This essay challenges the claim that the practice of Mass intentions is a “Germanic” distortion, foreign to the biblical and patristic tradition. It frames the development of Mass intentions not as a decline narrative but as a natural outworking of the biblical witness to prayer as a divine-human synergy, tracing this development through Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, Carolingian liturgical legislation, and Thomas Aquinas.

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.