa, whose purpose was to captivate, encourage, and edify the faithful, while preserving a vast store of information pertaining to the legends and traditions of the church.”
If you are looking for new spiritual reading, try these two books that changed the life of St. Ignatius Loyola.
And today we celebrate...