Recently, I finished writing a chapter on Ignatius of Loyola for a forthcoming book that focuses on the importance of the saints in the context of the Catholic Church in crisis. (The book is edited by Catherine Wolff and is called Not Less Than Everything: Catholic Writers on Heroes of Conscience (HarperCollins, 2013)).

While writing this chapter, I was confronted again with the ways in which Ignatius’ old life survived, after his “conversion,” in his new life. Often, stories of conversion emphasize the discontinuities between old ways and new ways. In the story of Ignatius, 16th century Basque mystic and founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), some contemporary research makes us more attentive to the continuities.

One of those continuities is his taste for combat. Early in his life, he is a courageous and sometimes foolish fighter, frequently eager to vanquish foes with force. Once he dedicates his life to Christ, that zeal for weaponry does not die but is funneled differently. He takes to characterizing Christian life as a battle of the forces of Christ against the forces of Satan, and he continued to struggle against his own impulses to command and defeat others. This is no simple criticism of Ignatius but rather an attempt to contribute to a reframing of what his conversion was about. (A rethinking of conversion is on the way on many fronts in contemporary theology.)

I had Ignatius’ famous story in mind as I recently listened again to Ace Frehley’s “Rock Soldiers,” in which Frehley addresses his fans, from the far side of a “conversion,” as soldiers for rock and roll. Frehley was a guitarist for KISS who took up a solo career in the 1980s and had a hit with this tune in 1987. In “Rock Soldiers,” Frehley tells the apparently autobiographical story of a car accident he had in the early 1980s. The path to the accident is marked by an internal battle about how (and even, like Ignatius at one point, whether) to live: He goes speeding down the road “With a trooper in my mirror, and Satan on my right.” Here is the video:

It is a conversion story (“my only high was just a lie / and now I’m glad I saw”), replete with an explicit reference to beating the devil. Its arc is similar to that of Ignatius and thousands of other such stories in and out of religion: dissolute young adulthood,

dramatic shift in perspective (in a moment or over time), leading to a new and more true way of seeing/living in the world.

I don’t know enough about Frehley’s life to know about the deep continuities evident in his life despite the discontinuities after his conversion, but maybe R&T readers can help fill that gap.

Thinking about Ignatius and Ace Frehley, I remembered Hercules. Why? Because of Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle’s sober and learned study of Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, titled Loyola’s Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self (University of California Press, 1997). Boyle reminds us that Hercules’ story informed the way Augustine portrayed his own conversion — as a personal negotiation in which prudential judgment was at stake — and can be found influencing Loyola’s tale, too. As Boyle tells it, “In a sophistic parable Hercules, that most popular of Greek heroes, was adapted to idealize the human faculty of deliberation and its power of decision. Hercules in his passage to youth also went, like Loyola, to a quiet place and sat down pondering which path of life to choose. Two contrasting female figures appeared and addressed his doubts with the divergent attractions and promises of vice and virtue. From that exemplar, the classical ancestor of medieval and renaissance masters of choice, a character was typically plotted as a traveler on the path of life, confronted at crossroads with moral decisions” (p. 2).

Frehley is in the modern industrialized equivalent of a “quiet place” — in the driver’s seat of his car, speeding along alone. “Rock soldiers” is familiarly (post)modern in its hesitation to describe or prescribe exactly what it was to which Frehley was converted, choosing instead, with so many contemporaries, to make the process of personal change itself the content of conversion. Does Frehley’s (post)modern sensibility give us a new way of reading Ignatius? I think so, but will have to discuss this in a future post.

Tommy Beaudoin

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