via Amy Welborn
God's unlikely Latin lovers
Yasmin Haskell
September 27, 2006
ONE of the most delicious paradoxes in the history of education is the fact that the Society of Jesus, a Catholic Reformation order founded by Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th century, was the greatest single publicity machine for the literature of pagan antiquity from the late Renaissance until the French Revolution.
The ethos of the Society of Jesus was an apostolic one: its members were called less to contemplate than to preach, to harvest souls, to exert influence in the world. The order attracted active types - missionaries, musicians, mathematicians, artists, architects, scientists and poets -- and all Jesuits were required to do a stint of teaching in the society's free humanist schools.
The Jesuits are rightly acclaimed as the educators of early modern Catholic Europe. Among their brilliant alumni were Rene Descartes and Voltaire. While their curriculum and pedagogical methods were based on Renaissance models, the Society of Jesus translated traditional elements into a spectacularly successful formula of their own, forging an international educational empire that stretched from Rome to Russia, Mexico to Macau.
A Jesuit education culminated, ideally, in the higher study of philosophy, science and theology, but students (all boys) had to pass through a series of graded lower classes in literature and rhetoric. Well into the 18th century this lower curriculum prescribed the study of the ancient languages, the reading of the pagan classics and, above all, the active production of elegant and effective Latin verse and prose.
There is a good deal of documentary evidence for what went on in the early modern Jesuit classroom.
The sources reveal a high-pressured environment, but not an excessively punitive one.
Jesuit teachers were bound to follow a meticulously researched Ratio Studiorum, or code of studies, which was put out in its definitive form in 1599 after international consultation and in-school testing. The ratio was no bald list of prescribed texts and expected outcomes. It enshrined the Jesuit philosophy of education. Successive versions of this policy document reveal that the reason for teaching pagan classics to Christian boys was the fostering of two qualities highly prized by the Society of Jesus: competition and creativity.
The early modern Jesuit classroom was a literary sporting arena, which saw regular intra-class and inter-class competitions. Indeed, boys would be assigned a personal rival with whom to duel, and were encouraged to point out one another's mistakes. There was division into ranked teams of 10 (decuriae), and further into class camps, with monthly contests for promotion and demotion of so-called dictators, praetors, tribunes, and senators.
If it all sounds rather militaristic, we should bear in mind that students were at the centre of this fast-paced learning. The teacher's role was to channel the boys' high spirits and rivalry, to correct exercises, to moderate and confer praise.
Students collaborated in the correction of classwork, and competed energetically in using and reusing the classical models, relating them in often ingenious ways to their own experience.
An 18th century anthology of student verse includes a sequence of myths to explain the origins of fencing, bombs, musical organs, tapestries, mirrors, hair ornaments, wigs and beauty spots, and another sequence of poems on sports and games, including badminton, tennis, billiards, chess and snakes and ladders.
Beyond the classroom, there were exhibitions and prize-givings, the staging of original plays, and extra-curricular "academies", where boys at every level could spend more time perfecting their Latin style: through memory exercises, translation, composition of inscriptions, emblems and enigmas, working out themes for dialogues, poems and tragedies and, above all, through imitation.
Certainly not everyone was destined to graduate with flying colours, just as not all of today's school-leavers will have mastered our indispensable subjects, English and mathematics.
On the other hand, it is a testament to the Jesuits' way of proceeding with the classics that many of their students evidently did achieve a remarkable facility in Latin verse composition. We can infer this, at least, from the vast quantity of Latin poetry churned out by mature Jesuit priests, on subjects from the spiritual to the secular to the scientific (they were the leading producers of didactic poetry, poetry of instruction in the arts and sciences, in the early modern period). No one was forcing them, and some recorded the pleasure they derived from the exercise.
All this may seem a world away from present-day concerns about declining standards of literacy and numeracy in our schools and universities, not to mention the ideological battle over outcomes-based education. But perhaps there are some lessons to be drawn, cautiously, from the experience, successes and even deficiencies of early modern Jesuit teachers.
Arts faculties and humanities teachers today regularly attempt to lure students into their non-professional courses with the promise of a flexible degree, which will fit them for the ever-evolving knowledge economy and a life of multiple career changes.
The Jesuits were masters of such flexibility. The greatest polymath of them all, Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), curator of the museum of the Roman College, sat at the centre of a worldwide web of scientific and scholarly correspondence, and turned his hand to monumental works on Egyptian hieroglyphics, China, music, medicine, natural history, seismology and cryptology.
The chameleon-like Jesuits of the Ancien Regime had learned to create and recreate themselves in the classroom (and also, let's not forget, to work effectively in teams).
But the Jesuit classroom was also a place where content was taken very seriously, and the humanistic curriculum was considered an essential foundation for the higher study of physics, metaphysics and theology. We may be inclined to dismiss the exclusive focus on ancient languages and literature in Jesuit schools as a waste of students' time, having no real connection with their subsequent professional or religious training.
Early modern parents did not feel that way, though, and the beneficiaries of Jesuit humanist education did not dispense with it in the way that I, for one, have forgotten everything I once knew about trigonometry and calculus.
In the 18th century, the Jesuit physicist Roger Boscovich devoted his rare leisure hours to composing a technical Latin poem on eclipses.
In its heyday, Latin humanism provided poets and teachers, doctors and lawyers, scholars and scientists, with a common ground of culture, which was shared and keenly cultivated by educated people throughout Europe and the New World.
Yasmin Haskell is Cassamarca Foundation associate professor in Latin humanism at the University of Western Australia.
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