Any student of the early history of Jesuit attitudes on education will study many secondary sources, but students wishing to consult primary sources in translation will find a helpful reference in Jesuit Pedagogy. As a compendium of documents related to pivotal stages in the development of Jesuit education from the society’s foundation to 1616, the book may not necessarily offer any uniquely novel argument, but the introduction and the various chapters lucidly synthesize scholarship on how Jesuit institutions of learning grew from the thoughts of Ignatius of Loyola into a global system of schools. The editors focus on the accommodating flexibility of the order with respect to teaching and learning among both Jesuits and non-Jesuits. Through the book’s organization into four numbered parts, respectively labeled “Inspirations,” “Administration,” “Formation,” and “Teaching Practices,” the reader appreciates how the Jesuits viewed pedagogy as a discipline that ideally cultivated the spiritual as well as temporal well-being of teachers and students.
In their selection and arrangement of primary sources, the editors highlight the epistolary productivity of Jesuits interested in the proliferation and structure of schools. In part 1, Casalini and Pavur call special attention to Jesuit engagement with audiences both within and outside the order, notably the civil authorities whose approval of Jesuit colleges would prove indispensable. Readers will notice how the introductions and content of the documents focus on Jesuit-authored reflections that necessarily reconciled secular (i.e., Greco-Roman) ideas and the fundamental aims of the Jesuit order with respect to the propagation of Catholic Christianity. The Jesuit stress on the importance of the physical and spiritual welfare of students arguably enabled the order to advance the view that spiritual edification could not merely occur in an intellectual mind otherwise tainted by less than ideal living habits. These two argumentative underpinnings of unifying the secular and religious world and unifying the tangible habits of daily life with the intangible Christian soul clearly arise in the introduction of “Constitutions for the German College (1570)” in part 2. Here, in their preliminary remarks to a letter dictated by the sixteenth-century Jesuit Giuseppe Cortesono, the editors explain how Jesuits favored a pious learner invested in schoolwork over a more erudite learner nominally pious but morally torpid in other respects.
Among other issues, Casilini and Pavur also navigate the basic question of how much the Jesuits valued learning in relation to cultivating the missionary ethos of Christian virtue so central to the order. According to the documents selected, learning and the promotion of morality did not always exist as essentially synonymous ideas. This implied tension becomes especially clear in chapter 18, “Spiritual and Academic Progress (1564).” Dissenting voices arose as a natural byproduct of the growing ranks of the Jesuits, as plainly shown by Cortesono’s emphasis on accommodating gentleness as the guiding force for Jesuit schools. The very idea that gentle moderation in the attitudes of school administrators could assume more importance than learning contravened the harsh discipline espoused by other Jesuit pedagogues. Readers will appreciate these reminders of how Jesuit attitudes on learning resist reduction into generalizations that fail to capture the multifaceted and often-conflicting attitudes that prevailed among Jesuits. Letters regarding the actual intricacies of teaching school subjects belong to the fourth and last part of this compendium.
Given the editors’ admirable job in choosing writings of varying degrees of formality, readers ought to completely excuse the editors for a few oversights. The dedication page and page 27, for instance, assign different birth years to Jesuit László Lukács, who edited the Monumenta Paedagogica, and a similar discrepancy in Cortesono’s birth year arises on pages 107 and 205. A conjunction clearly belongs between the terms “good defense” and “good explanation” on page 7. These utterly minor errors aside, Jesuit Pedagogy will prove tremendously useful as a helpful primary-source introduction to documents that illustrate the embryonic development of Jesuit teaching and learning in the context of the order’s dedication to Christian morals and the dissemination of the faith.
