Edgar Allan Poe maintained that the key to writing a good story is to write it backward. He said, in effect: Know exactly how you want your story to end. What impact do you want it to have on your readers? Do you want them to feel hope? Delight? Horror? Once you have that end in view, it will determine everything else: the characters you create, their surroundings, their words, their actions. Not a single sentence should be wasted.
“It is only with the [end] constantly in view,” Poe wrote, “that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.”
St. Ignatius would have liked Poe. As the first superior general of the Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius wrote a book in which he described the Society’s mission, internal structures and way of proceeding. In its introduction, he noted that all the content, and even the format, were decided with only one thing in view: how the Society can serve the greater glory of God as a unified body dedicated to apostolic service. From start to finish, St. Ignatius decided everything—how to select candidates for the Society, how to form them, how to mission them—solely based on what is “conducive” [“conveniente”] to that end. Every sentence in the book points to the greater glory of God in some way, and no sentence can be understood correctly apart from it.
The book is called the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. In 2016, the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States commissioned the Institute of Jesuit Sources at Boston College to produce a new edition for the formation of Jesuits and collaborators. This would require many explanatory notes to help readers understand the book in its historical and theological context. The institute assigned me to that project because I had written my dissertation on the Constitutions. It was a great honor—and more than a little frightening—to be entrusted with a project that, for better or worse, could shape how thousands of people view the Society of Jesus.
A means to an end
When people ask what struck me most about the Constitutions, I say two things: Ignatius’ unwavering focus on serving the greater glory of God (which is evident also in the Spiritual Exercises, his earlier book), and the astonishing internal coherence of the Jesuit way of proceeding that results from that focus.
To illustrate, Ignatius gave this example in the Exercises: It often happens that couples decide to marry, and then they ask how they can glorify God as much as possible within that marriage. To be sure, this is a holy thing to ask. But marriage is a means, not an end. The end is to glorify God. If the couple realizes, given the particularities of their situation, that they can serve God’s greater glory by not getting married in the first place, then do they have the interior freedom (Ignatius calls it “indifference”) to let that good option go, as beautiful as it is?
In the Constitutions, Ignatius applied this idea with relentless consistency to every aspect of the Society’s way of proceeding, leading to many controversial results. For example, in the Middle Ages, the conventional wisdom was that long hours of prayer and asceticism were the surest way to save one’s soul and that joining a monastery was the best way to do these without distractions. Consequently, abbots and abbesses generally erred on the side of accepting anyone who requested admission because they believed they had a duty to give them a chance to save their souls. If newcomers had physical infirmities or difficult personalities, well then so be it; God was giving the other monks and nuns an opportunity to practice patience.
Ignatius could not afford to adopt that attitude. He wanted Jesuits to be working in the world for all to see. It was necessary that men be physically fit for apostolic labors and have the personality, social graces and intellectual capacity to work with both society’s elites and the common people. In Part One of the Constitutions, therefore, he wrote that if men seek admission to the Society are lacking any of those things, no matter how devout and sincere they might be, they should be told gently to seek their salvation elsewhere, perhaps in a monastery or mendicant institute. His policy shocked and offended many of his contemporaries, both for its lack of precedent and for its implied elitism.
Here is another example of Ignatius’ consistency in the Constitutions: If Jesuits are dedicated to missions that serve a greater good, the logical implication is the existence of missions that serve lesser goods. Ignatius was keenly aware that when Jesuits choose the first over the second, they incur the resentment of good people who are invested in the second and who will not like being called lesser goods. Thus, in Part Nine of the Constitutions, Ignatius describes the needed qualities of a superior general:
Magnanimity and fortitude of soul are likewise highly necessary for him, so that he may bear the weaknesses of many, initiate great undertakings in the service of God our Lord, and persevere in them with the needed constancy, neither losing courage in the face of the contradictions, even from persons of high rank and power, nor allowing himself to be deflected by their entreaties or threats from what reason and the divine service require (No. 728).
A case in point is when Ignatius reassigned a beloved parish pastor in the name of the greater good. The incensed townspeople wrote letters to Ignatius, accusing him of callousness and hypocrisy and threatening to become Protestant if he did not change his mind. Ignatius held his ground. He wrote to one high-ranking critic:
Modesty and indeed prudence require that someone [like you] should approve—or at least not disapprove without much consideration—what is done with rational forethought and system by people [like me] who fix their gaze solely on the will of God. Nevertheless, I will put a good interpretation on your letter, convinced that it is prompted by your piety and charity toward your own people.
Note Ignatius’ reference to “rational forethought and system.” He was quite conscious of the fact that every aspect of the Jesuit way of proceeding followed logically from the Society’s commitment to the greater glory of God.
The Constitutions make clear, then, why so many good people found the Jesuit way of proceeding offensive, even scandalous. Ignatius easily could have mollified his critics by compromising on the implications of his spirituality, but he never did. To be sure, he was willing to make exceptions, but if and only if—he writes this explicitly the Constitutions—the circumstances were such that a particular exception clearly served the greater aid of souls. He did not make exceptions to placate someone’s feelings or to avoid acrimony.
That is why I tell my students, “It’s O.K. not to like Ignatius.” Any spirituality in the church—Benedictine, Franciscan, Carmelite—emphasizes certain virtues, principles and ministries more than others. That is why different spiritualities exist in the first place, and why all founders, not just Ignatius, have their critics if they remain consistent with their own ways of proceeding. If one were to explain Ignatian spirituality or the Jesuit mission in such a way that all Christians found it attractive, it would no longer be worth its salt.
I believe that this is what makes the Constitutions so fascinating, so powerful and still so relevant today. I am not saying the book is a riveting read. It is, after all, a book of rules and policies. But for readers willing to study the text closely, its consistent focus on the final end has much to contribute to Jesuits and their collaborators in the 21st century.
Inspirational rhetoric
Here is only one example. In 1995, the late Superior General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach asserted that Jesuits are looking for a new language to articulate their mission. Modern Jesuits have coined many expressions like “cura personalis,” “creative fidelity,” “faith that does justice,” “men and women for and with others” and “universal apostolic preferences.” Jesuits have also resurrected long-forgotten expressions from the early Society like “our way of proceeding,” “contemplative in action” and “union of minds and hearts.”
I have no objection to any of these expressions. Rightly understood, they denote authentic values of Ignatius and the early Society, and they are indispensable for instilling those values in schools where there is a regular turnover of students, faculty and staff.
Yet I suggest that the modern Society still lacks an inspirational rhetoric to get people excited about its mission, to say nothing of convincing men to join the Society. To fill that need, consciously or not, Jesuits and collaborators are pressing the above slogans into service, thereby putting more weight on them than what they can carry.
Walking through campuses, one often sees colorful banners with “Magis” in bold letters or a photograph of smiling students with “Cura personalis” beneath it. I find it difficult to imagine that many people are roused at the sight of these or prompted to think about eternal things. They simply are not emotive.
In fact, the opposite is possible. Lacking something more weighty, more sacred, overuse of these expressions can provoke tedium, even cynicism. I recently saw a very large homemade banner hanging from the front porch of a house for students at a Jesuit university with the following words spray-painted on it: “Men and Women Drinking For and With Others.” I wish I were kidding.
The problem is that all these sayings pertain to how people should be acting, not why they should care. In other words, they concern the means, not the end. Ignatius understood that what truly inspires people are reminders of the end they seek, those eternal goods for which they should be willing to suffer and sacrifice. To paraphrase a line from Cardinal John Henry Newman: No Jesuit will be a martyr for a universal apostolic preference. But he will gladly die to save someone’s soul.
Jesuits and their colleagues will find in the Constitutions the language they seek, a language that remains true and relevant and packs a punch in every generation: the salvation of souls, living and dying for Jesus Christ, and of course, the greater glory and service of the Divine Majesty. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.
In the final years of his life, Poe liked to socialize with the Jesuits at Fordham University. He wrote to a friend that they were “highly cultivated gentlemen and scholars, they smoked and they drank and they played cards, and they never said a word about religion.”
I like to imagine Poe in heaven, still playing cards with Jesuits. Certainly, he knows now what he probably did not did not know back then: that he and Jesuits were kindred spirits. And if someone were to ask Poe to explain the essence of Ignatian spirituality and the Jesuit Constitutions, I think he would first look at Ignatius, who would give a nod. Then Poe would say, “Always remember how you want your story to end.”
Barton T. Geger, S.J., is a research scholar at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies and assistant professor of the practice at the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College.
