Ad perfectum eloquentiam: The “Spoils of Egypt” in Jesuit Renaissance Rhetoric

Abstract

Beginning in the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, founded the first global rhetorical curriculum. Jesuit educators founded schools in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America—all ordered on their 1599 Ratio Studiorum. Yet this organizational and educational achievement faced several challenges. The Ratio reveals an attempt to reconcile the medieval education that shaped the early Jesuits and the classical humanism that excited later generations. The Jesuits articulated a reconciliation of humanistic and Christian virtue for the vita activa. These accomplishments mark Jesuit rhetoric as a distinct tradition worthy of deeper study by contemporary rhetoricians.

Notes

1We thank RR reviewers Don Abbot and David Fleming for their guidance on earlier versions of this essay.

2Jesuits in Goa, India, began teaching Indian and Portuguese students beginning in 1543. In 1545, the Duke of Gandia offered to endow a college in his city, and the Jesuits accepted his offer, soon attracting external students. Success at Gandia prompted the city fathers at Messina to request a school there, and thus a new kind of Jesuit college was founded, “one intended chiefly to teach lay youths who did not envisage the priesthood” (Ganss 22). Ignatius hoped the Roman College would become a model for all other Jesuit schools (Lynch 209).

3The book was widely published: “The original and the revised editions number 134 printings in forty-five different European cities, covering a period of 175 years,” and modifications (digests, compendiums) include fifty-eight printings over 260 years (Flynn, “Sources” 261).

4As our bibliography suggests, most Jesuit historiography has been written by Jesuits. Farrell's 1938 study is cited repeatedly, and O'Malley is the foremost contemporary expert. Surely, both rhetorical history and Jesuit history would benefit from wider interest.

5All references from the De Arte Rhetorica refer to the page number in the only English translation of the book: The De Arte Rhetorica (1568) by Cyprian Soarez, S.J: A Translation with Introduction and Notes by Lawrence Flynn.

6The youngest of thirteen children, Ignatius began life as Iñigo Lopez de Loyola. The young Iñigo formed his imagination by reading romances, and he became “a youthful solider, a swaggering caballero … in the service of the Spanish king” (Olin 4). He was badly injured at the Battle of Pamplona in 1521. During his long recovery—which included not one but two attempts to reset his shattered leg—Iñigo had only two books: the Life of Christ and The Golden Legend, an anthology of the saints (5). Soon his interior life began to change, and he found himself attracted to a religious vocation. This imaginative practice came to be known as the “movement of spirits” and formed the basis of his Spiritual Exercises. To pursue priestly ordination, Ignatius had to pursue education. Already in his late thirties, he was what we might today call a nontraditional student; his Autobiography recounts that he studied in the same classrooms as the young boys attending college at the traditional age (Olin 73). “At first, he had no idea how to acquire learning, except … to make a frontal attack on all the arrayed batteries of the grammarians, philosophers, and theologians” (Lynch 130). When this did not work, Ignatius moved to Paris, where he thought the universities would offer a more systematic approach. During his stay, which lasted from 1528 until 1535, he formed both the Society of Jesus and the attitudes that would shape Jesuit education.