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As a teenager I loved Antigone. I was an artistically inclined teenager, and so the Antigone in question I loved was French playwright Jean Anouilh’s. In high school, I directed a production of his version reimagining the title character in the punk-rock mold of Patti Hearst under the spell of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
It was, I’m sure, not a very good production. Nevertheless it emphasized what I loved about Antigone at the time: Antigone as a stubborn, idealistic teenager. Antigone’s refusal to grow up and refusal to grow old are so intertwined that she herself cannot make sense of them. She doesn’t want to die, nevertheless she knows that a life lived in society requires moral sacrifices of her she cannot countenance. In Anouilh’s rendering, Antigone does not die solely because she feels bound to break the law. Anouilh’s Creon is far more reluctant to kill Antigone than she is reluctant to die. He repeatedly begs her to choose life, depart their audience quietly, and marry his son Haemon, whom she loves.
But Antigone can’t. In one of her climactic monologues, she announces to Creon,
I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life—that life that must go on, come what may. . . . I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete; otherwise I reject it! I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl. I want to be sure of everything this very day; sure that everything will be as beautiful as when I was a little girl. If not, I want to die.
With a teenager’s solipsism, I read and, indeed, directed Antigone as primarily about Antigone’s desire for “everything.” My own desires, both moral and personal, were as all-encompassing, inchoate, and confused as Antigone’s. I wanted totality and beauty and absinthe and God and a poetic life, whatever that meant. I spit on a happiness I understood as merely ordinary.
But I had left something significant out of my interpretation. Anouilh’s Antigone was written and produced in Vichy France. When not directed by a quixotic fifteen-year-old theatre kid, the play is generally understood as a response to Nazi occupation and censorship. Antigone is an idealistic, dramatic teenager, and the only one in the play morally naive enough to comprehend just how many compromises Creon has had to make—just how many lies he has to tell himself and others—in order for society to function. Her death is an existential act of refusal to countenance adulthood if growing up means surrender.
Now, what Sophocles appears to present us with, in the account of Antigone from which Anouilh takes inspiration, is perhaps an even more discomfiting moral conflict. Antigone’s religious dedication to her family and Creon’s no less binding need to govern a people effectively are both moral goods. They’re just—and herein lies the tragedy—goods that are incompatible with one another. As novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, drawing heavily on Hegel’s understanding of tragedy, writes of Sophocles’s version, “Antigone and Creon are both right, as we see if we understand the total situation which encloses them both.” Tragedy, for Murdoch and Hegel alike, arises out of this “conflict of goods.” To understand Antigone as an innocent, and Creon as a coward, is to assume that religious duty and political responsibility, individual moral conscience and collective rule of law, never come into conflict with another. We assume that we could simply work out a better and more comprehensive code of moral and political relations, no human being would ever fall into conflict with any other. This may be true, eschatologically speaking. I have confidence in the constitution of the new Jerusalem. But if there is a definite tragedy in human life, it is not merely the unpredictability of sickness and the inevitability of death. It is also the fact that goods, like people, often do come into conflict with each other. Sometimes we have to choose; sometimes no amount of philosophical deliberation will provide us with certainty that the answer we have chosen is right.
Ignatian Discernment of Competing Goods
Christian theology has, historically, not provided a clear road through this impasse, but rather a set of tools to navigate it. Discernment, whether it be the discernment of a priestly or other vocation, or the discernment of a call to marry a particular person, or the discernment of a communal decision taken toward the future of a given church or parish, is not merely the process of deciding whether option A is right or option B is wrong. Discernment, particularly as it is found in St. Ignatius of Loyola’s sixteenth-century Spiritual Exercises, does not seek to establish eternal moral tenets or laws. Nor does it seek to help us decide between an obvious right and wrong. Discernment is the process reserved for those moments when we must decide among competing goods.
When I write of the process of discernment here, I do not exclusively mean Ignatian discernment as traditionally practiced through his Spiritual Exercises: a thirty-day-long retreat under the supervision of a spiritual director. Ignatian spirituality, and the discernment process in particular, is today often practiced in a variety of ways more accessible to lay people. This includes shorter retreats, or discernment alongside the business of everyday life—a proviso made by Ignatius in the nineteenth annotation of his exercises. More broadly, though, Ignatian discernment can provide us with insight into the complexities of a given situation and, even more importantly, an intensification of our moral and spiritual imaginations.
Ignatian discernment does not assume that our conflicting motivations are equally valid. Antigone’s desire, for instance, to bury her brother may be rooted in a perverse hunger for transgression, just as Creon’s motivations may be partially holding on to political power. Ignatian discernment posits both a good and evil angel that may be the source of our thoughts and desires. The real challenge is that the difference between the two angels is not always immediately obvious. Someone who inadvertently stepped on a piece of straw in the shape of a cross—to give an Ignatian example—might be led by the evil angel to erroneously believe he had sinned, and worry accordingly. Part of the process of discernment is the identification of which of our impulses are, in fact, governed by self-love, or self-will, or attachments to worldly status, or even to our conceptions of our own selves.
But discernment also isn’t merely a mental checklist—the spiritual equivalent of a pro and con tally. For Ignatius, true discernment transforms the soul just as exercise transforms the body. “As strolling, walking and running are bodily exercises,” he writes, “so every way of preparing and disposing the soul to rid itself of all the disordered tendencies, and, after it is rid, to seek and find the Divine Will as to the management of one’s life for the salvation of the soul, is called a Spiritual Exercise.” The process of discerning is, in part, about figuring out what to do, in a particular instance, but it’s also about shaping who we are—as people who must make decisions not in the hypothetical abstract but in our lived existence.
These decisions are ultimately not simply about practical outcomes, but more significantly about our relationship with God. To stand at a spiritual crossroads is not merely to decide on a final destination but to choose a path itself. This path, for Ignatius, is ultimately—and necessarily—an individual one: one that must both be chosen by and experienced by the discerner.
To listen to one’s own heart, in the fullest sense, is to listen to God.
These decisions, therefore, cannot be mediated by any other person. Even those in spiritual authority over discerners do not have the authority to choose for those under their care. Ignatius warns spiritual directors against unduly influencing those undergoing discernment: “When seeking the Divine Will,” he writes, “it is more fitting and much better, that the Creator and Lord Himself should communicate Himself to His devout soul, inflaming it with His love and praise, and disposing it for the way in which it will be better able to serve Him in future.” Thus, the spiritual director “should not turn or incline to one side or the other, but standing in the center like a balance, leave the Creator to act immediately with the creature, and the creature with its Creator and Lord.”
From one perspective, Ignatian spirituality can be seen as strikingly “modern”—if we take “modern” to mean the primacy of the individual, and their own conscience and inner feeling, over the external doctrines or dogmas of authority and orthodoxy. This is, of course, an overstatement: discernment should take place only within contexts where any available choice is “orthodox.” (Nobody can, for example, discern that they ought to become a practicing Satanist.) But it is nevertheless true that Ignatian discernment offers us a way of thinking about the importance of the personal, the individual, and, yes, the emotional- within the context of Christian decision-making: a vision we can see later echoed in, for example, the distinctly Protestant Christian existentialism of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. There is something to our human individuality, to our inward longings and desires, to the truth of our own selves, that can lead us—if we rightly understand and explore it—to the knowledge of what God wants, not merely in general, but for us. Our own role in God’s plan may not be that of our neighbour; nor may it be that which we wanted or expected.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that we have to simply “listen to ourselves,” or that God’s desire for us is synonymous with our inwardly felt experience. Ignatian spirituality is as much about understanding the ways in which our true selves and true desires are warped and perverted by external forces as it is about understanding what our true selves and desires are. To know ourselves rightly, we must know what we are not, and part of that is recognizing which of our desires and callings are external to our true identity before God.
Listen to Your Heart?
This treatment of the individual relationship with God, and the moral weight of personal relationship, is particularly striking against the background of what Charles Taylor has called our contemporary ethos of authenticity. The idea that looking inward into our own souls can lead us toward God’s will is one that has simultaneously been excessively valorized by contemporary secular culture yet treated with excessive suspicion in Christian circles. What, after all, separates private discernment from the idea that God just wants us to lead, well, our best lives, or to do whatever it is we really want to do—a watery version of moralistic therapeutic deism in which we do simply what feels good to us?
Yet, Ignatius suggests, it is precisely in the process of discernment that we learn to understand ourselves both in terms of our sins and in terms of God’s plans for us. When we untangle the threads of our longings—when we learn to separate out our sinful desires from our holy ones, our hunger for God from our hunger for glory—we are better able to make the kinds of intensely private, intensely personal decisions to which only we (and God) have the answers. Not only can Ignatian discernment help us understand our worst impulses as driven by Ignatius’s “evil angels”—outside what we might consider our authentic selves. But it can also help us conceive of our best selves as made possible only through the avenue of God’s grace.
In this way, Ignatian spirituality reflects the secular therapeutic path at its best, rather than its more popular, TikTok-driven analogue. “Authenticity” is not merely about shutting out society, or other people, and thus discovering our best “individual” selves. It’s also about recognizing that even within our “individual” selves there are externalities—evil angels, or diabolic forces—that we must banish in order to discover the true selves whose desires align with those of God. We do not so much “listen to our heart” as we examine it—working to figure out which of our longings come from God and which from a world that prizes markers of value, from wealth to sexual desirability, antithetical to the value system of the new Jerusalem. To listen to one’s own heart, in the fullest sense, is to listen to God.
The Spiritual Faculties
Yet at the core of the process of discernment is a fundamentally humanistic conviction that our desire for the good, for closeness to God, is different from our desires for worldly or wicked things not just in degree but in kind. By exercising our spiritual faculties, we can better fit ourselves to experience the differing desires that take us closer to or further from God.
Imagination is a spiritual faculty, although it is more often associated with fiction and falseness than spiritual truth. Part of the process of discernment, when taken in the context of the Spiritual Exercises, is imaginative prayer. The discerner is called to imagine himself or herself into the biblical accounts of creation and incarnation: “seeing the place,” as Ignatius writes: “Here it will be to see the great capacity and circuit of the world, in which are so many and such different people: then likewise, in particular, the house and rooms of Our Lady in the city of Nazareth, in the Province of Galilee.” Over and over, Ignatius stresses the importance of these contemplations in which the discerner learns to look and consider, to experience as wholly real and really present the stories of divinity or doctrine they might otherwise have taken for granted.
At its worst, imagination can lead us into a very particular kind of sin. We end up dreaming of lives or luxuries to which we feel entitled. Just think of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, who, immersed in the world of romantic novels, grows ever more dissatisfied with her own life and marriage, desiring instead a life lived “in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching a cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant fields.” But the Ignatian imagination, by contrast, trains us to harness our imaginative power to better see ourselves in other contexts, and to apprehend the reality of God outside that immediate context. Such a use of the imagination might transform us not for the evil of escapism but for the good of returning to live in the real. The expansion of our imaginative capacity, Ignatius suggests, expands our self-understanding, and indeed our soul-understanding. “For it is not knowing much,” he writes, “but realizing and relishing things interiorly, that contents and satisfies the soul.”
To me, these three major elements of discernment—the recognition of competing goods, the intensely personal and relational element of decision-making, and the expansion of the imagination through contemplative prayer—work together. As a novelist, I confess I am drawn to this unity, in part, because I find that the imaginative work of the best novels—and, indeed, the best plays—so often calls us, albeit in a far more mediated way, to honestly and compassionately encounter a world in which goods are competing. In fictional worlds we can experience how answers are not always obvious, and one’s relationship with God nuances individual decision-making in ways that doctrine alone cannot. (Ignatius’s notorious assertion that, if the church demanded it, he would believe what he saw as black to be white makes more sense in a context where he otherwise stresses the importance of private, and individual, experience—experience that can only be fully trusted downstream of Christian doctrine.)
Grounded in the theological assurance—seemingly oxymoronic, and yet foundational—that Christ is fully human and fully divine, we can see the created order as a site not of competing binaries but rather of cooperating possibilities.
It is difficult, perceiving a world without easy answers, not to conclude—as Sophocles and Anouilh both do—that we live in a tragic world. If there are no right decisions, in the final accounting, if there are too many or not enough or sufficiently broken puzzle pieces, such that the world cannot fit together in a sensible unity, then why bother striving for moral certainty at all? This is certainly the tack taken by Anouilh’s Antigone, when she chooses death. But here, too, imagination as a virtue seems to help us recast hopelessness as abundance. There are too many goods for the world to contain. When we watch a production of Anouilh’s Antigone, we consider Antigone at once contradictory and overflowing. She is a teenage rebel without a cause and an ideological purist and an anti-fascist symbol and the personification of duty to family. She contains multitudes, which is to say she is human. We all hold such seeming contradictions and in them better understand not just Antigone as a human being but what it means to be a human who must navigate life with such competing roles and motivations. In a Christian context, that in which Christ became incarnate, the mystery of faith is that our seeming opposites are not merely reconciled but exist abundantly. Christ becomes a hermeneutic through which we can better understand, and better love, the world in which we find ourselves, and the people with whom we find ourselves in it.
Part of the joy of discernment, in other words, is the recognition of abundance: a world in which everything, from words to symbols to a Greek tragic heroine on stage, can have multiple meanings, meanings that do not contradict one another but rather point to a surfeit of meaningfulness: a world in which everything both points to God and reveals the multiplicity, maybe even the polyphony, of a world in which so many different things point to God in different ways. Grounded in the theological assurance—seemingly oxymoronic, and yet foundational—that Christ is fully human and fully divine, we can see the created order as a site not of competing binaries but rather of cooperating possibilities. There are too many goods, in this world, for a single life to contain.
In a political climate where the idea that different parties might merely have competing goods in mind is both unthinkable and—if the examples of its representatives are anything to go by—untenable, this vision of discernment becomes more important too, not merely as an individual practice, but also as a communal one. If we cannot recognize that, say, personal freedom and societal safety are both goods to be cherished, or that protections for the vulnerable and encouragement to innovators are both things a society ought to value, that political decisions are hard precisely because they will inevitably result in one virtue or the other being subordinated, then we cannot ever hope to achieve a political community that doesn’t end up burning out idealists like Antigone. It will be sustained instead by those self-servers whose pursuit of power has blinded them to the idea that anything is a good that matters. And if we cannot recognize, too, that to be human, and in community, is to be called every day to make impossible decisions, decisions that discernment can clarify or illuminate but never make easy, we lose sight of what it means to be human in the first place. Our imagination, our contemplation, our prayer—these private and often solitary parts of ourselves—all help us to live in the same painful awareness as Anouilh’s Antigone that we live in a broken world, a world to which we might, like Antigone, say no. But it is a world, within the Christian story, that God has chosen to enter, to be part of, in which he has become incarnate. The world that Antigone says no to is a world to which Christ has already, and will continue to say, yes.
