Abstract
This article argues that Ignatius Loyola, in proposing the “hierarchical Church” as norm for judgment and feeling, meant to evoke and commend aspects of the Dionysian tradition—especially its principle of hierarchical mediation and its affective portrait of spiritual perfection. Supporting this interpretation are considerations of the world behind the text (the reforming Dionysianism abroad in Ignatian Paris), the world of the text (the culminating position and concerns of the “hierarchical Church”), and the world in front of the text (its reception by Peter Faber and Jerome Nadal). Interpreted against a Dionysian backdrop, Ignatius’s hierarchical church becomes a charter for ecclesial mysticism.
Keywords
He told Father Diego Laínez several times that in divine matters he proceeded more passively than actively. This is handed down as the highest and most perfect degree by those who write about contemplation. Thus Dionysius the Areopagite, speaking of his teacher Hierotheus, said, “Erat patiens divina.” —Pedro de Ribadeneira, Vita Ignatii Loyolae
Though the spiritual and intellectual debts of the nascent Society of Jesus were multifarious, not all receive equal attention. In particular, the Dionysian tradition—that is, the hierarchical vision crystallized in the pseudonymous writings of Dionysius the Areopagite—remains little studied. What sporadic attention it has received, moreover, arises more from the intuitions of systematic and dogmatic theologians rather than from those of specialists in spirituality and Jesuit history. 1 Neither the Dictionnaire de spiritualité nor John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits traces the Jesuit reception of Dionysius beyond Jerome Nadal. 2 The Areopagite lacks an entry in the four-volume Diccionario Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, and goes unmentioned altogether in Joseph de Guibert’s magisterial The Jesuits. 3 The recent Oxford Handbook of Dionysius the Areopagite dedicates ten chapters to Dionysius’s modern Western reception but not one to the Jesuits as such. 4 At first glance, prospects seem poor of finding anything in the Dionysian tradition informing the spiritual vision of Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556).
Evidence does exist, however, to support a rather different conclusion. But since any comprehensive attempt to trace the early Jesuit reception of Dionysius would exceed the scope of even many articles, 5 my argument will focus on just one point of contact: Ignatius’s identification of the “hierarchical Church” as a standard for Christian judgment and feeling.
The phrase “hierarchical Church” in a certain sense comprises two layers of neologism. Dionysius invented the term hierarchia in the sixth century to describe the structure of the divine economy. Ignatius, for his part, seems to have been the first to use the adjective “hierarchical” to modify the church as a whole. 6 Some have speculated that this departure from the more standard term “ecclesiastical hierarchy” represents an invitation to consider from a Dionysian perspective more than just the church’s officeholders. 7 Developing this suggestion, I would argue that Ignatius uses “hierarchical Church” to evoke and affirm elements of the Areopagite’s broader spiritual vision that he deems essential to ecclesial renewal, especially affective attunement to the visible-ecclesial mediation of grace.
A few words are in order about the nature and limits of the argument. Though I argue that Ignatius references Dionysius, I do not presume that he read the Corpus Dionysiacum firsthand. I mean only that he, by designating the church as hierarchical, intended to evoke a constellation of ideas then readily associated with Dionysius: that God exercises providence through hierarchical mediators, and that “perfected” mediators show “sympathy” with the divine realities so mediated. Ignatius implies these Dionysian ideas through the term “hierarchical Church” much as we might conjure up a constellation of Aristotelian ideas through a phrase like “eudaimonistic ethics.” These might plausibly include not only the eponymous doctrine of “happiness” (eudaimonia), but related ideas like virtue or teleology. The desire to call to mind an analogous complex of Dionysian ideas best explains Ignatius’s choice of the term.
The argument will proceed by examining Ignatius’s notion of the “hierarchical Church” in light of the world behind the text, the world of the text, and the world in front of the text, in the loose sense of its historical reception. Attending to the world behind the text directs us to two distinct but related backgrounds: first, the experiential and kataphatic side of Dionysius’s thought; second, the significance of Dionysius in the Paris of Ignatius’s student years. The world of the text means in this case the first thirteen Rules for Thinking with the Church (RTWC), where the phrase “hierarchical Church” is found. Both the thematic concerns of this segment of the RTWC and its position in the itinerary of the Exercises suggest that it aims to paint a Dionysian portrait of spiritual perfection. Attending to the world in front of the text involves observing how two privileged interpreters of Ignatius’s mind, Peter Faber (1506–1546) and Jerome Nadal (1507–1580), receive these rules in their own prayer. I will conclude by suggesting how Ignatius’s “hierarchical Church,” properly understood, illuminates Pope Francis’s notion of “synodality.”
The World Behind the Text: Dionysius’s Thought and Its Parisian Reception
The slight attention paid to the Dionysian background to Ignatius’s understanding of the “hierarchical Church” probably owes much to the vicissitudes of the Areopagite’s reception. Our post-Heideggerian era, stung by the charge of onto-theology, has long fixated on Dionysius the natural theologian, finding in his repeated negation of creaturely similarity to God a model of properly chastened divine predication. Though more recent historical scholarship has nuanced this picture considerably, calling attention to the ecclesial and liturgical heart of Dionysius’s worldview, this more balanced appraisal has been slow to penetrate general theological consciousness. 8 The Areopagite thus remains a prima facie unlikely source of inspiration for Ignatius, founder of an apostolic order, and teacher of imaginative and affective prayer. However, earlier readers of the Corpus Dionysiacum, including those of pre-Reformation Paris, were attuned to the positive side of the Dionysian tradition—especially to its valorization of the hierarchical, sensory, and affective. It was chiefly these dimensions of the Dionysian tradition, now being gradually recovered, that Ignatius meant to receive with his phrase “hierarchical Church.”
The Kataphatic Dionysius
There are good reasons why earlier readers regarded Dionysius as a thinker of divine disclosure no less than of divine concealment. Dionysius invented the term “hierarchy,” after all, to express succinctly what he considers a law of the divine economy. “It is the all-holy ordinance of the divinity [thesmos . . . tēs thearchias ho panieros] that secondary things should be lifted up to the most divine ray through the mediation of the primary things.” 9 In other words, God’s divinizing influence diffuses itself, as a rule, to creatures of lower station through creatures of higher station. Dionysius most often describes this divine procession in solar imagery, as above. But he also employs fontal imagery, as when he observes that the “source of this hierarchy is the font of life . . . the Trinity which bestows being and well-being on everything.” 10 Whether conceiving divine energy as radiating light or cascading waters, Dionysius teaches that it descends in gradated procession. According to the Celestial Hierarchy, divine assistance moves successively from Jesus, the “Light of the Father,” 11 through three triads of angelic orders. According to the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, this divinizing current then enters the pilgrim church, passing first through a clerical triad of bishops, priests, and deacons, and then through a lay triad of monks, contemplatives, and penitents. 12 To different members of the triad there correspond the diverse functions of perfecting, illuminating, and purifying. 13 Though Dionysius normally assigns these three hierarchical acts to fixed ecclesiastical roles, he elsewhere implies, as we shall see below, that one can advance incrementally toward perfection. Dionysius is thus hardly skeptical about the possibility of divine self-disclosure.
This “law of thearchy,” by which secondary things are elevated via primary things, presupposes that each created station of the hierarchy, except the first and last, is simultaneously perfected and perfecting. “Indeed, for every member of the hierarchy, perfection consists in this, that it is uplifted to imitate God as far as possible and, more wonderful still, that it becomes what scripture calls a ‘fellow workman (synergos) for God.’” 14 As divine “energy” (energeia) descends along the cataract of perfected perfectors, it gradually particularizes and accommodates itself to each successive level. None remains excluded. For Dionysius and the greater part of the Christian tradition, then, the concept of hierarchy evokes not a machinery of oppression but an inclusive “gift.” 15 René Roques calls hierarchy an economy of “uplifting condescension” (condescendence anagogique), and Nicholas Heron describes it as a practice of “care.” 16 Hierarchy empowers its constituents to cooperate with God in the work of diffusing grace and consolation, giving the perfect a greater scope for mediation. 17 These themes might have resonated with the founder of an apostolic order like Ignatius.
By accentuating the need for each hierarchical level to receive divine illumination in accommodated fashion, the Dionysian tradition also accentuates the human need to encounter God via sensible intermediaries. Like Aristotle, Dionysius insists that knowing at the human level remains rooted in the senses. “This divine ray can enlighten us only by being upliftingly concealed in a variety of sacred veils which the Providence of the Father adapts to our nature as human beings.” 18 By these “sacred veils,” Dionysius means principally biblical narratives, liturgical actions, and liturgical actors. 19 Because of the limited and sense-bound nature of human knowing, in fact, the only angelic ranks that can enlighten humans are those immediately above them. 20 Direct communication from the lofty seraphim would be to human minds what ultraviolet light is to human eyes. This Dionysian picture of the divine economy, in which human contemplatives rise from the sensible to the suprasensible by angelic ministration, may resemble the contemplative style of the Exercises more than is commonly recognized. Ludovico Nisi ascribes to Ignatius and Dionysius alike a tendency to conceive prayer as an imaginative “interior vision visited by ‘heavenly powers’ who act as intermediaries.” 21 Jerome Nadal, to whom we will return later, seems to have discerned the same convergence with the Dionysian tradition in Ignatius’s own lifetime. 22
Though the divine ray accommodates itself to our bodily nature, the fact that it “enlightens” only as something “concealed” marks a tension in the Dionysian position. On the one hand, the abiding hiddenness of divinity, even in its sensible mediation, might seem to speak against our capacity to know God experientially. The Mystical Theology recalls how the “mysteries of God’s Word” lie “in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.” Dionysius’s counsel to Timothy, therefore, is to “leave behind . . . everything perceptible (panta aisthēta) and understandable . . . to strive upward as much as you can toward union with him who is beyond all being and knowledge.” 23 Such passages point in a strongly apophatic direction, intimating that the path of divine union terminates in a kind of perceptual blankness akin to St. John of the Cross’s doctrine of nada. 24
On the other hand, the Dionysian corpus elsewhere suggests that spiritual perfection is accompanied by experiential saturation. In the Divine Names, for instance, Dionysius, after insisting that the Incarnation “cannot be enclosed in words or grasped by any mind,” goes on to extol his teacher Hierotheus’s “sympathy” with it: I have said enough about this elsewhere and my famous teacher has marvelously praised whatever he learned directly from the sacred writers . . . or whatever was made known to him through that more mysterious inspiration, not only learning but also experiencing the divine things (ou monon mathōn alla kai pathōn ta theia). For he had a “sympathy” (sympatheias) with such matters.
25
The Divine Names thus suggests that by “mysterious inspiration” we can experience more than we can conceptualize. The highest mysticism would therefore seem to be what Bernhard Blankenhorn calls “metaconceptual”—not experientially vacant, but full of an experience incommunicable by the ordinary resources of discursive reason. 26 Such metaconceptual perception gives rise to “praise” (hymnein)—a response repeatedly prescribed in Ignatius’s RTWC.
The implied contrast between mere knowing and Hierotheus’s “sympathy” led many subsequent commentators to give Dionysian mysticism an affective and sensory gloss. John Scotus Eriugena (ca. 800–ca. 877) provided the textual anchor by Latinizing Hierotheus’s “experiencing the divine things” simply as affectus divina. 27 The Victorine master Thomas Gallus (ca. 1200–1246) would later lay the anthropological foundation for “affective Dionysianism” by locating the highest capacity for divine union in the affectus, the soul’s equivalent of taste or touch. 28 Even the more intellectualizing Thomas Aquinas includes this affective dimension when he, commenting on the Divine Names, observes that Hierotheus was “not only receiving the science of divine things in the intellect but also, by loving, was united with them through affect (per affectum).” 29 In the Latin West, Dionysius came to represent much more than a model of restrained divine predication.
However well deserved the Areopagite’s fame as a herald of divine darkness, in short, this should not be allowed to obscure the positive and experiential dimensions of his theological vision. These include: the hierarchical “law of thearchy,” implying, in the case of human beings, the sensible-symbolic mediation of divine action; and a divinely cooperative and affectively sympathetic portrait of spiritual perfection. These Dionysian themes, as we shall see below, comport well with Ignatius’s identification of the “hierarchical Church” as a spiritual norm.
Dionysius in Ignatian Paris
The attempt to retrieve what Dionysius might have signified for Ignatius, rather than what he means for us, obliges us to look not only at Dionysius’s writings but at his place in the social imaginary of Ignatian Paris. Lacking the resources to reconstruct the first Jesuits’ studies with any exactitude, we can speak only of what was in the air in Paris during Ignatius’s years there (1528–1535). Such atmospheric evidence may nevertheless do its modest part in supporting an inference from converging probability. O’Malley appeals to such ambient factors, for instance, when speculating on why the first Jesuits opted for Thomism. This probably reflects, he says, the “theological and liturgical preeminence” that Aquinas then enjoyed in Rome. 30 But if Thomas cast a long shadow over Rome, Dionysius cast an even longer one over sixteenth-century Paris, playing a prominent role in its popular piety, intellectual enthusiasms, and reforming aspirations.
To understand Dionysius’s broad appeal to Ignatius’s Parisian contemporaries, it helps to recall that they took him to be much more than a moderately agnostic natural philosopher. Thanks to the still unrecognized pseudonymity of the Corpus Dionysiacum, as well as to the creative historiography of Abbot Hilduin of St. Denis (ca. 785–ca. 855), Parisians generally ascribed to their “St. Denis” (Dionysius = Denis) the achievements of three historically distinct figures: Paul’s Athenian convert mentioned in Acts 17:34, the founding martyr-bishop of Paris, and the sixth-century pseudonymous author. 31 Jacob of Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, which helped spark Ignatius’s initial conversion, elaborated Hilduin’s legendary account of Dionysius’s martyrdom into a sort of via crucis spanning the width of Paris. As a result, the Parisian faithful began gathering annually on the feast of St. Denis (October 9) to visit the seven stations of his martyrdom. 32 This custom continued well beyond the student years of Ignatius and his first Jesuit recruits. 33 They thus knew full well that they, while making their first religious vows at Montmartre, stood over the traditional site of Dionysius’s decapitation; and that they, while eating their festive lunch at a nearby well, reclined where Dionysius was thought to have rinsed his severed head. 34 Such decisions point to an aspiration to follow in the footsteps of Dionysius and his companions, whom they would naturally have regarded as models of both contemplation and apostolic service.
Though significant at the popular level, the Areopagite’s influence on Paris extended well beyond it. When Ignatius arrived in Paris in 1528, Dionysius was also a major intellectual focus. It is well known that the University of Paris of the early sixteenth century was experiencing a Thomistic revival. 35 It is perhaps less known, however, that Aquinas cites Dionysius nearly 1,700 times, always deferentially. 36 Though the curricular presence of other scholastics indebted to Dionysius remains harder to determine, it is clear that they continued to find a readership. Ignatius’s fellow student Jerome Nadal shows firsthand familiarity with Bonaventure, for instance, who made Dionysian hierarchy a pillar of his theological edifice. 37 Students educated at the University of Paris did not need to read Dionysius directly, in sum, to encounter the substance of his ideas.
As regards more humanist thinkers, it is worth recalling the unique flavor that Lefèvre d’Étaples (ca. 1455–ca. 1536) gave French humanism. Unlike its Italian or Dutch counterparts, the humanism inspired by Lefèvre and prevalent in Paris typically held at least the primitive ideal of monastic life in high regard. 38 More importantly, it never doubted the quasi-apostolic origins of the Dionysian corpus. 39 Dionysius thus provided French humanists a way to reconcile their zeal for the purity of Christian origins with established ecclesiastical order. 40 It is telling that at the University of Paris in 1521, scholastic and humanist wings of the faculty, though normally feuding, united in condemning Martin Luther. They cited, inter alia, the incompatibility of his priesthood of all believers with Dionysius’s hierarchical ecclesiology. 41
Lefèvre’s student Josse Clichtove (1473–1543), active at the University of Paris during Ignatius’s studies, embodies the kind of reforming Dionysianism that might have caught the future saint’s attention. Though receptive to the language of negative theology, the Flemish academic nevertheless underscores what I have called Dionysius’s experiential and kataphatic side. He republishes and comments on the whole Dionysian corpus in his Theologia Vivificans (1515), 42 drawing heavily from Thomas Gallus, the father of “affective Dionysianism.” 43 The same commentary, moreover, readily underscores mysticism’s rootedness in the sensible “veils” of liturgical actions and actors. Dionysius’s treatment of baptism, for instance, gives Clichtove occasion to comment, “Pontiffs and priests and others devoted to the sacred ministries, know through the ascent from visible things to the invisible spiritual mysteries themselves, which are the beginnings and commencements of sensible signs.” 44 Even before the provocation of Luther, Clichtove’s Dionysianism was neither experientially vacant nor disembodied. 45
After taking a position on Luther became inevitable, however, Clichtove began increasingly to appeal to Dionysius’s authority in defense of the church’s visible and devotional order. His Compendium Veritatum (1529), an exposition of the anti-Lutheran Council of Sens, may be taken as representative.
46
Published not long after Ignatius entered Paris, it defends many of the Catholic practices that Ignatius later lauds in his RTWC: celibacy and religious vows, frequent attendance at Mass, frequent confession, and veneration of the saints and images.
47
But the first chapter, “That the Universal Church Cannot Err in Faith and Morals,” prefaces all these more particular conclusions with a global reflection on the “hierarchical” nature of the church: But the Church, though still militant and sweating in agony, is rightly said to descend from heaven, since she is formed in her grades, functions, and offices according to the form, state, and mode of the Church triumphant, as our divine father Dionysius famously showed in his book The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. This Church still battling in the camps is called the Church prepared by God, and is established in a beautiful order, and is called a spouse adorned for her groom.
48
Here Clichtove invokes Dionysius’s authority in a programmatic defense of Catholic polity against Lutheran objections. Even if its influence on Ignatius remains uncertain, 49 the Compendium nevertheless offers a glimpse of the kind of reforming Dionysianism that was abroad in Paris on the eve of the Reformation, as well as of the controversial contexts in which the Areopagite’s authority was often invoked.
Dionysius, in sum, did not only loom larger in the social imaginary of Ignatian Paris than in ours, he was also famous for different ideas. Scholastics and humanists were attuned to the disclosive side of his thought, especially the sensible-hierarchical mediation of divine realities and the affective quality of higher prayer. French humanists, convinced that Dionysius was a contemporary of the apostles, regarded his writings as an evangelical ideal by which to repristinate the church. This distinguished them from Erasmian humanists and set them at odds with magisterial Reformers.
The World of the Text: The “Hierarchical Church” in the Exercises
Armed with this all-too-brief review of the kataphatic Dionysius, we are better positioned to perceive its relevance for Ignatius’s “hierarchical Church.” My argument will go beyond observing that Ignatius used a word coined by Dionysius in an era of Dionysian enthusiasm. It also appeals to contextual considerations from the Exercises. Though admittedly subordinate to the explicit division of the Exercises into four “weeks,” Dionysius’s purgative, illuminative, and perfective (or unitive) acts appear to have represented for Ignatius an alternative way of plotting the course of the retreat. This secondary, partly implicit, itinerary leads the reader to expect a Dionysian portrait of perfection from the RTWC, 50 where the phrase “hierarchical Church” twice appears. The content of the RTWC meets these expectations, in turn, by presuming a retreatant perfected in the Dionysian sense—that is, a “fellow workman for God” exhibiting a Hierothean “sympathy” for divine realities. These points will be treated in turn.
Rules for the Perfected
There are two main ways Ignatius manages to suggest that the “hierarchical Church” serves as a norm for those perfected in the Dionysian sense. First, he organizes the Exercises so that they culminate in the perfective way. Second, he associates the RTWC structurally with this perfective material.
The suggestion that the Exercises unfold according to Dionysius’s three hierarchical acts of purgation, illumination, and perfection comes largely from Ignatius himself. The tenth of his introductory observations for givers of the Exercises, commonly called Annotations, begins to correlate these three hierarchical acts with the four “weeks,” or spiritual dynamics, of the retreat. Different weeks of the Exercises require different approaches to discernment, Ignatius explains: For commonly the enemy of our human nature tempts more under the appearance of good when one is exercising himself in the illuminative way. This corresponds to the Exercises of the Second Week. He does not tempt him so much under the appearance of good when he is exercising himself in the purgative way, which corresponds to the Exercises of the First Week.
51
Ignatius thus explicitly assigns the purgative way to the first week, dedicated to repentance from sin, and the illuminative to the second week, dedicated to imitation of Christ.
Though Ignatius does not index the perfective way to any specific week of the Exercises, he does not leave it wholly out of account. In the General Examen after the Annotations, he mentions the perfect in the context of granting them more latitude to swear oaths by creatures: The perfect, due to constant contemplation and the enlightenment of the understanding, consider, meditate, and ponder more that God our Lord is in every creature by His essence, power, and presence. Therefore, when they swear by a creature, they are more apt to be disposed to show respect and reverence to the Creator and Lord than those who are imperfect.
52
The prefatory material of the Exercises thus indicates that the retreat has the perfect in mind too. It thereby hints that the Exercises will at some point complete the Dionysian sequence, following the purgative material of the first week and the illuminative material of the second week with material more suitable to the perfected.
This implied Dionysian progression did not escape the notice of the first generation of commentators on the Exercises. The “Short Instructions on Giving the Exercises” by Jesuit General Everard Mercurian (1514–1580), for instance, assert rather confidently that the division of the Exercises is the “one traditional with doctors and with perfect spiritual men, including St. Dionysius in the Celestial Hierarchy and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, where he divides all hierarchical acts (actus hyerarchicos) into those of cleansing, enlightening, and perfecting.” 53 The disagreement among early commentators lies not in whether the Exercises contain all three Dionysian stages, but in where the third and final dynamic begins to predominate. Some think it commences with the Passion, 54 others with the Resurrection, 55 and still others with material lying outside the formal structure of the four weeks: the Contemplation to Attain Love of God, the RTWC, and apostolic life. 56 Notwithstanding such discrepancies among the commentators, a point of consensus does emerge: all who mention Dionysius’s three acts agree that the perfective way dawns before the Exercises end.
A closer look at the way the Exercises in fact end suggests the plausibility of this minimal consensus, for the Contemplation to Attain Love of God, also known simply as the Contemplatio, abounds in Dionysian imagery. This final meditation, probably added during Ignatius’s Parisian years, 57 invites exercitants to do what the General Examen says the “perfect” do—namely, to consider that “God our Lord is in every creature.” Placing themselves in the presence of saintly and angelic mediators, 58 retreatants are to imagine themselves bathed in hierarchical energy: “I will consider how all good things and gifts descend from above; for example, my proportionate power (medida potencia) from the Supreme and Infinite Power above . . . just as the rays come down from the sun, or waters from the font.” 59 The Contemplatio thus recalls Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy, which begins with the same allusion to James 1:17: “Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” 60 Whether Ignatius read Dionysius directly or just osmosed his ideas, the motifs he deploys—saintly and angelic mediation, self-diffusive goodness, rays and font, proportionate participation—all savor strongly of the Western Dionysian tradition.
But the point of contemplating this cascading energy is not only to recognize it cognitively. It is also to respond to it affectively. “I will ponder with great affection (con mucho afecto; cum intimo affectu),” Ignatius says, “how much, as far as He can, the same Lord desires to give himself to me according to His divine decrees.” 61 The Contemplatio thus exercises the retreatants in sympathizing, like Hierotheus, with divine gifts in hierarchical descent. Not without reason, then, did early commentators take the Exercises to terminate in Dionysius’s perfective way.
Might the RTWC also belong to this perfective material? Structural considerations indicate as much. The RTWC occupy the final position in a series of rule collections, whose themes keep pace with the itinerary of the Exercises. The first two positions belong to the first- and second-week rules for discernment of spirits, which, according to Ignatius himself, are more suitable to those exercising themselves in the purgative and illuminative ways. 62 Given this beginning, one might reasonably expect to find, at least by the end of the series, a set of rules more suitable to those exercising themselves in the perfective way. This structural logic seems to guide Mercurian’s perfective interpretation of the RTWC: “Finally, once the person has reached perfection he goes out to make others perfect, i.e., to help his neighbor. Hence, at the end of the Exercises some rules are given for thinking (ad consentiendum) with the orthodox Church in mind and word, particularly in these times of ours, so that we can directly oppose the heresies of our day.” 63 Besides highlighting their terminal position in a spiritual itinerary, Mercurian notes that the RTWC exercise retreatants in two acts that, according to the Dionysian tradition, are proper to the perfect: sympathizing (ad consentiendum) with divine things, and illuminating others as “fellow workmen for God.”
Both Ignatius’s prefatory remarks and early Jesuit commentaries thus imply that the spiritual itinerary of the Exercises culminates in a Dionysian vision of spiritual maturity, most recognizable in the Contemplatio. The homologous position that the RTWC hold among the appended rules suggests that they too pertain especially to those exercising themselves in this perfective way.
Thematic Concerns of the “Hierarchical Church”
Besides structural grounds, there are also content-based reasons for thinking that Ignatius intended “hierarchical Church” with its broader Dionysian entailments. The focal phrase, as we shall see, brackets a segment of the RTWC concerned to elicit “praise” for aspects of Catholic practice disparaged by humanists and reformers. Because Dionysius was known, especially in Ignatian Paris, both for teaching the sensible-ecclesial mediation of divine energy and for valorizing the affective experience of divine things, he becomes a likely authority for Ignatius to invoke in this context.
Two of the three appearances of “hierarchical Church” in the Exercises are found in the RTWC, where they seem to mark off a literary unit of thirteen rules within the larger group of eighteen. Ignatius introduces the whole set of rules as follows: “The following rules should be observed to foster the true attitude of mind (sentido verdadero) we ought to have in the Church militant (Yglesia militante).” When the same heading is rendered into Latin, the “true attitude of mind” becomes the verb sentire: “Some rules to be observed that we might truly feel with (vere sentiamus cum) the orthodox Church.”
64
The phrase “hierarchical Church” appears in the first and thirteenth rules that follow. According to the first rule, “we must put aside all judgment of our own, and keep the mind ever ready and prompt to obey in all things the true Spouse of Christ our Lord, our holy Mother, the hierarchical Church (Yglesia hierárchica; hierarchica Ecclesia).”
65
The thirteenth rule emphatically restates the first: What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church (Yglesia hierárchica; hierarchica Ecclesia) so defines. For I must be convinced that in Christ our Lord, the bridegroom, and in His spouse the Church, only one Spirit holds sway, which governs and rules for the salvation of souls. For it is by the same Spirit and Lord who gave the Ten Commandments that our holy Mother Church is ruled and governed.
66
The separation and ostensible redundancy of these exhortations to conform to the “hierarchical Church” suggests that they form an inclusio, marking off a thematically coherent subset of rules. 67 The relevance of the Dionysian tradition for this thematic unity is intimated by the unusual phrase “hierarchical Church.” Clichtove’s Compendium Veritatum, it will be remembered, cites Dionysius’s authority by name within a similar cluster of martial, spousal, and hierarchical images for the church.
The eleven other rules appear to contain those more particular directives for which the Dionysian tradition serves as a global warrant. As already noted, the Corpus Dionysiacum provided a charter not only for a mysticism of darkness but for a mysticism of experience, an approach to union with God characterized by active “sympathy” for divine realities. The concern for sympathy is evident throughout these first thirteen rules. In fact, scholars often refer to them simply as the “sentir rules,” 68 from the Spanish verb for feeling (sentir). This is partly because Ignatius describes these rules as norms for cultivating a true “attitude of mind” (sentido) toward the church. But this is also because they prescribe a felt response to some feature of the church’s life, whether to praise (alabar) it or to guard against (guardar) it. 69 Significantly, ten of the eleven rules prescribe praise. This litany of praise recalls the example of Hierotheus, who, according to Dionysius, “praised whatever he learned” because he had a “sympathy with such matters.”
The RTWC show a particular concern to train this sympathy on what Dionysius calls divinity’s “veils”—the Scriptures, sacramental actors, and sacramental actions. The sentir rules single out for praise precisely such sensible intermediaries: sacramental confession and communion; frequent attendance at liturgies; vows of religion; relics; candles; pilgrimages; indulgences; the church’s commandments and penitential regulations; the adornment of churches; the directives and customs of superiors; and the teachings of positive and scholastic theologians. 70 These sentir rules imply the fittingness of approaching the invisible through visible mediators, whether sacred objects or ecclesiastical authorities.
Summing up, one can say that both the structure of the Exercises and the content of the RTWC indicate that Ignatius meant to evoke a broader Dionysian vision with the phrase “hierarchical Church.” Structurally, the “hierarchical Church” occupies the final position in a series of rules that, like the meditations of the Exercises more generally, show a Dionysian progression toward the perfective way. The two appeals to the “hierarchical Church” also form an inclusio around a group of rules most likely formulated during Ignatius’s Parisian years, when he would have had exposure to Paris’s reforming Dionysianism. Like this Parisian Dionysianism, moreover, the sentir rules seek to uphold the hierarchical “law of thearchy” and to accentuate the sensible-ecclesial mediation of divine light. The fact that Ignatius privileges the response of “praise” suggests that he understands perfection much as Dionysius does—that is, as a Hierothean capacity to sympathize with “divine things” and to initiate others into this “sympathy.”
The World in Front of the Text: Faber and Nadal
When we look at how those who best knew Ignatius received his teaching about the “hierarchical Church,” we find further evidence of its wider Dionysian import. Striking confirmation can be found in the prayer of two of Ignatius’s contemporaries at the University of Paris: Peter Faber, whom Ignatius considered the most gifted giver of the Spiritual Exercises, 71 and Jerome Nadal, to whom Ignatius entrusted the task of promulgating the Jesuit Constitutions throughout Europe. 72 Though Nadal, unlike Faber, rebuffed Ignatius’s invitations to join the companions while still in Paris, this did not prevent him, after a change of heart, from becoming one of Ignatius’s most trusted collaborators in Rome. 73 Ignatius could eventually say of him, “he has known my thought completely and enjoys my authority.” 74 More to the point, both Jesuits—formed in the same Parisian intellectual milieu as Ignatius—take Ignatius’s sentir rules not simply as negative prohibitions against criticizing the church but as a positive contemplative program, whereby one cultivates a sense for God’s proportionate and mediated presence in things of the church. This recognizably Dionysian reception of the “hierarchical Church” sheds a backward light on Ignatius’s own intentions.
Faber’s Memoriale
The most substantial witness to Faber’s interior and apostolic life is found in his Memoriale. 75 This spiritual diary reveals a devotional life strongly oriented toward those things that Ignatius’s sentir rules hold up for praise: the Mass and its appurtenances, 76 angels, 77 Mary and the saints, 78 and the authority of popes and religious superiors. 79 Faber, moreover, often situates the objects of his devotion in a recognizably hierarchical frame, characterized by gradation and participation in the Dionysian senses. This shows how someone deeply familiar with Ignatius’s mind and religious culture would have understood the phrase “hierarchical Church.” 80
A striking example of Peter Faber’s affective attunement to what Ignatius calls the “hierarchical Church” appears in his Memoriale under the entry for the First Vespers of the Assumption in 1542. There Faber explains why he found entering the Cathedral of Speyer so moving: This was because the ceremonies, the lights, the organ, the chanting, the splendor of the relics and the decorations—all these gave me such a great feeling of devotion that I could not explain it. . . . In short, I was led by that spirit to esteem the least of these devotional activities, performed with a simple Catholic faith, more highly than a thousand degrees of that idle faith made so much of by those who do not feel hierarchical things well (qui non bene sentiunt hierarchica).
81
With good reason, Alfons Knoll detects in this juxtaposition of sentire and hierarchica the “terminological influence” of Ignatius’s RTWC. 82 The unusual pairing recalls Ignatius’s first two sentir rules, which offer directives to be observed so that “we might feel” (sentiamus) with the “hierarchical (hierarchica) Church.” 83 The objects of Faber’s devotion, moreover, are those that the sentir rules single out for praise: chanting, relics and candles, and the adornment of churches. 84 The influence of Ignatius’s RTWC best explains why Faber would refer to such a heterogeneous set of practices collectively as hierarchica. Finally, though an objection might be made that Faber made the Exercises too early to have been influenced by the sentir rules, literary dependence cannot be ruled out. We know that Faber himself gave the Exercises to fresh Jesuit recruits in Paris in 1535, 85 presumably with materials made available to him by the absent Ignatius. This falls at the end of Ignatius’s Parisian period, when it is generally agreed that the sentir rules were added. It is probable, then, that Faber speaks of “feeling hierarchical things well” because he was familiar with Ignatius’s sentir rules and understood his prayer to be an appropriation of them.
Though Faber does not connect “feeling hierarchical things” with Dionysius by name, he does connect it to a constellation of Dionysian ideas. First, he gives the “metaconceptual” an affective coloration: the Catholic ceremonials give him “such a great feeling of devotion that [he] cannot explain it.” Indeed Faber explains Protestant estrangement primarily as an affective disorder: “they do not feel hierarchical things well.” Second, Faber seems to designate those things as “hierarchical” that involve the visible mediation or cooperative transmission of divine illumination. These include sensible aspects of the liturgy, the relics of saintly intercessors, and the value of meritorious works—the implied contrast to “idle faith.” There is the likelihood, moreover, that Faber presumes angelic mediation when he speaks of the “spirit” that leads him to esteem such activities. Faber calls hierarchical, in short, those features of Catholic practice for which Dionysius was then considered a legitimating authority.
Just a couple of months later, Faber will again contrast the Reformers’ exclusively fiduciary faith with devotion to a similar constellation of hierarchical things, now availing himself of Dionysius’s classic fontal imagery. As he prepares to say Mass at Speyer’s Church of the Holy Cross, Faber finds himself deeply moved: “I saw it clearly, and I felt it too in spirit: Christ wills not only that we possess him through faith, confident of his protection, but also that we grasp with our minds and handle with our hands, as it were, all that derives its virtue from him and . . . has been prepared for us by the benevolence of God in order to lead us to him.” In context, the objects sharing this divine virtue are the “whole material fabric of the Church,” “the body of the Lord there reserved with all the fullness of his divine attributes,” and the names of Jesus, Mary, and Peter.
86
Faber then resolves to be even more devoted to such objects in the future: Each day exercise yourself more and more in contemplation of them. With faith and confidence in the divine power present in them, impress them, engrave them, paint them on your heart until there opens before you the way that leads to the wellsprings whence stream forth the waters of sanctification. And if it is given to you to draw somewhat from that fountainhead which is the Savior himself, beware lest you disdain or do not value as highly as you should those streams that flow from it through the Mother of God, through his saints, or through all the virtues that flow from other creatures. . . . The water is given so that you may better praise the fountainhead, not only for what it is in itself, but also for the many different streams that gush forth in profusion from the divine waters and have their source in them, as you have learned by the experience of the sense of your own spirit (experientia sensus spiritus tui).
87
Here Faber places the kind of objects he had previously described as hierarchical things in a recognizably Dionysian frame. Each stream, including such perfected mediators as Mary and the saints, shares proportionately in the divine virtue of the transcendent Font. Faber, like Hierotheus, perceives this not just theoretically but sympathetically—“by the experience of the sense of [his] own spirit.” Taken together with the preceding diagnosis of Protestant apathy toward “hierarchical things,” this passage suggests that Faber took the sentir rules as an invitation to contemplate the church through a Dionysian lens.
It is perhaps worth pausing here to note how this passage lends further plausibility to earlier claims. When treating the world of the text, I argued that at least the Contemplatio and the RTWC occupied homologous, perfective positions in the spiritual itinerary of the Exercises. In this entry of the Memoriale, we find Faber performing this homology, fusing the imagery of the two loci in the inner composition of his prayer. From the Contemplatio, he takes the cascading flow of energy from the divine font; from the sentir rules, the praise for saints, sacraments, and church adornments. Faber’s way of meditating on the church illustrates, in short, how someone sharing Ignatius’s religious culture and mystical bent might have understood the RTWC, the Contemplatio, and the Dionysian tradition to be mutually implicating.
Nadal’s Method of Prayer
Lest Faber’s contemplative reception of the “hierarchical Church” be dismissed as eccentric, we do well to observe how much Jerome Nadal’s prayer resembles Faber’s in this regard. Like Faber, Nadal makes a methodical effort to cultivate a spiritual sympathy for God’s presence in the things that the sentir rules designate for praise, reflexively locating these items in a hierarchical network. Going beyond Faber, however, Nadal also sees in the “hierarchical Church” a foundation for an ecclesial reinterpretation of Dionysius’s via negativa.
Evidence of Nadal’s attempt to “feel with” the hierarchical Church abound in his Orationis Observationes, a journal of lights received in prayer over the course of his Jesuit life. In an early entry, from around the year 1546, Nadal formulates a principle that guides his prayer over the course of his life: “In created things themselves, one ought to feel (sentienda) the power of God, by which he wants, on the basis of that creature, to be understood, contemplated, loved, and adored.” 88 The aspiration to feel (sentire) God in creatures echoes, of course, the vocabulary of Ignatius’s RTWC.
Like Faber, moreover, Nadal’s devotional efforts gravitate toward those creatures praised by the sentir rules. These include the liturgy and other public devotions, 89 the universal intercessory competence of the Virgin Mary, 90 and the lesser intercessions of angels and saints. 91 He sometimes perceives their activity in a kind of stratified synergy, as in this entry dating from around 1558: “A sense (sensus) of the celestial hierarchy among the Saints and of the chain leading up to God, according to the pattern that Dionysius handed down.” 92 Here Nadal, like Faber, finds devotion not just to divine things but to hierarchical things, that is, to mediators arrayed in hierarchical taxis.
This principle holds equally true for the ecclesiastical hierarchy and its ceremonies. In a revealing entry dating to around 1548, Nadal reports the following conviction received in prayer: “The Word of God in spirit is eternal life. To feel, taste, receive in the heart and embrace this is the special fruit of prayer. From this derives most sweetly union (unio) with the Catholic Church and with the Vicar of Christ, obedience toward all traditions and ecclesiastical ceremonies, etc.” 93 Though the logic is compressed, Nadal here, like Faber before him, presents the things of the “hierarchical Church” as proportionate extensions of Christ’s own power and presence. Only this explains why tasting the Word in spirit would lead as a matter of course to union with Christ’s vicar and the church’s ceremonies.
Though Nadal resembles Faber in his effort to “sense” God in the things regulated by the sentir rules, he goes beyond Faber in one intriguing respect. He also incorporates the Dionysian tropes of divine concealment, presenting the prompt obedience to the “hierarchical Church” prescribed by the RTWC as the Jesuit way of entering Dionysius’s “luminous darkness.” For instance, his exhortation on obedience, given to Jesuits in Alcalá in 1561, offers the following analogy: Haven’t you heard what St. Dionysius says about prayer? . . . When one has any freedom to be able to think about God and rejoice in (goçar de) God, the principle for this is holy blindness to exterior things that arrives at the light and clarity of spiritual and celestial things. This is the end of all meditation. So it is with obedience, which at the beginning has the blindness we mentioned . . . ; but later the obedient man will find much clarity and much peace in what obedience has commanded.
94
In his instructions on prayer for Jesuits, Nadal generalizes this principle, presenting the obedience of faith itself as the kind of via negativa proper to their institute: “It helps to seek God by negations of every creature and of all our imagination and understanding, and in this darkness (en esta caligine) of every negation to adore him in fide ecclesiae sanctae catholicae.” 95 Nadal thus “ecclesializes” negative theology, construing it not as the soul’s unmediated encounter with God but as its obscure sympathy with the church’s faith and representatives.
In sum, both Faber and Nadal, two privileged interpreters of Ignatius’s mind, receive Ignatius’s sentir rules as encouragement to adopt a Dionysian vision of the church. Both instinctively array the objects of the sentir rules in hierarchical order, imagining them like a network of streams descending from Christ the font. Both cultivate a Hierothean sympathy for God present in these “hierarchical things.” To these Dionysian themes of hierarchical order and sympathetic mysticism Nadal adds, somewhat exceptionally, the conceptuality of negative theology. This suggests that he took the phrase “hierarchical Church” as license to apply a broad range of Dionysian ideas to the objects regulated by the sentir rules.
Conclusion
The evidence presented here is far from exhaustive. It nevertheless converges upon the conclusion that Ignatius’s motive for coining the phrase “hierarchical Church” was to evoke certain Dionysian principles that he saw as foundational to ecclesial renewal. These include especially the law of thearchy (the principle that God elevates by intermediaries) and the ideal of “sympathetic” mysticism (the aspiration not just to know but to “experience” God at work in these intermediaries). The world behind the text indicates that Dionysius not only had such ideas but was especially known for them in the Paris of Ignatius, Faber, and Nadal. The world of the text, by virtue of both the location and content of the RTWC, indicates that inner and outer conformity with the “hierarchical Church” represents Ignatius’s version of Dionysius’s perfective way. The world in front of the text, represented by Faber’s and Nadal’s contemplative styles, corroborates this interpretation, revealing how much early Jesuits associated living the sentir rules with internalizing a Dionysian vision of the church. Though commentators nowadays speak of the Exercises’ “fundamental premise” as the “immediate action of God on the individual,” 96 the first generation of Jesuits understood this to be more nearly the mediate action of God on the member.
The importance that Ignatius and the early Jesuits ascribed to hierarchical and metaconceptual sympathy is not, of course, without contemporary relevance. It anticipates postconciliar theology’s privileging of the “tacit dimension” of knowledge as the matrix of creative fidelity, both speculatively and practically. In suggesting that one can grow in this “tacit” knowledge of God at work in the church by spiritual exercises, thereby laying a foundation for ecclesial renewal, it may help us understand what Francis hopes to bring about by his Synodal Way, and thus to receive it more fruitfully.
Though Faber’s and Nadal’s recorded “experiences” of hierarchical things were largely transient, they reflected an abiding and connatural feeling for the church as a privileged theater of divine operation. The high value they place on this sensus ecclesiae adumbrates in many ways contemporary theology’s appreciation for the participatory aspect of knowledge. The late Avery Dulles, for instance, building on the work of philosopher Michael Polanyi, frequently drew an analogy between scientific and theological discovery. Just as the former often results not from the impersonal pressure of accumulated data but from a personal and almost aesthetic intuition, so the latter often results not from detached analysis of propositions but from a “kind of connoisseurship derived from personal appropriation of the faith of the Church.” 97 This sensus ecclesiae proves indispensable to creative theology because it tacitly guides theologians to solutions satisfactory to it, much like the “feeling” of speakers for their native language guides them reflexively to the mot juste.
More recently, the Anglican theologian Rowan Williams has linked this tacit dimension of knowledge to the Dionysian tradition in a way that recalls Nadal’s ecclesial apophaticism. True negative theology, Williams suggests, is not so much a solitary exercise of conceptual refinement as a “‘catholicising’ of personal consciousness,” a serene acceptance of the fact that no private subject enjoys a comprehensive view. 98 Though adherence to a particular liturgical or contemplative tradition may seem to risk putting God in a conceptual box, it actually constitutes the ordinary precondition for entering this via negativa. “The sense I am able to make of the common habits of both liturgy and contemplation involves both the recognition of an active but systematically elusive agency that does not originate in my mental apparatus, and the acceptance of a rigorous set of cautions about any hopes for conceptual exhaustiveness in witnessing to this agency.” 99 Contemplative perseverance in rites, doctrines, and practices that we have not invented, in other words, gradually frees us from idolatry.
This general dependence of the formal and explicit on the participatory and tacit implies that any effective renewal in Christianity, whether theoretical or pastoral, will inevitably be “hierarchical.” If more intensive participation in the church’s life gives a deeper sensus ecclesiae, Dulles observes, then “democratization, in the sense of an equal distribution of authority among the totality of the members, would bring about a rapid assimilation of the Church to secular society, as a result of which the salt might lose its savor.” 100 The early Jesuits, imbued with Dionysian principles, took it for granted that renewal would come about not by indiscriminate consultation but by contact with the perfected, with those who enjoy a Hierothean sympathy for divine realities and act more fully as God’s “fellow workmen.” Their notable success in promoting ecclesial renewal suggests they were not altogether mistaken.
All this has implications for receiving the synodal process to which Francis has committed the church for the foreseeable future. The address with which Francis opened the Synod, casting his vision for synodality, could conceivably license two very different agendas. Some passages seem to present the Synod as an exercise in administrative decentralization or, as Massimo Faggioli puts it, a “rebalancing of power.” 101 Francis does, after all, call on the Synod to redress “certain overly vertical, distorted and partial visions of the Church,” and to provide an “open square where all can feel at home and participate.” But other passages imply that the agenda of the Synod is not so much to overcome the hierarchy of office as to foreground the hierarchy of sensus ecclesiae, with which the ordained hierarchy coincides only in part. In the same opening address, Francis also vigorously denies that the synod is a “parliament or an opinion poll,” warning against a divisive intellectualism “without great depth or spiritual insight.” He describes the desired destination of the synodal path as follows: “let us journey together, in order to experience a Church that receives and lives this gift of unity, and is open to the voice of the Spirit.” 102 This second series of texts frames the synod more as a spiritual exercise than a political referendum.
Judging from this second series of texts, in fact, the synod’s deepest rationale would be to facilitate an experience of the “hierarchical Church,” where, in the words of Ignatius, “only one Spirit holds sway.” This would align closely with the remarks in Francis’s address in 2016 to the Thirty-Sixth General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, where he revealed the importance he attaches to renewing the church in the right “spirit”: This grace of discerning is not limited to thinking, doing, and organizing well, but rather of doing these things with a good spirit: this is what roots us in the Church in which the Spirit works and distributes his various gifts for the common good. [Faber] used to say that in many cases those who wanted to reform the Church were well intentioned, but God did not wish to correct the Church using their methods.
103
We find our way to fruitful reforms, Francis implies, only when we, under the influence of the good spirit, “feel hierarchical things well.”
If the reforming Dionysianism of his Jesuit forebearers can be assumed to illuminate Francis’s intentions in any way, then we do better to understand “synodality” less as a political exercise in democratization than as a spiritual exercise in contemplating the church “hierarchically,” as a proportionate extension of God’s own action and presence. In any case, the notable pastoral fruitfulness of the early Jesuits’ way of proceeding suggests that the synod’s power to rejuvenate and foster creative fidelity will depend more on the latter than the former.
Footnotes
1.
The Jesuit philosopher and theologian Erich Przywara was pathbreaking in this regard, underscoring the Dionysian aspects of Ignatian ecclesiology. Deus Semper Maior, 2nd ed. (Vienna and Munich: Herold, 1964), 280, 301, 305–6, 319. More recently, Santiago Madrigal Terrazas has made a similar case, contextualizing Ignatius’s use of the term “hierarchical” within late medieval ecclesiology. See his chapter, “La estructura ‘jerárqica’ de la realidad, el influjo de Pseudo-Dionisio en la teología medieval,” in Estudios de eclesiología ignaciana (Madrid: Universidad de Comillas and Desclée de Brouwer, 2002), 253–99.
2.
See Jean Krynen, “Denys l’Areopagite: En Occident: D. Au 16e siècle: 1. En Espagne avant Saint Jean de la Croix,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité (hereafter cited as DSp), 16 vols. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937–94), 3:386–99; John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 251. For Nadal’s Dionysian debts, see Miguel Nicolau, Jerónimo Nadal, SJ (1507–1580). Sus obras y doctrinas espirituales (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciónes Científicas, 1949), 423–27.
3.
Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, trans. William J. Young, ed. George E. Ganss (Chicago: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1964); Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús: Biográfico-tématico, 4 vols., ed. Joaquín-María Domínguez and Charles E. O’Neill (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2001).
4.
Mark Edwards, Dimitrios Pallis, and Georgios Steiris, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dionysius the Areopagite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 315–686.
5.
For a fuller treatment of Ignatius’s papalism, angelology, and the tendency to approach God through a fixed sequence of “mediators,” see my “Aquinas and Ignatius on the ‘Hierarchical Church,’” in Thomas Aquinas and Ignatius Loyola: Resourcing the Jesuit Tradition, ed. Justin Anderson, Matthew Levering, and Aaron Pidel (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, forthcoming).
6.
See Y.M.-J. Congar, L’Église de saint Augustin à l’époque moderne, Histoire du Dogma III/3 (Paris: Cerf, 1970), 36; Tradition and the Traditions: An Historical and Theological Essay, 2 vols., trans. Michael Naseby and Thomas Rainborough (London: Burns and Oates, 1966), 1:176n3.
7.
Madrigal Terrazas, “La estructura ‘jerárquica’ de la realidad,” 254–55.
8.
9.
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy V, 4, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, 236. Greek text: Corpus Dionysiacum, vol. 2, De coelesti hierarchia. De ecclesiastica hierarchia. De mystica theologia. Epistulae, ed. Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter, Patristische Texte und Studien 36 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991), 106. For two detailed accounts of the Dionysian notion of hierarchy and its background, see René Roques, L’Univers dionysien. Structure hiérarchique du monde selon le Pseudo-Denys (Paris: Aubier, 1954); and, more recently, Eric D. Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007), 65–81 and 129–33.
10.
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy I, 3, trans. Luibheid, 198.
11.
Celestial Hierarchy I, 2, trans. Luibheid, 145; see also Ecclesiastical Hierarchy I, 1; IV, 5.
12.
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy V, 6; VI, 1–3.
13.
See Celestial Hierarchy III, 2–3; VII, 2. For the application of this tripartite schema to deacons, priests, and bishops, see Ecclesiastical Hierarchy V, 3.
14.
Celestial Hierarchy III, 2, trans. Luibheid, 154.
15.
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy I, 4.
16.
René Roques, “Denys l’Aréopagite,” in DSp, 3:244–86 at 280; Nicholas Heron, Liturgical Power: Between Economic and Political Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 62.
17.
“The superior ranks possess in an eminent degree the sacred attributes of their inferiors.” Celestial Hierarchy II, 11, 1, trans. Luibheid, 175.
18.
Celestial Hierarchy I, 2, trans. Luibheid, 146. For a treatment of the Dionysian account of the senses, see Paul L. Gavrilyuk, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,” in The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, ed. Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 86–103.
19.
Celestial Hierarchy I, 3.
20.
Celestial Hierarchy, II, 13, trans. Luibheid, 180–81.
21.
Fuori dell’anima: Ignazio di Loyola e l’immaginazione (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2020), 183.
22.
In his Apology for the Spiritual Exercises, Nadal places Dionysius first in a list of authorities “on the spiritual senses in Scripture” (de sensibus spiritualibus Scriptura). He does so in the context of defending the idea that meditating on Scripture reliably disposes one to movements of consolation—presumed to be angelically mediated. Epistolae P. Hieronymi Nadal Societatis Jesu ab anno 1546 ad 1577, 5 vols., Monumentum Historicum Societatis Iesu (hereafter cited as MHSI) 13, 15, 21, 27, 90 (Madrid and Rome: Typis Augustini Avrial, Gabriel López del Horno, and Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1898–1962), 4:855.
23.
Mystical Theology I, 1, trans. Luibheid, 135 (Heil and Ritter, 142).
24.
For the influence of Dionysian texts on John of the Cross’s “nights,” see Eulogio de la Vierge du Carmel, “Denys l’Areopagite: St. Jean de la Croix,” in DSp, 3:399–408 at 402–4.
25.
Divine Names II, 9, trans. Luibheid, 65. Greek text: Corpus Dionysiacum, vol. 1, Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita. De divinis nominibus, ed. B. R. Suchla, Patristische Texte und Studien 33 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990), 134. Vivian Boland traces the mathein-pathein contrast back to a fragment attributed to Aristotle by Synesius of Cyrene in AD 403: “Non solum discens sed et patiens divina: the Wanderings of an Aristotelian Fragment,” in Roma, Magistra Mundi—Itineraria Culturae Medievalis: Mélanges offerts au Père L.E. Boyle à l’occasion de son 75e anniversaire, ed. Jaqueline Hamesse (Louvain: Louvain-La-Neuve, 1998), 55–69. For the suggestion that the mathein-pathein contrast may owe less to Dionysius’s philosophical cultivation than to the Greek patristic reception of the Letter to the Hebrews, see Dimitrios Pallis, “St Dionysius the Areopagite,” in Oxford Handbook of Orthodox Theology, ed. A. Louth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
26.
I owe the term to Bernhard Blankenhorn, The Mystery of Union with God: Dionysian Mysticism in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 435.
27.
Blankenhorn, The Mystery of Union with God, 412n218.
28.
Gallus, In Isaiam, 153.4–31; cited in Ty Monroe, “‘In Excess of Yourself and All Things.’ Metaphysics and Epistemology in Dionysius the Areopagite and Thomas Gallus,” Archa Verbi 14 (2017): 38–72 at 55. See also Declan Lawell, “Thomas Gallus: Affective Dionysianism,” in Oxford Handbook of Dionysius the Areopagite, 379–93 at 385, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198810797.013.24. For more on affective and intellectualist receptions of Dionysius in the Middle Ages, see Denys Turner, “Dionysius and Some Late Medieval Mystical Theologians of Northern Europe,” Modern Theology 24, no. 4 (2008): 651–65, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0025.2008.00491.x. For extreme apophatic receptions, represented by Meister Eckhart and Marguerite Porete, see Willemien Otten, “Christianity’s Content: (Neo)Platonism in the Middle Ages, Its Theoretical and Theological Appeal,” Numen 63 (2016): 245–70 at 61–65, 
.
29.
30.
O’Malley, First Jesuits, 248–49.
31.
Philippe Lécrivain, Paris in the Time of Ignatius of Loyola (1528–1535), trans. Ralph C. Renner (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2011), 115. For more on the conflation of the above three persons, see Michael Lapidge, Hilduin of Saint-Denis: The Passio S. Dionysii in Prose and Verse (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
32.
Paul Pedrizet, Le Calendrier Parisien à la fin du moyen âge (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1933), 239.
33.
Bernard Hours notes that in the Paris of Ignatius’s day every shrine was associated with a day in the calendar and boasted relics that traveled “throughout the whole city by participating in general processions.” Des moines dans la cité (Paris: Belin, 2016), 296.
34.
Georg Schurhammer, Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times, vol. 1, Europe (1506–1541), trans. M. Joseph Costelloe (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1973), 212–15.
35.
James Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris (1500–1543), Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 32 (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 233n71, 246. As early as 1509, the Dominican Pieter Crockaert replaced Lombard’s Sentences with Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae at the Dominican Studium of St. Jacques, whence the innovative pedagogy spread to Spain. See also Ricardo García Villoslada, La universidad de Paris durante los estudios de Victoria, O.P. (1507–1522) (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1938), 279; Schurhammer, Francis Xavier, 248–50.
36.
On Aquinas’s greater deference to Dionysius than even to Aristotle or the “Platonists,” see Wayne Hankey, “Dionysian Hierarchy in Thomas Aquinas: Tradition and Transformation,” in Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité en Orient et en Occident, ed. Y. de Andia (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1996), 405–38 at 243n41.
37.
Nicolau, Jerónimo Nadal, 428. For the Dionysian character of Bonaventure’s writings, see Togni, “Hierarchical Center,” 140–47.
38.
Jean-Pierre Massaut, Josse Clichtove, l’humanisme et la réforme du clergé, 2 vols. (Paris: Société d’Édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1968), 1:440.
39.
Silvano Cavazza, “Platonismo e Riforma Religiosa: La ‘Theologia Vivificans’ di Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples,” Risorgimento 22 (1982), 99–149 at 105, 114. For Lorenzo Valla’s and Erasmus of Rotterdam’s suspicions of the pseudonymity of the Corpus Dionysiacum, see Karlfried Froehlich, “Pseudo-Dionysius and the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist, 1987), 33–46 at 37–39; Denis J.-J. Robichaud, “Valla and Erasmus on the Dionysian Question,” in Oxford Handbook of Dionysius the Areopagite, 491–515, .
40.
Cavazza, “Platonismo e Riforma Religiosa,” 136. Lefèvre vindicated even Dionysius’s pyramidal angelology against Erasmus. Andrea Steenbeek, “Pyramis universorum aut duo mundi? Angelologien in der Polemik zwischen Erasmus und Lefèvre,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 127, no. 3 (2016): 335–48. For the similar role that Dionysius played for Lefèvre’s friend Guillaume Briçonnet (1472–1534), Bishop of Meaux, see Cathleen Eva Corrie, “‘Sy excellente pasture’: Guillaume Briçonnet’s mysticism and the Pseudo-Dionysius,” Renaissance Studies 20, no. 1 (2006): 35–50 at 43–44, .
41.
Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform, 167.
42.
Josse Clichtove, Theologia Vivificans: Cibus Solidus (Paris: H. Estienne, 1515). For a contextualization of that intellectual milieu, see Christa Lundberg, “Apostolic Theology and Humanism at the University of Paris, 1490–1540” (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2021).
43.
Massaut, Josse Clichtove, 2:26.
44.
Theologia Vivificans, 60 recto (Commentary on Ecclesiastical Hierarchy II, 3).
45.
Massaut, Josse Clichtove, 2:329. For Clichtove’s appeal to Dionysius as authority for the church’s juridical power, see Pierre Fraenkel, “An der Grenze von Luthers Einfluß: Aversion gegen Umwertung,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 89 (1978): 21–30 at 28.
46.
Josse Clichtove, Compendium Veritatum ad Fidem Pertinentium contra Erroneas Lutheranorum Assertiones ex Dictis et Actis in Concilio Provinciali Senonensi (Paris: Ex officina Simoni Colineai, 1529).
47.
For a table of parallels, see Lécrivain, Paris in the Time of Ignatius of Loyola, 87–90.
48.
Clichtove, Compendium Veritatum, cap. 1, 12 (p. 3 verso).
49.
For arguments in favor of dependence, see Lécrivain, Paris in the Time of Ignatius of Loyola, 87–90; Massaut, Josse Clichtove, 2:326. For an opposing view, cf. Walter Sierp, “Zu den ‘Regeln über die kirchliche Gesinnung’,” Zeitschrift für Aszese und Mystik 14 (1939): 202–14 at 207–9. Alfons Knoll has more recently argued that the Compendium Veritatum at least influenced other early Jesuits, such as Claude Jay and Peter Canisius. “Derselbe Geist”: Eine Untersuchung zum Kirchenverständnis in der Theologie der ersten Jesuiten, Konfessionskundliche und Kontroverstheologische Studien 74 (Paderborn: Bonifatius, 2007), 253.
50.
Spiritual Exercises [352–70], trans. Louis J. Puhl (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1951), 157–61. The bracketed numbers refer to the paragraph division of the Spiritual Exercises, standard across languages and translations. References to the Latin Versio vulgata and Spanish autograph version will be taken from: Monumenta Ignatiana: Exercitia Spiritualia Sancti Ignatii de Loyola et eorum directoria, vol. 1, Exercitia Spiritualia, nova editio, MHSI 100 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1969).
51.
Spiritual Exercises [10], trans. Puhl, 6.
52.
Spiritual Exercises [39], trans. Puhl, 20.
53.
“Short Instruction on Giving the Exercises, probably by Fr. Everard Mercurian” [13], in On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599 (hereafter cited as Directories), ed. and trans. Martin E. Palmer (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), 101–13 at 103. Latin text: Monumenta Ignatiana Series Secunda: Exercitia Spiritualia Sancti Ignatii de Loyola et eorum directoria, vol. 2, Directoria (1540–1599) (hereafter cited as Directoria), ed. Ignacio Iparraguirre, MHSI 76 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1955), 242–65 at 246. Nadal agrees that the order of the Exercises is “purgation, illumination, union.” “From the Writings of Father Jerónimo Nadal” [7], in Directories, 35–40 at 36. Following the convention of the Exercises, the Directories have been divided into paragraphs—here represented by bracketed numbers—to standardize referencing.
54.
“Short Instruction by Mercurian” [16], in Directories, 103–4.
55.
“Directory of Father Gil González Dávila” [52], in Directories, 234–64 at 242; “Official Directory of 1599” [253–54; 274], in Directories, 289–349 at 343, 347.
56.
See “Method of Giving the Exercises Dictated by Father Alfonso Ruiz” [13], in Directories, 65–66 at 66; “Report of Father Antonio Valentino” [39], in Directories, 78–86 at 86; “Directory of Father Antonio Cordeses” [153], in Directories, 265–285 at 284.
57.
H. Pinard de la Boullaye, Les étapes de rédaction des Exercices de S. Ignace (Paris: Beauchesne, 1945), 32–33.
58.
Spiritual Exercises [232].
59.
Spiritual Exercises [237], trans. Puhl, 103 (Exercitia, 310).
60.
Celestial Hierarchy I, 1, trans. Luibheid, 245.
61.
Spiritual Exercises [234], trans. Puhl, 102 (Exercitia, 308).
62.
See Spiritual Exercises [313–36].
63.
“Short Instruction on Giving the Exercises,” [17], in Directories, 104 (Directoria, 247–48).
64.
Spiritual Exercises [352], trans. Puhl, 157 (Exercitia, 404), author’s translation from Latin.
65.
Spiritual Exercises [353], trans. Puhl, 157 (Exercitia, 404).
66.
Spiritual Exercises [365], trans. Puhl, 160 (Exercitia, 412).
67.
Only these rules (Spiritual Exercises [352–65]) appear in some early manuscripts, suggesting a different origin from the “hablar rules” (Spiritual Exercises [366–70]), probably in Paris. Victoriano Larrañaga, “La revisión total de Los Ejercicios por San Ignacio ¿en París, o en Roma?,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 25 (1956): 396–415 at 412–13; H. Pinard de la Boullaye, Les étapes de rédaction des Exercices de S. Ignace, 22–23.
68.
For the predominantly, but not exclusively, affective register of sentido in this context, see H. Pinard de la Boullaye, “Sentir, sentimiento, sentido dans le style de Saint Ignace,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 25 (1956): 416–430 at 420.
69.
In the one instance of “guarding against,” Ignatius advises exercitants to avoid transgressing hierarchical order by “making comparison between those who are still living and the saints.” Spiritual Exercises [364], trans. Puhl, 159 (Exercitia, 410).
70.
Spiritual Exercises [354–64].
71.
William V. Bangert, To the Other Towns: A Life of Blessed Peter Favre (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1959), 39.
72.
Roger Cantin, “L’élection de Jérôme Nadal: Des ténèbres jaillit la lumière,” Cahiers de spiritualité ignatienne 4 (1980): 263–69.
73.
Cantin, “L’élection de Jérôme Nadal,” 262, 265–68.
74.
Epistolae Nadal, 1:144.
75.
Peter Faber, Memoriale, in The Spiritual Writings of Pierre Favre, trans. Edmond C. Murphy and Martin E. Palmer (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), 59–315; Fabri Monumenta: Beati Petri Fabri primi sacerdotis e Societate Jesu epistolae, Memoriale, et Processus ex autographis aut archetypis potissimum deprompta, MHSI 48 (Madrid: Typis Gabrielis Lopez del Horno, 1914), 489–696.
76.
Besides the examples of devotion Faber finds in the churches of Speyer, to be examined more closely below (Memoriale [88, 1311–33]), see also Memoriale [196, 243, 347]. Here again, bracketed numbers refer to paragraph division, standard across languages and translations.
77.
On his way to the Imperial Diet of Ratisbon in 1541, Faber reports “receiving a method of asking grace from our Lord that the archangel of that region with all the angel guardians of its inhabitants might be well disposed toward us.” Memoriale [21], trans. Murphy, 75. See also Memoriale [28, 175, 200, 260, 283, 309, 354].
78.
Devotion to the saints structures Faber’s prayer both spatially and temporally, in that he invokes the patron saints of the regions through which he travels (Memoriale [21–22, 28]) and organizes his prayer according to the sanctoral cycle of the liturgy (Memoriale [93, 95, 232, 244, 245, 247, 283–84]).
79.
For Faber, the voice of the pope, as Christ’s vicar on earth, “gives the clearest of calls.” (Memoriale [18], trans. Murphy, 72). See also Memoriale [92, 150, 190, 358–59].
80.
For Faber’s probable exposure to Clichtove, François Picart, and other pro-Dionysian humanists, see Michel de Certeau, “Introduction to Mémorial, by Peter Faber,” in Christus 4 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer and Bellarmin, 1960), 1–95 at 59–63; Henri Bernard-Maîstre, “Les fondateurs de la Compaignie de Jésus et l’humanisme parisien de la Renaissance (1525–1536),” Nouvelle Revue Theologique 72 (1950): 811–33 at 824.
81.
Faber, Memoriale [88], trans. Murphy, 118–19 (Fabri Monumenta, 537).
82.
Knoll, “Derselbe Geist,” 199.
83.
Spiritual Exercises [352–53], trans. Puhl, 157 (Exercitia 404).
84.
See, respectively, Spiritual Exercises [355, 358, 360].
85.
According to a letter of Simon Rodriguez, one of Ignatius’s first seven Parisian companions, Paschase Broët and John Codure “had Father Faber as guide in the Spiritual Exercises” (in spiritualibus exercitationibus ducem habuerunt Patrem Fabrum) before joining the first companions. Epistolae PP. Paschasii Broëti, Claudii Jaji, Joannis Codurii et Simonis Roderici, MHSI 24 (Madrid: Typis Gabrielis López del Horno, 1903), 456.
86.
For all citations contained in this paragraph hitherto, see Memoriale [131–32], trans. Murphy, 144–45.
87.
Memoriale [133], trans. Murphy, 146 (English translation modified).
88.
P. Hieronymi Nadal Orationis Observationes, ed. Miguel Nicolau, MHSI 90A (Romae: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1964), [134], 62. The bracketed numbers refer to paragraph divisions, standard across editions of Nadal’s journal.
89.
Orationis Observationes [116, 148, 244, 655].
90.
Orationis Observationes [268].
91.
For angels: see Orationis Observationes [333, 364, 462, 534, 979]. For saints, especially the apostles, see Orationis Observationes [93, 126, 129, 176, 232, 341].
92.
Orationis Observationes [491], 169.
93.
Orationis Observationes [515], 173.
94.
Epistolae Nadal, 5:430. See the parallels in his Second Dialogue (Epistolae Nadal, 5:712–13) and his 1567 Cologne Exhortation (Epistolae Nadal, 5:799).
95.
Epistolae Nadal, 4:679.
96.
O’Malley, First Jesuits, 43. For an equivalent statement about God’s “direct action on the soul,” see William Meissner, To the Greater Glory: A Psychological Study of Ignatian Spirituality, Marquette Studies in Theology (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1999), 130. My thanks to Justin Anderson for directing me to this reference.
97.
Avery Dulles, The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System, expanded ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 8.
98.
Rowan Williams, Understanding and Misunderstanding “Negative Theology” (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2021), 26.
99.
Williams, Understanding and Misunderstanding, 24–25.
100.
Dulles, Craft of Theology, 8.