icating obedience of the pre-existent Son. This clue is taken up by St. Ignatius Loyola, and provides an essential element in what he calls "perfect obedience."

In his Letter on Obedience of 1553, Ignatius sums up much of the collective wisdom on religious obedience in the Latin Church.28 By it we imitate Christ, who was obedient unto death (2, 21). It makes a holocaust of the religious to God (9, 14), and Ignatius tells his sons that they thereby vanquish "the loftiest and most difficult part of yourselves, your will and intellect" (21). Religious obedience is founded both on the authority of the superiors, the right to teach that Christ bequeathed to the Church in the apostles, since "he who hears you hears me" (Luke 10:16), and on the vow of obedience the religious makes, whereby he undertakes to obey the superiors of his order.29 The obedient religious obeys not the superior as a man, or according as he is thought to be wise and prudent, but only as the representative of Christ, discerning Christ in the superior by faith (4, 16).

St. Ignatius distinguishes three degrees of obedience: obedience of execution, obedience of will, and obedience of intellect.30 Obedience of execution fulfills the commandment, accomplishing the exterior work. Just in itself, it is of little worth (5). Obedience of will joins one's will to that of the superior, and through that of the superior, to God's will. The merit of obedience increases in proportion to the sacrifice of our will in conforming our desire to the superior's.31 Obedience of the understanding, in turn, conforms our mind to the mind of the one who

28 The text of the letter in English can be conveniently found in Manuel María Espinosa Pólit, S.J., Perfect Obedience: Commentary on the Letter on Obedience of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (Westminster, MD: The Newman Bookshop, 1947), 20-30. I cite internally by paragraph numbers. See also the parallel exposition in the The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans., with an introduction and commentary, by George E. Ganss, S.J. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Resources, 1970), part VI, chapter 1.29 Espinosa Pólit, Perfect Obedience, 69, observes that the jurisdiction of the superior comes through the Church from Christ, as Luke 10:16 warrants, but the "dominative power" according to which the superior has the right in religion to command this individual arises from the will of him who vows obedience.30 Francisco Suárez, De religione societatis Iesu, Liber IV, De votis, chapter 13, in Opera Omnia (Paris: Vivès, 1860), vol. 16, finds the elements of this threefold grade of obedience in St. Thomas, ST I-II, q. 90, a. 9.31 Espinosa Pólit, Perfect Obedience, 81.

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Obedience Religious, Christological, and Trinitarian

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