@litterat: I'm not sure who your reply was directed at but creating one role for each method would be pretty meaningless as one quickly would end up with hundreds of roles and a completely unmaintanable application...
Anyway, I solved my stack overflow problem by using a Hibernate interceptor instead of event listeners. The interceptor checks the domain object type on save/delete/insert and adds it to a set. If the Set is non-empty on flush the method definition map is reloaded from the database. See the Java Persistence with Hibernate book for a full example of extending EmptyInterceptor.
