Comparing the affinities, differences between Ignatius and Aquinas

Sometime last century, at the Fisher House chaplaincy in Cambridge, the Dominican chaplain told a joke in his homily—it was the Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola—about the difference between Jesuits and Dominicans. He explained that the Dominicans were founded to fight the Albigensian heresy and the Jesuits were founded to counter Protestants. He then rhetorically asked which of the two had been the most successful, and the punch line was: ‘How many Albigensians do you know’?

No doubt if a Jesuit had been present, he would have made some comment about respect for religious freedom. However, to be fair to both sides, they have each produced some outstanding scholars who have promoted the faith through an appeal to truth and rationality, not social coercion.

The editors of Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas Aquinas: A Jesuit Ressourcement have thus produced a collection of scholarly essays, highlighting the intellectual affinities and synergies and, in some cases, stark contrasts between the two traditions. Two of the editors are leading scholars of the Thomist tradition (Justin M. Anderson and Matthew Levering) while the third editor (Fr Aaron Pidel, SJ), is a rising star from the Jesuit stable and a leading authority in the Anglosphere on the theology of Erich Przywara, SJ.

There are eleven essays in all, and the only thread uniting them is the juxtaposition of the Thomist and Ignatian traditions. To review the work, one therefore needs to mention each chapter individually.

The first is by Thomas Osborne titled “The Early Jesuits and Scholastic Theology”. The research here is very deep. Osborne trawls through the history of the disputes between scholastics and humanists at the Sorbonne in the 1520s and 1530s and charts the reactions of St. Ignatius Loyola and other early Jesuits to these disputes. Osborne’s conclusion is that while the Jesuits were innovative in their understanding of religious life, in their theology they were staunch defenders of Thomist scholasticism. Loyola gave scholastic theology a special place in his Rules for Thinking (or Feeling) with the Church and in the Jesuit Constitutions.

Justin M Anderson follows Osborne with a chapter on ‘Experiencing the Divine according to Thomas and Ignatius’. This is an important theme in the relationship between the two orders since St. Ignatius’s ideas on precisely this point landed him in trouble with the Spanish Inquisition and its Dominican advisors, somewhat notoriously, Melchor Cano and Tomas de Pedroche. Specifically, their charge was that the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises was a work of the alumbradismo–a Spanish mystical movement with an array of ideas, some possibly sound, some very heterodox. Anderson notes the judgment of Hans Urs von Balthasar that Loyola’s ideas on the experience of the divine, far from having an alumbradismo provenance, were influenced by the Bonaventurian tradition of mysticism, probably through Ludolph of Saxony and his Vita Christi and through the medieval tradition of ‘spiritual senses’. Anderson concludes his chapter with the thought:

If the young Ignatius did lean too far towards the subjective dimension…then Thomas can function as a corrective, and possibly did in Ignatius’s Parisian theological training. Yet, where theology; in particular scholastic-Thomistic theology, becomes too objective, in the sense of being divorced from the subject and experience of the one who practices, then perhaps it is the Ignatian voice we need to hear underscoring the mystical to which theology stands in intimate proximity; ‘for the one who does not taste, does not know’ (p. 57).

Still on the territory of affectivity, the third chapter by Margaret I. Hughes looks at how Ignatius and Aquinas viewed the passions. Her conclusion is that although they emphasize different facets of the passions, they understand the phenomena of the passions in the same way and especially the role of the passions in prayer for glorifying God.

The fourth chapter was written by Fr Joseph Koterski, SJ, to whose memory the book is dedicated. He offers an analysis of the Thomist account of prudence and the Ignatian account of the discernment of spirits. His macro-level argument is that properly understood, both the Thomist account of prudence and the Ignatian principles for the discernment of spirits are not only compatible with one another but are mutually beneficial for souls.

The caveat ‘properly understood’ is underscored by Koterski in his affirmation of the Thomistic “worry” about ‘the integrity of moral reasoning when Ignatian discernment practices are offered as a justification for moral assessments that amount to ethical consequentialism or situation ethics’. (p. 80). Koterski notes that ‘Thomists rightly point out that feelings, emotions, and passions do not alter the moral character of an action’, and thus, ‘the use of Ignatian concepts for this purpose does not show fidelity to the Spiritual Exercises’ (p. 80).

Chapter five is also offered by a Jesuit scholar–Nicolas Steeves. He is an authority on the theological significance of the human imagination. He writes: ‘to oppose Thomas Aquinas, satirized as an aloof nerd, to Ignatius of Loyola, styled as a starry-eyed, relativistic mystic, is to fall headlong into the trap of a fixed imaginary’. (p. 106). He is sympathetic to those who find scholasticism a bit dry. As he writes: ‘we children of post-modernity do not associate the syllogistic method with the creative imagination’ (p.120).

Nonetheless, Steeves affirms the judgment of Herbert McCabe, OP, that the goal of logic, central to syllogistic argumentation is ‘not to help people to make rational arguments, but to hinder them from making bogus arguments’. (p. 120). Moreover, Steeves affirms the reading of Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt that ‘Thomas knows that most human thought is of an intuitive kind’ and he also ‘recognizes that poetry and rhetoric, inter alia, can help order thought’. (p. 120). It’s thus a little unfair to declare Aquinas a nerd, even if some of his cheer squad does seem to lack imagination. As for Ignatius, Steeves’ judgment is that he ‘implicitly concurs with Aquinas’s views on the imagination’ and he ‘adds thoughts drawn from experience on how the imagination relates to emotions and ethics’. These can complement and challenge the theories of Thomas himself or of those who fill the varied schools of Thomist thought’ (p. 134).

The sixth chapter moves back to a Dominican contributor (Fr Andrew Hofer) and is focused on the treatment of frequent communion in the thought of Aquinas and Loyola. Hofer concludes:

It would be wrong to claim that Thomas Aquinas was the only influence on Ignatius of Loyola regarding the frequent reception of Communion. But we have good reason to conclude that Ignatius and his Society of Jesus were influenced by Aquinas in their Eucharistic teaching, including frequent Communion. The Jesuit Eucharistic zeal is a teaching stitched through with elements already taught centuries before by Thomas Aquinas, especially with his scholastic concern for the practice of the early Church. (p. 166).

From Eucharistic theology, the collection moves to a study of Mariology in chapter seven, presented by Sr. Theresa Marie Chau Nguyen, OP. Her macro-level argument is that ‘the Marian theme is not a superfluous addendum to Ignatius’s legacy but an essential element in his spirituality’. (p. 179). She notes that the postulator for the cause of his canonization reported that Our Lady appeared to Ignatius more than thirty times during his eight-month stay at Manresa.

From Mariology, the move flows logically into ecclesiology, with the eighth chapter examining notions of the hierarchical church in the understanding of Aquinas and Loyola. This chapter is offered by Aaron Pidel, SJ, who concludes:

It is sometimes debated whether Ignatius was the last of the medieval or the first of the early moderns. This study suggests that the transition between the two periods and sensibilities was a gradual one. Ignatius leaves behind some of the florid speculations about the hierarchical structure of reality more typical of high Latin scholasticism, showing little concern either for the number and nomenclature of the angelic choirs or for the exact division of labor into purification, illumination, and perfection. At the same time, Ignatius shows striking affinities for certain aspects of the Thomist hierarchical world-view, especially those aspects where Aquinas complicates Dionysius’s fixed order of mediation. Like Aquinas, but unlike Dionysius, Ignatius holds that God may illuminate either immediately or through angelic intermediaries, that Mary outranks the angels, that jurisdictional authority radiates from the pope as from a principal hierarch, and that ecclesiastical inferiors may nonetheless enlighten their superiors.

It is often assumed that mystical experience tends to explode all religious frameworks, submerging them in the universal solvent of divine immediacy. Ignatius’s illuminations, however, do not seem to have had this effect. While it is true that they led Ignatius to seek God “in all things”, they nevertheless left him expecting to find God more reliably in some things rather than others. After being transformed by grace into “another man with another mind”, Ignatius grows only firmer in his conviction that God wishes to perfect the lower things through a meaningful order of “mediadores”. In this respect for the lex divinitatis, Ignatius was a faithful Thomist. (p. 216).

Sam Zeno Conedera, SJ, follows Pidel with a chapter on obedience within the two traditions. He concludes that there is no uniform position among the Jesuits about the relationship between the teaching of Aquinas and Ignatius on the subject of obedience and he acknowledges that ‘the emphasis on the conformity of will and judgment in Ignatius and all the Jesuit authors is simply absent from the works of the Angelic Doctor, and Thomists are well within their rights to underscore this point’. (p. 245). Conedera also observes that for Thomists the vow of obedience and its exercise has a clear foundation in nature, whereas for the Jesuits it does not. On this issue, the two traditions are thus not easily reconciled.

The tenth chapter offered by Elisabeth Rain Kincaid addresses the issue of the status of the conversos (Jewish converts) in the early history of the Society of Jesus. She argues that one of the early Jesuits, Francisco de Toledo (1532-1596)–not to be confused with the Viceroy of Peru of the same name–‘incorporated Ignatius’s theological convictions regarding God’s ongoing special relationship with the Jews and his defense of equal treatment of those of converso descent into a robust theological system, drawing creatively upon foundational insights of St. Thomas Aquinas’ (p. 248).

This theme of the place of Judaism in salvation history as understood by Francisco de Toledo is continued in the final chapter by Kevin Flannery, SJ, who narrows the topic down to the issue of the possibility of coerced faith. This includes an analysis of the treatment of predestination in both Aquinas and Toledo. Flannery’s judgment is that Toledo’s positions allow for a greater limitation on religious liberty than the positions of Thomas Aquinas and that this is due to his different understanding of predestination from that of Aquinas. The role of free will in the act of faith is given greater significance by Aquinas than by Toledo.

No doubt there are many other themes and fault lines that could be addressed in a study of the character of the Thomist and Ignatian traditions and their relationship to one another. Erich Przywara SJ’s publications from the early decades of the twentieth century are littered with comparisons and analyses of their polar tensions.

This collection of essays, however, is an engaging first port of call for exploring this topic.

Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas Aquinas: A Jesuit Ressourcement
Edited by Justin M Anderson, Matthew Levering, and Aaron Pidel, SJ.
Catholic University of America Press, 2024
Hardcover, 400 pages