The Jesuit founders' conception of good order in the Church was already suffused with concepts which they recognised as having been derived from the practice of commonwealths, and the reflections of political thinkers and historians. But for the founders good order was good order, whether it was in the Church, the secular commonwealth, the family, a corporation, or in any other collectivity, and each of these could serve as a model of how any of the others should be ordered. We thus find inherent in the Jesuits' organisational thinking an intricate triple analogy or ‘correspondence’ between good order in their own Society, in the Church and in the well-ordered commonwealth.

In the deliberations of the Society's dozen or so founding associates in 1539 the first point at issue was whether they should go individually where the Pope sent them, or whether they should ‘be so joined and bonded together one to another in one body, that no physical distance, however great, can divide us’ (p. 3). They concluded by concurring with Ignatius that the unity and companionship they already enjoyed should be rendered permanent by ‘reducing ourselves to one body’, in other words by formal incorporation.

Ignatius and his disciples designated their association a compañía or congregación. In Latin this became societas. This was a generic term for ‘association’, but in Roman law it usually meant a commercial association, established on terms and conditions (in the Society, these would be the Institute and the Constitutions).