Traditions of Eloquence

The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies

Cinthia Gannett, John Brereton, Cinthia Gannett, John Brereton

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780823264544
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This groundbreaking collection explores the important ways Jesuits have employed rhetoric, the ancient art of persuasion and the current art of communications, from the sixteenth century to the present. Much of the history of how Jesuit traditions contributed to the development of rhetorical theory and pedagogy has been lost, effaced, or dispersed. As a result, those interested in Jesuit education and higher education in the United States, as well as scholars and teachers of rhetoric, are often unaware of this living 450-year-old tradition. Written by highly regarded scholars of rhetoric, composition, education, philosophy, and history, many based at Jesuit colleges and universities, the essays in this volume explore the tradition of Jesuit rhetorical education—that is, constructing "a more usable past" and a viable future for eloquentia perfecta, the Jesuits' chief aim for the liberal arts. Intended to foster eloquence across the curriculum and into the world beyond, Jesuit rhetoric integrates intellectual rigor, broad knowledge, civic action, and spiritual discernment as the chief goals of the educational experience.Consummate scholars and rhetors, the early Jesuits employed all the intellectual and language arts as "contemplatives in action, " preaching and undertaking missionary, educational, and charitable works in the world. The study, pedagogy, and practice of classical grammar and rhetoric, adapted to Christian humanism, naturally provided a central focus of this powerful educational system as part of the Jesuit commitment to the Ministries of the Word. This book traces the development of Jesuit rhetoric in Renaissance Europe, follows its expansion to the United States, and documents its reemergence on campuses and in scholarly discussions across America in the twenty-first century.Traditions of Eloquence provides a wellspring of insight into the past, present, and future of Jesuit rhetorical traditions. In a period of ongoing reformulations and applications of Jesuit educational mission and identity, this collection of compelling essays helps provide historical context, a sense of continuity in current practice, and a platform for creating future curricula and pedagogy. Moreover it is a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding a core aspect of the Jesuit educational heritage.

PART I

HISTORICAL SITES AND SCENES OF JESUIT RHETORICAL PRACTICE, SCHOLARSHIP, AND PEDAGOGY

HISTORICAL NOTES ON RHETORIC IN JESUIT EDUCATION

Patricia Bizzell

In a focus group discussing new recruitment material for the College of the Holy Cross, I learned from admissions-office personnel that many students who are interested in our college seek excellent liberal-arts education but place little value on our affiliation with the Society of Jesus, little beyond a generalized feeling that Jesuit schools are “good.” This vagueness about what constitutes Jesuit education may be due in part to the dwindling (though still significant) number of our students whose parents attended Holy Cross and who therefore have firsthand witnesses to inform them. But I dare say the vagueness is shared by many who are navigating the American academic scene. So what should these prospective students be looking for? Holy Cross has a robust sense of its Jesuit mission to educate the whole person, and this mission encompasses many components. But I will argue here that a major component of the Jesuit educational mission has been, and is, education in rhetoric and, often, more specifically, that blend of verbal facility and ethical action known in the tradition as eloquentia perfecta (see, in Part II, Brereton and Mailloux and, in Part III, Gannett and Fernald).

This focus was necessitated by the cultural milieu in which the order emerged, and it has significantly contributed to the Jesuit-educated becoming influential leaders throughout the world. As John O’Malley, S.J., points out in the foreword to this volume, the humanist rhetorical education of the Renaissance, which the Jesuits adopted, came to define “good education” for people of many different religious and cultural backgrounds. It can be argued, however—and indeed, the essays in this volume attest—that the Jesuits gave rhetorical education a particular ethical spin and held onto it through the centuries more tenaciously than did many others. Contemporary examples include the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Sogang University, in Seoul, South Korea, where I was privileged to teach in 2011. The common denominator has always been to develop whatever language-using abilities are most needful for leadership in that time and place.

RHETORIC IN EARLY JESUIT EDUCATION

At the time of the founding of the Society of Jesus, which received papal approval in 1540, Europe was in the midst of violent cultural changes. Social classes were becoming more stratified, with greater concentrations of wealth above and poverty below; political upheavals and warfare were commonplace, as larger national entities were gradually hammered out; and explosive religious controversy had begun with the Reformation and the Roman Catholic Church’s responses to it. It is easy to imagine how individuals in such a period would have difficulty finding their way. One such individual was Ignatius Loyola. Like many aristocratic young men of his day, he was proficient in arms, but while recovering at home from severe battle wounds, he experienced the religious revelation that set him on the path to founding the Jesuit order. (For more on his early spiritual development, see Deans, Part I.)

As Ignatius and his companions began to discern what their particular contribution to Christendom would be, “the basic impulse behind the new Order was missionary,” as O’Malley has explained (“How,” 60). The Jesuits were ready to travel anywhere in the world where they could serve “the good of souls” (60), and as is well known, early companion Francis Xavier set out for India, Japan, and China even before the order was formally approved. (I’ll have more to say about Jesuits in Asia later.) O’Malley shows how the Jesuits evolved their program of helping souls from the spiritual development of Ignatius himself, characterized by “the primacy of personal spiritual experience” (61); “the conviction that God could be found in all things” (62), so that religion and secular learning need not be at odds; and the vision of “the Christian life as a call to be of help to others” (62).

Initially, the Jesuits aimed to enact this form of spirituality through pastoral care and preaching. O’Malley says that at first they explicitly ruled out education as part of their ministry (63). Indeed, no religious order had undertaken the education of laypeople as its principal mission, although some offered instruction to their younger members, as the Jesuits began to do. Nevertheless, as O’Malley has noted, Ignatius Loyola and his early companions were well equipped to become educators, as all were “from an academic elite” (First, 36). Having begun their education at universities in their native lands—Loyola’s at the Spanish universities of Alcalá and Salamanca—they then traveled to the University of Paris, which for centuries had been the preeminent institution of higher learning in Europe. At Paris they completed their mastery of the classical languages, then the sine qua non of higher learning, as well as developing their own new emphases in theology, and when the companions then traveled to Rome, intent on offering their services to the pope, they entered the homeland of the humanist movement, of which rhetoric as exemplified in the classical texts was “the central discipline,” as O’Malley says (253; for more on Loyola’s rhetorical education, see Brereton in Part II, and Gannett in Part III). Italian humanist pietas, to be derived from classical learning, aimed to inculcate personal integrity and a commitment to public service, goals easily adapted to a more specifically Christian emphasis such as the Jesuits valued (see O’Malley, “How,” 64). Indeed, Robert A. Maryks has argued that Ciceronian probabilistic argument provided the inspiration and model for the way the Jesuits innovated in conducting the sacrament of confession (emphasizing individual conscience rather than strict legalism) (see Maryks, Saint, 97–101; and his chapter in Part I of this volume).

Combating Protestantism, as O’Malley emphasizes, was not an early motive for Jesuit missionizing activity (see “From,” 135). Much of this activity took place in countries where Protestantism was not a great threat (e.g., Catholic European countries and “pagan” countries in Asia). But as Paul Grendler has explained, the early Jesuits believed that a new kind of schooling was necessary to prepare young men for the priesthood, and especially for membership in the Society of Jesus. O’Malley, who concurs, is worth quoting at length on the problem:

The Jesuit educational venture originated with concern for the training of younger members of the Society, whose education the first companions hoped would be at least the equivalent of their own. Those companions must themselves be numbered among the clergy that benefited from the best their age had to offer. From their observations, however, and from many other sources as well, we know that the training of the diocesan clergy followed an extraordinarily haphazard pattern across Europe. Although a small percentage were well educated and devout, the seemingly vast majority were so ill-trained as to constitute a major scandal, and some were ignorant almost beyond description. It was almost inevitable that the Jesuits would be drawn into attempts to alleviate the situation.

—John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 232

Compounding the problem of inadequate training was misplaced fidelity to the cold logic of the medieval scholastic style of preaching, with its elaborately structured sermons of textual and doctrinal analysis. James J. Murphy gives detailed information on this ars praedicandi: in its ultimate form, circa 1200, the typical sermon consisted of a “ ‘protheme’ or ’antetheme’ followed by a ’prayer’ and then statement of ‘theme’ (Scriptural quotation) with ‘division’ and ‘subdivision’ of that quotation ‘amplified’ through a variety of modes” (331). Setting aside such elaborate schemes, the Jesuits introduced a new style of pulpit oratory that tried to reach people through arousing their emotions with both the religious sincerity of the speaker and his judicious use of rhetorical ornaments. Jesuit preaching concerned itself less with doctrinal niceties than with motivating people to love God and do God’s will, even to the point of addressing “heretics” gently (see Worcester, Part I). To reach a wide variety of hearers, says O’Malley, “the Jesuits were constantly advised in all their ministries to adapt what they said and did to times, circumstances, and persons”—as O’Malley points out, a very rhetorical stance (255).

To provide better training for the clergy—and ultimately for the lay students they would educate in their schools—the Jesuits advocated that classical literature in Latin and Greek should be taught, as the Italian humanists had always promoted, but much more systematically (see Scaglione, 3ff.). Borrowing from the pedagogy they had experienced at Paris, the early Jesuits decided that humanist education needed to be organized in levels suited to the students’ ability. Students would have to master the work at one level before proceeding to the next. Students also would have to be active learners, provided with many opportunities to use their classical-language skills in original compositions and oral presentations, including theatrical presentations, for which the Jesuit schools later became famous (see O‘Malley, First, 223ff). Repetition, review, and drill would still be key aids to memory and mastery. Yet the students would need teachers who could motivate them with praise and friendly competition among them, rather than with the brutal forms of corporeal punishment employed elsewhere. Above all, if the students were to put their verbal skills to good use in the service of the Catholic Church, they would need teachers who could make them love doing God’s will by the teachers’ personal example rather than by exhortation and threat. (To glimpse a Jesuit classroom of the period, see Leigh, Part I).

Guidelines to this approach were eventually collected in the Ratio Studiorum of 1599. Many of its principles are widely accepted in secular education today, from the idea that students should be separated into classes according to ability level, to the liberal arts’ educational goal of developing the students’ psychological well-being and ethical sophistication as well as their intellectual competence. O’Malley contends that the Jesuits “saw a correlation between the pietas beloved of the humanists and the kind of personal conversion and transformation that were the traditional goals of Christian ministry” (“From,” 135). Juan de Polanco, secretary to Ignatius, wrote an important letter on Jesuit education in 1547 that emphasized the contribution of humanistic learning to interpreting scripture, understanding philosophy, and fostering “the skills in verbal communication essential for the ministries in which the Jesuits engaged” (134). The ultimate goal, wrote Polanco, would be to create “pastors, civic officials, administrators of justice, and [those who] will fill other important posts to everybody’s profit and advantage” (quoted in O’Malley, “From the 1599 Ratio Studiorum to the Present,” 135). Surely the goal of creating effective civic leaders resonates with today’s liberal-arts educators, especially rhetoricians. Moreover, having had his (or later, her) conscience developed by arguing cases of conscience according to Ciceronian probabilism, as Maryks explains, these leaders “would when necessary defy convention to follow what in these concrete circumstances was the better choice” (O’Malley, “From the 1599 Ratio Studiorum to the Present,” 136).

The early Jesuits did not work out this educational philosophy in the abstract before they ever entered a classroom. But because they saw how better education could not only support their own mission but also improve the world in which they lived, they responded quickly to an invitation to open a school in the Sicilian town of Messina in 1548. It was at Messina that the rudiments of the Jesuit approach to education were worked out. Messina promised the Jesuits a school building and room and board for themselves, if they would agree to open a school in which any male student could be admitted free of charge. The Jesuits hoped—not without reason, as it turned out—that a significant number of the young men attending this school would choose a religious vocation or perhaps even seek membership in the Society of Jesus. But the Jesuits were quite willing to educate other students as well, who would enter secular life. Accepting such students was a condition of the town’s support for the whole enterprise, but apparently the Jesuits did not resist the notion, because they believed that candidates for the clergy would be better educated if they studied in company with their lay peers—quite a new idea at the time.

The organization of this school responded in part to what the Jesuits found among the young students of Messina and in part to their own earlier educational experiences. These experiences convinced the Jesuits that the best way to create the accomplished rhetoricians they desired was to school the students in Latin and Greek grammar, composition, and literature. Most of the boys who came to the school were the sons of upper-middle-class merchants and wealthy aristocrats, but a few were sent by ambitious farmers and small tradesmen. These boys from the poorer social classes might not even be literate, and a few of them, at the young age of seven or so, were admitted to the school to learn their letters first. Most students, however, entered at around age ten, already possessing basic literacy, and began the first of three levels of classes in Latin. They then progressed to the “humanities” course, which focused on the appreciation of classical literature, and, finally, to the capstone “rhetoric” course, in which all the verbal skills they had learned so far in Latin, and to some extent also in Greek, were put to use in a variety of written and oral exercises. Students moved through these five levels at their own pace, with the more academically successful able to progress more quickly, but in general, young men completed the course when they were around the age of sixteen.

Latin classes focused on the work of Cicero and Vergil. The Jesuits used various manuals, especially one by the Italian humanist Guarino and one by the Jesuit Manoel Álvarez, but they also attempted to present students with complete classical texts, chosen to suit the class’s ability level—what is nowadays called a “whole language” approach. The letters of Cicero were favored for this reason—they were relatively short—...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by John O’Malley, S.J.
• Preface
• Half Title
• Introduction: The Jesuits and Rhetorical Studies—Looking Backward, Moving Forward
• Part I. Historical Sites and Scenes of Jesuit Rhetorical Practice, Scholarship, and Pedagogy
• Part II. Post-Suppression Jesuit Rhetorical Education in the United States: Loss and Renewal in the Modern Era
• Part III. Jesuit Rhetoric and Ignatian Pedagogy: Applications, Innovations, and Challenges
• Afterword: Technology, Diversity, and the Impression of Mission
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index