Annotations and Meditations on the Gospels.
Worcester, Thomas
Annotations and Meditations on the Gospels. By Jerome Nadal, S.J.
Cumulative index by Joseph P. Lea, with a Study by Walter Melion.
Philadelphia: St. Joseph's University, 2014. Pp. x+ 196. $39.95.
Nadal's well-known notations and meditations on the Gospel
texts read at Mass were first published in the 1590s. In 2003-2007, St.
Joseph's University Press published selections from them in English
translation, in three volumes: Infancy narratives (I), Passion
narratives (II), and Resurrection narratives (III). This volume now
offers an index of the earlier volumes, as well as glossy, high-quality
reproductions of many of the illustrations that accompanied Nadal's
text, along with an essay by art historian Walter Melion.
The index is in fact four indices: persons, scriptural, subjects,
and iconographical material. The longest and most interesting is the
subjects index. The array of topics at least mentioned by Nadal is wide,
and includes angels, anxiety, camels, compassion, desire, discernment,
dogs, earthquakes, friendship, goats, hairshirts, kisses, Limbo,
lunatics, mercy, milk, mortification, nakedness, pain, pilgrimage,
prisons, sloth, snakes, tears, tyranny, wisdom, wrath, and zeal. The
index of persons reveals that Nadal, though focused on the Gospels,
often cited figures from the Hebrew Scriptures such as David, Job, or
Moses; the scriptural index shows that the Psalms were the Old Testament
texts he most often cited.
Does all or any of this matter for our understanding of Nadal
(1507-1580) and the first generations of Jesuits? M.'s essay
usefully recalls that Nadal's annotations and meditations were
written and published above all for use by Jesuit novices and
scholastics, yet in fact they also accompanied Jesuit missionaries
around the world. M. focuses mainly on how both Nadal's texts and
the images published with them followed closely the canons and decrees
of the Council of Trent on topics such as justification of the sinner,
free will, the Mass, and the saints. As M. shows clearly, Nadal
presented Jesus as God's mercy made present and visible, a mercy
that may not, however, extend to heretics worthy of the fires of hell.
Thus an anti-Protestant agenda animated the older Nadal; one may ask
what Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) would have thought of this.
DOI: 10.1177/0040563915619978
Thomas Worcester, S.J.
College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA
