SCUPOLI, LORENZO. - Theatine ascetical writer, b. at Otranto ca. 1530, d. at Naples on 28 Nov. 1610.
Having entered the Theatines of S. Paolo Maggiore in Naples in 1569, he was at Piacenza in 1577, where he was ordained a priest for Christmas. In 1578 he moved to Milan, then to Genoa and then, in 1588, to Venice. Between the years 1589-91 he was often at Padua, where he perhaps met the young student Francis de Sales, who later asserted that he had received from a Theatine a copy of the Combattimento spirituale which served him as reading for many years. Calumniously denounced for an unknown fault, he was reduced to the state of lay brother by a decree of the General Chapter of 1585. S. submitted to the harsh penance, which was remitted to him toward the end of his life, which he closed in the odor of sanctity in the convent of S. Paolo Maggiore in Naples.
The Combattimento spirituale appeared anonymously in 1589 at Venice, where S. was then residing. In 1610, a few days after his death, it came out in Bologna for the first time (the 50th ed. had already been surpassed) with the author's name. The Combattimento is a "treatise of spiritual strategy" developed with a simple and practical ascetical method, which leads the soul to a wholly interior perfection, based on self-renunciation and consummated in union with God. The individual topics are developed in the 66 chapters with solidity of doctrine; the most original part, and the one that more than the others justifies the title of the work, is that which gives suggestions for the exercise of the higher faculties, especially of the will, which reveal in the author a consummate knowledge of the human spirit. Permeated by the asceticism of the Spanish school and influenced by Franciscan and Ignatian spirituality, in those principles which are the patrimony of Christian asceticism, the work of S. nevertheless reveals the unmistakable aspects of the Italian spiritual school of the 16th century. This strengthened the judgment of historical criticism, which even today in its great majority claims for S. the authorship of the celebrated treatise. It, moreover, more than the lived experience of an author, must be considered as one of the fundamental treatises of spirituality, which imposed itself on the succeeding centuries.
S. also left, besides an Aggiunta to the Combattimento, two short works: Del modo di consolare ed aiutare gli infermi a ben morire and Il modo di recitare la Corona della Madonna. Erroneously there are often attributed to S. and published together with the Combattimento the treatises: De' dolori mentali di Cristo nella sua Passione, of the blessed Battista Varani (v.), and Della pace interiore ovvero Sentiero del Paradiso, of Juan de Bonilla (v.).