Molding the plastic soul of youth. The Ratio Studiorum and the manifacture of educated and catholic subjects

From Firenze University Press Journal: Journal of History of Education (RSE)

Norberto Dallabrida, Università degli Studi di Santa Caterina

The Ratio Studiorum was promulgated by the Society of Jesus in 1599, with the objective of serving as a pedagogic discourse standard of educational practices at Jesuit colleges. It molded important disciplinary pieces of the Jesuitic and Catholic “school machinery”, which would be secularized and used by the school systems formulated by the Enlightenment and, mainly, by the bourgeois National State. A re-reading of the Ratio is intended as a “monument document”, in the sense of analyzing its strategies and pedagogical tactics in the production of the subjectivity of Jesu-it students, connected to the ascetic principles of the Society of Jesus, as well as to the social circumstances of a century of religious reforms and wars. The focus of analysis will be placed on the selection and structuring of school contents and on the didactic practices determined by the Ratio, seeking to connect them to the social groups that attended Jesuit colleges.

The founders of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola and his companions, did not intend to create a religious congregation committed to school education, as their initial motivation was directed to missionary activities in the Asian World, following the European Eastern expansion (Lacouture 1993). The concern with schools emerged from the intra-institutional need to provide “substantial” and regular education to Jesuit seminarians. However, when pressed by the growth of protestant religions and the religious wars, the Society of Jesus started to admit external students in their colleges, transforming them into catholic trenches, mainly after the Council of Trent. The Jesuits were established as the main modern Catholic Church militia, standing out as an active congregation, concerned with individualizing spirituality and characterized by a fighting language (Varela 1983).

In the 1540s, Jesuit colleges started to pop up around Europe, changing school education into one of the main pastoral actions of the Ignatian Congregation. The first educational institution that effectively admit-ted external students was the MessinaCollege, in 1548, a practice which was extended, very rapidly, to other European, Asian, and American cities (Schmitz 1994). In Rome, the headquarters of the Society of Jesus was founded in 1551, the Roman College, becoming the school institution model for the Jesuits, the one which agglutinated their main theologians and pedagogues, and which tested the school practices that would be the basis for the Ratio Studiorum. In the following year, the German School was instituted, aiming at the formation of Jesuit staff from German regions, that were frontally hit by the whirlwind of Lutheran and Calvinist reforms (Meneses 1988).

The Ratio Studiorum was a pedagogic reinvention produced from the Catholic re-reading of Renaissance pedagogic writings and educational practices, as well as from the creation of a system of practices from the Jesuit colleges themselves. The first generation of teachers of the Society of Jesus was very much influenced by the pedagogic formulations of Erasmus and Vives, both concerning the teaching of classical Latin language and active school practices. On one hand, the modus parisiensis was chosen as an educational model for the first Jesuit colleges, not only because Ignatius of Loyola and his co-founding companions had studied at the University of Paris, but above all due to their teaching method, which was distinguished by teaching solid grammar, by grading classes and courses, by implementing exercises in the classes and by the individualization of the student (Durkheim 1995).

The “Constitutions of the Society of Jesus” dedicated the fourth part, entitled “The Learning and Other Means of Helping Their Neighbor That Are to Be Imparted to Those Who Are Retained in the Society”, to the education of the new born Jesuit colleges. It is the legal-pedagogical milestone for the Society of Jesus, in which Ignatius of Loyola established the fundamental guidelines for the Jesuitic educational practice, indicating the need to produce the Ratio Studiorum (Loyola 1975).Furthermore, the 1599 Ratio is, above all, a product of the reflection systematization educational practices implemented in Jesuit colleges for half a century. The first Course of Studies was written by the rectors of the Messina College: De studiis Societatis Iesu, by Jerónimo de Nadal, and De Ratione Studiorum, by Hannibal du Coudret. From their experiences and observation at a number of colleges, but especially at the Roman College, where he worked as a teacher and prefect of studies, Diego de Ledesma published De ratione et ordine Collegii Romani, which should serve as a model for all the Society of Jesus’ colleges, and it is considered the main individual contribution to the 1599 Ratio (Franca 1952).

From those partial beginnings, Father Claudio Acquaviva, fifth Superior General of the Society of Jesus, led the process to make a “definite” Ratio Studiorum. In 1586, he nominated a commission with six representatives to write a draft project, which was sent to the Jesuit provinces. After the provincial reviews, five years later, a new text was produced, sent to all the Jesuit col-leges. After the approval of the reviewers nominated by the Superior General, in 1599, the Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Jesu was officially approved by the Society of Jesus, becoming then mandatory in Jesuit colleges. In fact, the “definite” version of the Ratio responded to the need for the standardization of educational practices in the chain of Jesuit colleges, which was meteorically formed in the second half of the 16th century. The first controlling pedagogical strategy adopted by the Society of Jesus was the establishment of “general officers”, who would regularly visit and inspect the Jesuit col-leges. Nevertheless, the diversity of visitors and the long intervals between visits did not contribute to develop the pedagogical standard, which would be established by the 1599 Ratio (Franca 1952).

The 1599 Ratio is an educational code comprising 467 rules, gathered in 30 sets, directed to the college agents and institutions of Jesuit colleges. The rules cover the administration, the course of studies, the school method and discipline, and were directed to the three classes of Jesuit teaching — lower classes, philosophy and theology — which had common pedagogical principles, but while these aimed at the formation of a Jesuit clergy and of other religious congregations, the lower classes would admit external students, who would follow other studies, mainly law and medicine. Approximately a third of those rules would guide the school content and practices of the lower classes, which were divided in “series”: rhetoric, humanities, and grammar, being this last one subdivided in lower, middle and upper grammar. The Ratio determined that the five series should not mix through fusions or divisions and that the promotions from one series to the next should be conducted annually, but in the grammar classes this should happen only when the student could demonstrate mastering of the established knowledge. Those school degrees of intellectual perfection were inspired in the progressive and linear processes of search for spiritual perfection, prescribed in the “Spiritual Exercises”.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/rse-10424

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