Ignatius thought that the biggest obstacle to making good decisions was “false consolation.” A decision looks good, everything lines up, you and your friends feel good about it. But it turns out to be the wrong choice. You’ve deluded yourself — or been deluded. The good feeling you had — the “consolation” — was bogus. Not the real thing but a counterfeit.
Many of Ignatius’s “rules” for discerning spirits are about distinguishing authentic from false consolation. One of his most useful ideas involves examining the “feeling” of the feeling.
The good angel touches the soul gently, lightly, and sweetly, like a drop of water going into a sponge. The evil spirit touches it sharply, with noise and disturbance, like a drop of water falling onto a stone. Spiritual Exercises, 335
This rule is about identifying spiritual dissonance Does the new spiritual movement fit your spiritual disposition or does it strike a dissonant note, like a jarring note in a pleasing melody? If your spiritual condition is basically healthy, God’s action will be gentle and delightful, like “a drop of water penetrating a sponge.” The action of the enemy will be noisy and disturbing, like “a drop of water falling upon a stone.”
This kind of discernment requires spiritual sensitivity. Ignatius’s examples suggest as much: a drop of water falling on a stone makes noise but not a lot of noise, and water soaking into a sponge doesn’t attract much attention.
A false consolation is dangerous precisely because it’s a consolation. The proposition seems attractive and plausible. It looks good. We’re excited and inspired by it. But false consolation isn’t the real thing. There’s always something fallacious and unsound about false consolation. The problems will always show up over time, but the falseness is there from the beginning, and with practice we can learn to detect it. We’re looking for subtle signs: a nagging doubt, a feeling that something isn’t right, a foreshadowing of spiritual trouble.
One such sign might be excessive excitement at the prospect of a new venture. Enthusiasm and can-do confidence are usually considered to be desirable, but Ignatius’s warning about the feeling of the feeling suggests that we not assume that this is so. The French Jesuit theologian Maurice Giuliani points out that noisy confidence is notably absent in some of the great stories in the Bible where God proposes something new. Moses, the prophet Isaiah, and Mary all reacted with humility and hesitation: Why me? How can this be? I can’t do this. Lord, I am not worthy. This was the reaction of Jesus himself at Gethsemane. This initial response paves the way for surrender to God, who is the real source of strength, followed by resolute and loving dedication to the task. Certainly we’ve seen plenty of examples of the opposite trajectory. Confidence and excitement at the beginning crumble when obstacles present themselves, as they always do. This causes frustration, and soon discouragement and hopelessness. In the end, the project is abandoned.
This is a rule of thumb, a heuristic, not a spiritual law. Examine the “feeling” of the feeling. Does it fit or is it raucous, dissonant? Is it water soaking into a sponge or striking a rock?