Pious Postmortems. Bradford A. Bouley

explicitly states that Loyola’s unusual anatomy is within the realm of the natural—but because it demonstrated Colombo’s skill and the ability of the new anatomists to understand variation within the human body.

      In contrast, Loyola’s fellow Jesuit and attendant during his final illness, Giovanni Polanco, immediately interpreted the anatomical details in a religious light. His narrative of the postmortem appeared in a letter Polanco initially sent to the superiors of the Jesuit order. Shortly thereafter, this letter circulated in anonymous copies. That it was widely distributed can be surmised from the fact that copies survive in Latin, Spanish, and Italian versions.⁷² The Jesuits’ attempt to disseminate the knowledge of Loyola’s anatomy suggests that even at this early stage, anatomy could demonstrate his sanctity. Furthermore, circulating Polanco’s observations in a letter full of firsthand experience suggests that these Jesuits actively engaged in the epistemic genre of Observationes in an attempt to make knowledge about the holy.

      According to Polanco, the autopsy provided evidence that Loyola had lived a remarkably ascetic life. Polanco’s letter states that, upon opening Loyola’s body, the physicians “discovered that his stomach and intestines were quite small and without anything inside them.” The physicians then declared that they understood these irregularities to be a sign of the great feats of self-denial that Loyola had undertaken.⁷³ The numerous stones found in Colombo’s body were reinterpreted as part of this narrative: Loyola’s extreme asceticism had made his liver harden and produce stones.⁷⁴ These stones would, in turn, have been painful to bear. Thus, Loyola’s anatomy demonstrated that he had lived a life of extreme ascetic rigor that caused a great deal of unseen hardship for the holy man.

      This anatomical demonstration of Loyola’s asceticism may have been especially necessary, since other accounts did not cast Loyola as bearing his final illness with the heroic patience of a saint. His friend Pedro Ribadeneira, who wrote the first posthumous biography of the saint, depicted Loyola as so “surrounded and oppressed by infirmities” that he wanted to “see himself with Christ,” that is, die.⁷⁵ This yearning for death because of his pain was in contrast to the advice Loyola himself had given a friend just two years earlier. Loyola told his friend that an illness was “an occasion for merit and the exercise of virtue” in patient forbearance.⁷⁶ That Loyola was in so much pain that he wished for death implied that he was not, in fact, bearing his pain with virtuous patience. Furthermore, as Ribadeneira noted, “the doctors [medici] did not make much of Ignatius’s illness, as it seemed to them to be his ordinary sickness.”⁷⁷ That medical practitioners ignored the call of the famous leader of the Jesuits when he was ill, claiming that it was just his “ordinary sickness,” indicates that Loyola regularly called doctors unnecessarily. In this depiction by his friend and well-disposed biographer, the holy man appears more sensitive to his personal discomfort than a true ascetic should have been. Colombo’s autopsy, as reported by Polanco, vindicated Loyola as someone who bore with extreme patience his bodily infirmities.

      Importantly for Loyola’s saintly reputation, the autopsy also uncovered Loyola’s first postmortem miracle. Polanco reported that, given his anatomy, Loyola only “lived due to a miracle for a great deal of time, since with a liver such as that, it would not be possible to live unless our Lord God, in providing for the necessities of the Company [of Jesus], made up for the weakness of his bodily organs and maintained him in life.”⁷⁸ That is, Loyola’s stones should have killed him long before; therefore God must have, through divine intervention, performed a continuous miracle through Loyola’s body to keep him alive. Autopsy had uncovered new and hidden miracles.