SCUPOLI, LORENZO. — Ascetic writer, born in Otranto ca. 1530, died in Naples on 28 Nov. 1610.
Having entered the Theatines of S. Paolo Maggiore in Naples in 1569, he was in Piacenza in 1577, where he was ordained priest at Christmas. In 1578 he went to Milan, then to Genoa and in 1588 to Venice. Between the years 1589–91 he was often in Padua, where he may have met the young student Francis de Sales, who later claimed to have received from a Theatine a copy of *The Spiritual Combat* which he read for many years. Calumniously denounced for an unknown fault, he was by decree of the General Chapter of 1585 reduced to the status of lay brother. S. submitted to this severe penance, and towards the end of his life, which he closed in a reputation for holiness in the convent of S. Paolo Maggiore in Naples.
*The Spiritual Combat* appeared anonymously in Venice in 1589, where S. was then residing. In 1610, a few days after his death, it was published for the first time in Bologna (by then it had already passed the 50th edition) under the author’s name. *The Spiritual Combat* is a “spiritual manual” developed with a simple and practical ascetical method, which leads the soul to an interior perfection based on self-denial and consummated in union with God. The individual topics are treated in 66 chapters with sound doctrine; the most original part, and the one that most justifies the title of the work, is that which gives advice for the exercise of the higher faculties, especially the will, revealing in the author a consummate knowledge of the human spirit. While allowing for the asceticism of the Spanish school and influenced by Franciscan and Ignatian spirituality in those principles that are part of the patrimony of Christian asceticism, the work of S. nevertheless reveals the unmistakable features of the Italian spiritual school of the 16th century. This supports the judgment of historical criticism, which even today, in the great majority of cases, claims for S. the authorship of the famous treatise. It is, moreover, more than the lived experience of an author; it is to be considered one of the fundamental treatises of spirituality that imposed itself on the centuries that followed.
S. also left, besides an appendix to *The Spiritual Combat*, two short works: *On the Way to Console and Assist the Sick to Die Well* and *On the Way to Recite the Rosary of the Madonna*. Mistakenly, the following treatises are often attributed to S. and published together with *The Spiritual Combat*: *On the Mental Sorrows of Christ in His Passion*, by the Bl. Battista Varani (v.), and *On Interior Peace or the Pathway to Paradise*, by Juan de Bonilla (v.).