Active Leisure the Body in Sixteenth-Century Jesuit Culture

journal of jesuit studies 1 (2014) 400-418

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Active Leisure The Body in Sixteenth-Century Jesuit Culture

Cristiano Casalini Università degli Studi di Parma [email protected]

Abstract

The philosophy of education of the first Jesuits—as delineated in the Ratio studiorum (1599) and embodied in the colleges’ practices—has become one of the preferred top- ics among historians of sixteenth-century education and philosophy. This paper seeks to present a heretofore rather neglected aspect of Jesuit education theory: the treatment of the body in the network of colleges during the first fifty years of the Society of Jesus. Among the key features of this treatment one finds leisure and rest, which Jesuits conceived as a means of measuring and punctuating the school timetable. While most medieval colleges did not usually leave much free time to their students, the Jesuits viewed leisure and rest as crucial for fostering spiritual and intellectual activities. Leisure and rest, however, ought not be understood as a cessation of action. This paper shows that the educational practices addressed to the body in the Jesuit colleges (such as the alternation of exercise and rest, the alternation of waking and sleep, the relationship between hygiene and the care of the body, and physical education) were deeply rooted in the Ignatian culture of the Spiritual Exercises. This experience stands out as one of most ingenious attempts to transform religious mystical practices from the medieval tradition in a manner that would make them resonate with the early modern way of life.

Keywords

Jesuit education – leisure – Ignatian spirituality – physical education – discipline – rest – vacations – school schedule

A considerable body of literature, sparked by Michel Foucault (and, going back further, by the Annales school of historians), has already developed around the themes of the government of the conscience and the disciplining of the

Active Leisure 401 body as practices that took root in Europe at the dawn of the modern age.1 Educational institutions have emerged as the favored field for the historical analysis of the adoption of such practices, and in particular the college, a mechanism conceived and developed within the university which was to become—between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries—the establish- ment of choice for the education of the ruling class. Obviously, many studies have been conducted on the regime of daily life at the Jesuit colleges, since from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century they represented the leading schools in Europe. The picture that emerges from these studies is often not very different from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, with the negative consequences regarding the control of the conscience (plagiarism, spying) and of bodies (harassment, punishment) that follow. In particular, bodies are often described as the place or object of forms of mortification applied or induced by external authorities to inform behaviors and discipline minds. The regime of discipline to which bodies seem to be sub- jected within the educational framework merely serves the correction of spiritual activity. In short, this picture depicts Jesuit education as a modern improvement (or as a secular adaptation) of some of the harshest practices devised by medieval monastic traditions. Hardly ever are the aspects of the care of the body applied in the Jesuit colleges highlighted, even less the fact that the body could be conceived by the Jesuits rather as the positive and driving force of a healthy and vigorous spirituality. One indication of this fact is given by something one would perhaps not expect to find in a Panopticon-type institution: leisure time. As I intend to show in this paper, this element is clearly present in Jesuit education and it may even be seen as the cornerstone of the Bildung (education) of the good Jesuit (or of the good student in general). Unlike the strict discipline imposed by the mendicant orders and pursued by the previous educational culture, the Jesuits conceived of leisure and rest, the break from rou- tine, as a positive means of punctuating lessons and as a tool for facilitating the individual’s spiritual activism.

1 In this vein are studies following Norbert Elias, which are more focused on the civilization of “good manners,” on courtesy and, in general, on the genesis of the modern social normaliza- tion of individual behavior. See Etiquette et politesse, ed. Alain Montandon (Clermont- Ferrand: Association des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Clermont-Ferrand, 1992). See also La città e la corte. Buone e cattive maniere tra Medioevo e Età Moderna, eds. Elena Brambilla and Daniela Romagnoli (Milan: Guerini e associati, 1991). Literature on colleges was triggered by Philippe Áries. See, for example, Philippe Áries, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage Books, 1962).

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The presence of leisure should thus not be confused with a concession to laziness or inactivity. The Ratio studiorum describes many aspects of what can be understood as free time in a Jesuit college, starting with simple recreation, holidays, hygiene, and the more general treatment of the body, such as play, physical exercise, sports, and so on, including the theater. In this way it shows that rest is actually intended as an exercise, a form of action that is essential for the cultivation of the skills required by the educational goals of the Society of Jesus. This presence of leisure and body care in education is an outcome of a broader conception of Jesuit spirituality, which has its origins in the notion that Ignatius of Loyola had of the spiritual relationship between mind and body. As a result of both biographical events and cultural influences during his years in Paris, Ignatius developed a strong belief in the need for psychosomatic unity for effective human askesis. The body for him ceased to be the physical manifestation of sinfulness that must be punished and became a tool that could foster the individual’s spirituality.2 The Society’s Constitutions would clearly show this later by prescribing a strictly limited use of severe punishments and practices of discipline of the body: “Punishment of the body should not be unreasonable, nor excessive in vigils, fasting and other penances […], which usually cause harm and prevent higher goods.”3 The individual was in need of physical and intellectual fitness to respond in all respects to the mission that God had given him/her in the world. Like the anti-monastic culture of the Protestant Reformation, even for the Jesuits the world became an eminent place for the manifestation of the will of God and for the askesis of the individual, who is always in search of his/her worldly mission. In this way, the Jesuits always conceived of themselves as “contemplatives in action.” This idea, linked to free will in opposition to Protestantism, produced a peculiar revaluation of the care of the body in Jesuit spirituality, since the aim of the high performance of the individual spirit is directly related to the emphasis on activism, on the essential mobility,4 and on the fundamental rest- lessness that characterize the spiritual profile of the Society. Of course, the care of the body was an unavoidable prelude to the fully effective performance

2 See Christopher van Ginhoven Rey, Instruments of the Divinity. Providence and Praxis in the Foundation of the Society of Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 3 Const. III, 96. 4 Luce Giard, “Le devoir d’intelligence, ou l’insertion des jésuites dans le monde du savoir,” in Les Jésuits à la Renaissance. Système éducatif et production du savoir, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), xi–lxxix.

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Active Leisure 403 of spiritual activism, and this is the reason why both entered the educational practices of the Jesuit colleges, becoming a key part of the curriculum. This paper aims at exploring the role of the body in Jesuit spirituality and its effects on the practices of the young people (Jesuits and others) whose minds and bodies were trained in the colleges of the Society. To do this, it returns to the origins of the spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola and to his Spiritual Exercises, where he sketched a clear profile of the positive role of the body in human askesis.

The Body and Ignatian Spirituality

Ignatius’s Exercises in fact can be seen as a method (a “ratio”) that sets out an ascetic route by which the Christian who submits to them is called constantly to be vigilant and in command regarding his/her conscience. It is a journey of interior asceticism of which the most modern aspect—and this was the key to the success of the Exercises across large swathes of sixteenth-century society—is the method which the exercitant and his/her spiritual “director” (a term that in fact never appears in the first edition of the Exercises) must follow in order to render as efficient as possible his/her religious path, a method largely envisaged by Ignatius as following the byways of the heart, the senses, and the emotions.5 These aspects, which according to Ignatius implicate the body in the development of Christian consciousness, represent an indispensable correlative in the formation of Jesuit spirituality: the body is not mere soma (dead weight), and neither is the soul perched on it like Plato’s captain of the ship; nor are we dealing with the concupiscent body of Lutheran theology, which conceived of the struggle against the obstinate negativity and corruption of the flesh as the only legitimate space for the exercise of humans’ free judgment. On the contrary, the Ignatian inspiration takes in general a positive view of humanity, in line with Tridentine anthropology: the Fall is not seen as definitive corruption but as a weakening of human virtue; thus the body becomes an active instrument in the believer’s striving for perfection and, as such, must cooperate with the conscience to prepare itself for the intervention of divine grace. In his Exercises, Ignatius reinforces this positive role of the body in the spiritual life. In a note to the First Week, he stresses the crucial importance of a scrupulous distribution of time, which should vary from individual to individual according to his/her physical constitution:

5 John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 131.

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Distribution of time […] may however be varied, and either increased or diminished, according as the age of each, his or her disposition of mind or body, or the complexion of his nature itself, helps him for the performance of the five exercises referred to.6

The body is an active factor in balancing and fostering spiritual asceticism. This means that taking care of one’s own body is no less important than taking care of one’s own soul. There could therefore even be the need for some rest in order to carry on the exercises. Ignatius states:

It must be noted that it is sometimes expedient that the one who is given these exercises, even if he is endowed both with vigor of mind and strength of body, should diminish something from the prescribed exercises […]; in order that he may be better able to attain what he desires.7

This relevance of the human body to individual spirituality is paralleled by the presence (over-emphasized, according to contemporary detractors) of the divine body in the liturgy: the Eucharist, transubstantiation, and the rite of sacrifice which Ignatius affirmed to the extent of making it a weekly practice— even generating scandal in certain quarters in a Catholicism still not geared up for confronting the Protestant supper—are pillars of Jesuit religious practice. Likewise the mystical body in Ignatius’s organicist vision of the Society of Jesus represents the image of the Societas as the body of Christ himself, and individuals as the members of that body, and it is worth noting that even if the Jesuits showed little interest in late medieval forms of Eucharistic devotion, they not only tolerated some, but manifested a preference—even in the wake of Ignatian spirituality—for the feast of Corpus Christi, for which it was allowed to set up large-scale celebrations.8 It would therefore not be out of place to rehearse a few biographical details regarding Ignatius, as they are crucial to the specific treatment of corporeality to which the Society adhered within its colleges. Going beyond the question of his battle wounds, which necessitated several orthopedic operations and a painful convalescence, Ignatius adopted from the outset of his conversion to the religious life a penitential style characteristic of the mendicant orders: a life centered on begging and on the mortification of the self and of the body (forced vigils, fasts, mortification of the flesh, and so on). Ignatius’s vocation,

6 Exerc. Spir. 1969, 298. English translations are my own. 7 Exerc. Spir. 1969, 312. 8 See O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 156.

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Active Leisure 405 however, was to mature in a different direction, and what looked like a series of practices of self-abnegation by a humble creature before his God came to seem to him to be public and immodest exhibitions of sanctity that reeked of pride and bordered on scandal. From this realization came the fundamental, characteristic and, above all, “modern” adoption of the golden mean (mediocritas): everything excessive, in terms of luxury or mortification, must be eschewed. The Jesuit Formula Instituti was a direct result of this. The approach to corporeality could no longer be conceived from the view- point of the mendicant tradition; it could no longer be seen as an obstacle to the active historical (and aesthetic) operation of the Christian in the world. Body and conscience were instead to be seen, according to the Ignatian inspiration, as joint instruments for understanding the mission which God had entrusted to the individuals in the world: the specific task assigned to each person for the worldly glorification of the Lord. As instruments, both body and mind were necessarily to be maintained by the Christian in perfect order: if that were not so, the Christian him/herself would get in the way of his/her own mission in the world. The life of the Jesuit thus became a permanent gymna- sium in which to exercise without respite muscles and intellect, body and conscience. We are a long way, therefore, from the punishments and privations that the religious asceticism of the previous centuries had promoted, some aspects of which were revisited both by the observant monasticism revived in the sixteenth century and by lay confraternities. But we are also equally far from those forms of religious experience that had, by contrast, cultivated corporeality as a mode of Christian life, setting it free from the category of mere sinfulness, and which were rooted, for example, in a particularly Franciscan approach. In an Addition to the First Week of the Exercises, Ignatius stresses the need for mediocritas in the disciplining one’s own body:

Moreover, since we often omit penances of this kind from fleshly affec- tion or erroneous judgment, as though our natural constitution were unable to bear them without great damage to health; and sometimes, on the other hand, exceed the just measure of penance, trusting too much to the strength of the body; by changing, as has been said, the kinds of penance, and taking and leaving them by turns, it generally happens that the most merciful Lord, who most perfectly knows our nature, enables each to discover that which suits him or her best.9

9 Exerc. Spir. 1969, 344.

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Dilwyn Knox has rightly observed that the disciplining of individual social behavior to be found in the pedagogical literature of the sixteenth century (Castiglione, Guazzo, Della Casa, Sadoleto, etc.) has its origin in the seculariza- tion of medieval monastic discipline,10 but he perhaps overlooks the ground- breaking influence of the Jesuit view of the body.11 His observations are nonetheless significant in so far as they show the unbroken ties that the lay mentality still maintained with the religious dimension: “It was a Christian ideal of ‘psychosomatic’ harmony rather than ‘courtliness’ […] which Europeans, both religious and lay, identified with civiltas or ‘polite behaviour.’”12 In other words, at the dawn of the modern age the training of the soul in the practical skills of courtly life could not leave out of consideration a watchful training of the body. This aspect of lay conduct can be traced back, according to Knox, to monastic “disciplinary” practices:

It was on the basis of this moral ideal that Benedictines, Cistercians, Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinian Canons Regular, followers of the devotio moderna and assorted friars and regular clergy prescribed detailed rules of behaviour for their various spiritual communities. […] If the soul and the body live in profound symbiosis, to every movement or posture of the body there must be a corresponding disposition of the spirit. Thus, by putting a break on exterior physical manifestations of sinful thoughts and impulses, the soul too can learn to resist and with time to triumph over those thoughts and impulses.13

On the other hand, Michel de Certeau has made clear the extent to which Ignatius’s speculations align with the modern—and the extent to which he distances himself from previous monastic practices—to reconstruct a psycho- theological framework for the sixteenth-century mystical experience: “What

10 Dilwyn Knox, “Disciplina: le origini monastiche e clericali del buon comportamento nell’Europa cattolica del Cinquecento e del primo Seicento,” in Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. Paolo Prodi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), 63–100. 11 Many studies have been conducted on Ignatius and the social aspects of his spirituality, often comparing his thought with that of John Calvin, in a perfect diptych of perspectives— not always in opposition—between Catholicism and the Protestant Reformation. Abel Athouguia Alves compares Ignatius and Calvin with the Nordic Humanism of Juan Luis Vives. See “The Christian Social Organism and Social Welfare: The Case of Vives, Calvin and Loyola,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (1989): 3–21. 12 Knox, “Disciplina,” 65. 13 Ibid., 68–69.

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Active Leisure 407 exactly is the body? The question haunts mystical discourse. What it grapples with is above all the question of the body.”14 Within the space opened by this question move the differing spiritualities of the great Spanish mystics, like John of the Cross, founder of the Discalced Carmelites, and Ignatius himself. While both actually claim descent from the same root, the Imitatio Christi, they offer two possible contrasting interpretations of the relation ship between soul and body in their pursuit of divine fulfillment: the first, in the opposition to and thwarting of the flesh; the second, conversely, in the active cooptation of the flesh and the senses. For Ignatius, the body needs care, guidance, and training in order to become an ascetic vehicle for approaching God. In fact, once he has abandoned what in his so-called Autobiography he recalls as an initially narcissistic care of the body, and once he has further discarded his later approach of repudiating corporeality, Ignatius comes to interpret the body as an apostolic instrument, continually warning his com- panions not to exaggerate their piety with vigils, fasts, penance, and excessive physical effort. Without specifically referring to the use and refinement of sensual experience as a means of reaching states of mystic contemplation— notwithstanding the fact that it was a dominating factor—the Exercises do offer a series of references to the treatment of the body, becoming indeed quite insistent, even detailed. Michael Barnes detects here a holistic approach on Ignatius’s part, in open contrast to the soul-body dualism typical of the time: Ignatius’s guiding principle was a sort of “balanced asceticism” wherein the body functions both as an instrument and as the apophatic locus of the spirit.15 Following Michel de Certeau, Pierre Emonet summarized this peculiar religious Erlebnis [experience] and suggested that it was fed by the European cultural mainstream.16 Although Ignatius had not been exposed to Humanistic culture as much as some Jesuits of the following generations would be, the idea of mediocritas was extremely important for him. This concept probably derived from Aquinas’s interpretation of Aristotle, to which Ignatius had some exposure while he was a student in Paris. Mediocritas was a virtue in the Humanistic tradition as well, and later Jesuits would exploit it, by adopting a Humanistic program articulated by Cicero, Quintilian, and the great Humanists

14 Michel de Certeau, Fabula mistica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987), 126. 15 See Michael Barnes, “The Body in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola,” Religion 19 (1989): 263–273. 16 See Pierre Emonet, S.J., “Du bon usage du corps. Selon Ignace de Loyola,” Choisir (July– August 2006): 16.

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408 Casalini like Vergerio, Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, and others, in whose works mens sana in corpore sano [a healthy mind in a healthy body] was a recurrent theme. The particular charisma that Ignatius of Loyola brought to the Society of Jesus was this double experience: a spiritual one, as a man of the world, and an academic one, as a student of the Collège de Sainte-Barbe—the government of the intellect and of the body was a double aim. Neither of the two aspects of humanity could be neglected in the individual’s mission in the world. For this reason not only in their ministry, their ritual observances, and their charitable work did the Jesuits bear the imprint of this double experience, but also in the educational structure of their colleges.

The Body in the College

It is well known that the Society was not founded with a pedagogical purpose. That the Society should found colleges or educational establishments was not part of Ignatius’s plans, or at least not of the earliest ones. We must be careful, therefore, not to attribute too readily certain didactic or educational disposi- tions to Ignatius. Nonetheless, the educational vocation developed fairly early in the life of Jesuit order, when Ignatius was still its superior general. The pedagogy that lay behind the birth of the Jesuit colleges need not be reconstructed from conjecture or speculation concerning what is left unsaid in Ignatius’s texts, but can be derived from explicit sources: for example, from the Society’s earliest documents, and from records of the debates that developed almost immediately, and which later fed into the more substantial confluence of doc- umentation that went into the compilation of the Ratio studiorum. The first explicit source is the Society’s Constitutions, first published in 1558. Here there is in fact an entire chapter devoted to the body, which deals with the training of the young Jesuit. Among the initial criteria governing admission to the order, the Constitutions emphasized particular attention to the body and to physical appearance:

A handsome/honorable appearance [species honesta] is desirable, since it can be greatly edifying to those one has to do with; and enjoying good health and strength of body helps one to perform our Institute’s tasks.17

Similarly, the second chapter of the ninth part of the Constitutions includes bodily concerns, such as health, youthfulness, and appearance [species externa],

17 Const. III, 49.

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Active Leisure 409 and states that an ideal superior general needs to be physically graceful and authoritative. The body was not only seen by Ignatius as one of the two principal areas to be examined in those wishing to join the Society, but was also the object of “reasonable care” (cura moderata, in the double sense of maintenance and control) required of the Jesuit.18 The divine service, according to Ignatius and the Constitutions, required the Jesuit to keep himself in good physical health in order to carry out his duties with the necessary energy.19 This precept was fundamental, particularly in the context of the educational requirements of the Society’s colleges, in so far as it imposed on superiors and novices (as well as students) the need to attend to such fundamentals as food, clothing, accommodation, and the distribution of tasks: the Constitutions in fact encourage the young Jesuit to inform his superior of any deficiency in his living conditions. From this derives the fact that questions regarding the division of the working day in the Casa Professa (or college), supplies, hygiene, and so on, demand the special attention of the superior, as well as the consideration of the most salubrious site for the build- ing of new colleges. Primum, quiescere [First, do get some rest]. The first body of evidence regarding the Jesuit emphasis on activism, i.e. on working in the real world towards the realization of the glory of God, is to be found precisely in the act of measuring the physical capacity of the student and of rationing with moderation his expenditure of energy: the way of mediocritas. Holidays, therefore, were both seasonal and weekly; and equally, there was a daily recreation period. Here we see already an indication of Jesuit innovation with respect to traditional didactic practices: the ample time allowed for recreation of body and spirit represented a clear break with the Parisian regimen (as introduced

18 “1. As an excessive concern about things pertaining the body is reprehensible, so a moder- ate and respectful care of the health and strength of the body is praiseworthy and should be observed by all. 2. As it is not convenient to burden anyone with too much physical work, which oppresses the mind and causes harm to the body, so some exercise, which is beneficial to both is commonly convenient to all, even to those who must devote themselves to exercises of the mind.” Const. III, 93–96. 19 It is interesting to note that, on a visit to the house of Alcalá to explain the Society’s Constitutions, Jerónimo Nadal would show dissatisfaction with the austere regime kept there (particularly with the few hours allocated for sleep), and required an immediate change: “He was unhappy with what he considered an excessively demanding spiritual regime that could jeopardize the health of the Jesuit students, and he moderated the religious practices of the community.” Claudio M. Burgaleta, José de Acosta, S.J. (1540–1600). His Life and Thought (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1999), 23.

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410 Casalini by Jan Standonck at Montaigu and reproduced by the college of Sainte Barbe) of an intensive daily student schedule.20 François de Dainville maintains that these conditions were typical of the Parisian colleges, which even at the height of the sixteenth century maintained an unbroken line with the medieval tradition:

The medieval schoolmasters do not seem to have concerned themselves with the bodies of their students, unless to punish them. Lapses of discipline, laziness or inattention, were all amply revisited on what they considered to be the literal seat of understanding. There was no provision for resting the body. The schools did not envisage a ‘programme,’ at best a ‘hall’ of recreation.21

On the contrary, it was the Jesuits who introduced a proper break into the daily workload of students. It is to them that students owe their modicum of relax- ation.22 Indeed, between 1556 and 1567 the Jesuit colleges steadily reduced the hours of the academic day, adapting it to the rhythm of the seasons and intro- ducing recreation periods so as to conserve oneself for future exertions. In Brevis ratio studendi (1564), Benito Pereira (Benedictus Pererius) stated that, since humans consist of soul and body, it is necessary for the Ratio to deal with both.23 In particular, Pereira stated that intellectual activities need some rest: “In my opinion, no one has to study more than three hours without taking a break.”24 The spirit of this precept was perfectly encapsulated forty years later in the measures adopted by the Jesuit Antonio Possevino to improve the study regime of a young man entrusted to his care:

As he was of tender age, it was good rather that he dine soberly, than abstain from all things, as he had been wont to do, except on those days when, either for some requirement of his order, or according to the rules

20 An example of this negative use of time is described by Henri Bernard-Maitre, Un grand serviteur du Portugal en France. Diego de Gouveia l’Ancien et le collège Sainte Barbe de Paris (1520–1548) (Coimbra: Coimbra Editora Limitada, 1952), 11. 21 François de Dainville, L’Éducation des jésuites (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Minuit 1978), 518. 22 Ibid., 526. 23 “Since [the body] is a necessary tool for the soul to understand, the health and vigour of the body must be cared for. The body is preserved and developed by moderation in eating, drinking, sleeping and exercising.” Mon. paed. II, 672. 24 Mon. paed. II, 673. Regarding sleeping time, Pererius stated: “One should not care about sleeping less than about eating, since during sleep the sensorial faculties (which serve the mind to understand) refresh and reanimate themselves and become more diligent and hard working to serve the mind.”

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Active Leisure 411

of the Holy Church, or for some other reason salutary to the soul, he should abstain from food; also that he reserve for the peace of the body or for sleep six or seven hours of the night, so that the bodily forces might not, by excessive weakening, extinguish the spirit, nor offend his own head. For this is the principal aim of the Devil, the author of all evil, that one should not go in fullness of strength to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, by which his reign has been overthrown.25

These considerations also feature in internal discussions, within the Society, around the proper duration of vacations, and which punctuate the long gesta- tion of the Ratio studiorum leading up to the publication of the definitive edition of 1599. The Ratio assigned to the provincial the task of administering the “school schedule and the vacations’ frequency.”26 All were enjoined to observe meticulously the rhythm of the daily scholastic timetable and, more broadly, that of the academic year as a whole. This admonition is enshrined in a pedagogical principle rendered explicit in the same article: “Assiduity in both liter- ary exercises and some rest is necessary.”27 The question of the vacationes had aroused considerable discussion and special pleading during the drafting of the Ratio, very often depending on the timing and duration of local festivities, themselves often influenced by material or climactic factors. The Ratio was concerned to impose and regulate two types of student vacation: general, of variable duration, and a weekly vacation—or rather a day dedicated explicitly to rest.28 During general vacations students usually went back to their families, while during the weekly rest- day they pursued physical activities. The so-called “long” vacations varied in length according to the course of study: for the philosophers, one to two months; the rhetoric course allowed one month; the humanities, three weeks; the third and fourth classes, two weeks; the fifth and the sixth, one. For all that they may appear today relatively short, the “long” vacations represent, according to de Dainville, a real litmus test demonstrating the discontinuity of the Jesuit approach vis-à-vis the pedagogical tradition. The differing lengths of the “long” vacations according to the courses exhibit a span of free time increasing with the advancing age of the student, a fact that is evidence of the Jesuit belief in the possibility of measuring the cognitive development of the young person.29

25 Antonio Possevino, Coltura degl’ingegni (Rome: Anicia, 2008), 188. 26 Mon. paed. V, 364. 27 Mon. paed. V, 365. 28 Mon. paed. V, 365–366. 29 Dainville, L’Éducation, 527.

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The peculiarity of the Jesuit style of pursuing psychosomatic unity in the formation of souls evidently did not escape the Society’s contemporaries. Florimond de Raemond, in his Histoire de la naissance de l’hérésie, reports that his admiration for the Jesuit colleges springs mainly from their balanced program of studies, rest, and physical exercises:

I often admired their colleges, not only for the order and good education of their youth, but also for their time management. […] Study does not prevail over devotion, nor does devotion delay study. They do not allow minds to feel themselves satisfied, nor bodies to exhaust themselves on the books. As a wise hunter pulls the string of his hound who has become heated in the quest; and as the farmer does not strain good fertile soils, since their fertility eventually runs out if it becomes too strained, they force those who are too caught up in studying to get out of bed and go out in the fields one day a week. One of them has the task of turning off the lights at ten o’clock in each room, so that everyone can get some rest and start his activities again more gaily with the return of the Sun.30

The space for recreation allowed to the body and the spirit opens a field of pedagogical debate concerning how such intervals are to be filled and the discipline required to spend a time that certainly could not be left idle. Rest, in the ambit of Ignatian spirituality, did not mean inactivity. Claudio Acquaviva, addressing his Industriae ad curandos animae morbos (1599) to the Society’s superiors, inserts a final chapter on the cure of melancholy, which he associ- ates with accidia (acedia, or laziness) as an affliction whose etiology can be traced back to a biological and structural incertitudo (uncertainty). Accidia should be cured by the sufferer’s superior, his spiritual father or his teacher, with stimuli and, above all, by renewing his sense of purpose: the curer should issue with “gentle firmness” a set of imperatives that might reactivate the patient’s incentives to action, and supply him with clear coordinates to arm him against potential disorientation. If action is the dimension in which Ignatian askesis finds its fulfillment, then rest within the didactic praxis of the Jesuit colleges in some senses raises questions as to the filling of that void. Action in rest thus came to mean exercise and led to the beginning of the modern era of physical education, securing for it a place in the many and various aspects of a general education aimed at

30 See Florimond de Raemond, L’Histoire de la nassaince, progrez et décadence de l’hérésie de ce siècle (Paris: Veufe Guillaume de la Noue, 1610), 534–535.

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Active Leisure 413 the young men of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ruling classes: nobles, for the most part, but some from the mercantile classes and, in the case of students within the Society, future Jesuits themselves. The architecture of the Jesuit colleges—as one would expect—reflects these requirements and translates this didactic distribution of time into a defined and recognizable space: a structure corresponding visibly and perfectly to those two movements of centralization and internalization that Philippe Áries discussed in his Centuries of Childhood, with a central space sur- rounded by walls and by classroom windows opening upwards. We are dealing with a large central courtyard, which became the area used for physical education classes. It is a formula we find, too, perhaps unexpectedly, in the practices of the Abbey of Thélème, where Rabelais stages a display of physical performance involving the jovial Thelemites in a wide variety of games, useful for toughening the body and, by extension, the soul. As it happens, St. Francis de Sales’s own spiritual director was the aforemen- tioned Antonio Possevino. In his Introduction à la vie dévote, Francis dedicates a chapter to the expediency of dedicating oneself to games: “The necessity of a honorable entertainment, to give some relief both to the mind and the body, is universally recognized.”31 There, follows a listing of games comparable to the Thelemites’s. Education through games is the first translation of the concept of scholastic gymnastics we find in the Jesuit colleges. In 1568, Francisco de Borja wrote in response to a group of rectors in Aquitaine who had asked him which games should be allowed among the students: “Without forbidding them, do not encourage games such as chess and draughts; the best games are those involving physical exercise, such as the game of aiming a ball at a hoop of metal with a bat.”32 Of course, physical exercise developed particularly in the seminaria nobilium [noble colleges], which for the whole of the seventeenth century

31 Francis de Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote de Saint François de Sales, Evêque et Prince de Geneve, édition nouvelle, Revûe par le R. P. J. Brignon, de la Compagnie de Jesus, & augmen- tée d’un Exercice Spirituel durant la Saint Messe (Brussels: François Foppens, 1709), 280. 32 Quoted in Dainville, L’Éducation, 519. This is the pall-mall, one of the most practiced game events at the Roman Seminary, whose rules confirm the widespread practice of a range of games in the yard, with respect to which the major concern was to avoid physical contact between students: “Games during which students touch each other directly or indirectly, such as those with handkerchiefs or leapfrog, should not be allowed.” These instructions are quoted in Luca Testa, Fondazione e primo sviluppo del Seminario romano (1565–1608) (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 2002), 451–452.

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414 Casalini constituted the high end, socially speaking, of Jesuit education.33 In these establishments, the aim of training the student for courtly life rested on traditional emphasis on knightly exercises (riding and fencing) as well as dancing and sprezzatura [studied carelessness] in gait and posture. Nearly all the seminaria nobilium in Italy had extramural classes where didactic activities contin- ued during the summer months. These seasonal relocations coincided with a general increase in emphasis on physical activities. In the French colleges of Clermont and La Flèche, a long walk was a weekly institution, and a genuine excursion was envisaged every six months (monthly from 1621). At La Flèche, games were held in the woods during such excursions, along with other sport- ing activities like la paume, or handball, which from the sixteenth century had begun to make use of rackets or battoirs, and which was particularly in vogue in the seventeenth century.34 Finally, the exercise of the body was the object of an aesthetic tendency in Jesuit pedagogy. The body was not to be trained only by ball games or exercises with iron hammers. Nor was the body of the young noble only to be honed in the manly pursuits of riding and fencing or instructed in the dances of the court, toughened to merely practical or social ends. Riding fields, summer walks and the pelota courts were the Jesuits’ open-air stage for the body; but there was also an indoor stage, and it was the college theater. The Jesuit colleges were well aware that the expressivity of the body was an essential component of effective eloquence, and the liberal arts, of which rhetoric was the queen, were the educational funnel through which the majority of sixteenth-century students flowed. Few completed the courses of the arts colleges; fewer still went on to the higher courses of theology, law, and medicine; many though followed the basic courses of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. There is an obvious practical sense to these statistics, which I believe should suf- fice to demolish the persistent prejudice that Jesuit culture is a gagging or a betrayal of true humanism, the ossification of free thought, and so on. The liberal arts had practical aims and were conceived as the best instruments to sur- vive among the machinations of the court, conduct commercial negotiations, enter or conquer new markets, convince a banker to finance a cargo of nuts from the Indies, and so on. Incidentally, as indicated in the oratorical prescriptions of

33 See Gian Paolo Brizzi, La formazione della classe dirigente nel Sei-Settecento. I ‘seminaria nobilium’ nell’Italia centro-settentrionale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1976); and, for a case study about the honeste ricreationi [honorable recreations], see Miriam Turrini, Il ‘giovin signore’ in collegio. I gesuiti e l’educazione della nobiltà nelle consuetudini del collegio ducale di Parma (Bologna: Clueb, 2006), 92–98. 34 See James Ullman, De la gymnastique aux sports moderns (Paris: Vrin, 1971).

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Active Leisure 415

Cicero and Quintilian, the body has an important part to play in such practical eloquence, and the Jesuit schools of oratory recognized this. Cipriano Soares’s manual of rhetoric, widely employed throughout the Jesuit colleges in the seventeenth century (it is cited as a reference text in the 1599 edition of the Ratio studiorum) underlines the inseparability of voice and gesture: “Every mood pen- etrates the soul, through the voice first, then the gesture.”35 If there is one place in particular where this element is central to the teach- ing of the Jesuit colleges, it is the theater. A century after their foundation, no fewer than four hundred of the Society’s colleges were equipped with one or even two theaters for the staging of student productions. Such spectacles, which included real full-length plays but might also involve orations and public performances of various kinds, constituted an important occasion of social self-promotion for the Jesuit institution in the community. A spectacle might open and close the year, as for example in the Roman College, with students and teachers at the college serving as playwrights and actors. This practice was not novel in itself, as scholastic dramas had always been accepted as part of the Humanistic pedagogical system.36 In the case of the Jesuits, nonetheless, the use of drama was motivated primarily by the realization that the staging of plays in Latin was the perfect instrument not only for mastering that language, but also for what we would call “the development of the personality.”37 It is significant that the plays presented during the first fifty years in which the Jesuits ran colleges in Europe and the rest of the world were not published; this fact indicates that the live (and constantly changing) performance, public recitation, and presentation of drama were the principal pedagogical concerns of the Society. The world had to wait for Luis da Cruz (a pupil of Miguel Venegas) to see a first printed edition of Jesuit plays (his own Liber tragoed- iarum) at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the meantime, however, great playwrights and ordinary teachers of rhetoric wrote an enormous number of plays—William H. McCabe, Nigel Griffin, and others have tried to enumerate them, basing their findings on the average number of annual

35 Cipriano Soares [Suárez], De arte rhetorica libri tres ex Aristotele, Cicerone et Quintiliano praecipue deprompti (Hispali: Alphonsus Escrivanus, 1569), 74v. See Giovanna Zanlonghi, “La psicologia e il teatro nella riflessione gesuitica europea del Cinque-Seicento,” Memorandum 4 (2003): 66; and Giovanna Zanlonghi, Teatri di formazione. Actio, parola e immagine nella scena gesuitica del Sei-Settecento a Milano (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 2002). 36 See O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 223. 37 Henry Schnitzler, “The Jesuit Contribution to the Theatre,” Educational Theatre Journal 4 (1952): 283–292; William H. McCabe, S.J., An Introduction to the Jesuit Theater (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1983); John W. O’Malley et al., eds., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts (1540–1773) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 1999–2006).

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416 Casalini productions, the wide spread of theaters in the Jesuit colleges, and the conven- tion of not usually repeating the same work.38 During the 1560s, Miguel Venegas’s successful plays were performed on the stages of the colleges of Coimbra, the Roman College, Clermont, and others. Nonetheless, not one of these plays was printed. His Achab was performed at the Collegium Germanicum by a large crowd of student-actors, with an abun- dant use of machinery to sustain the long heroic and tragic monologues writ- ten for the main character (a handsome young student, who moved all present): the public filled the cloister and a crowd pushed the doors to enter.39 All of the above is indicative of the primary importance that performance occupied in Jesuit educational theater: the text and the words were not the principal elements of the performance but ancillary to the assault on the senses and the rhetoric of bodies which, together with the text, made up an indissoluble and unrepeatable unity. Henry Schnitzler has ably demonstrated that the extraordinarily rich theatrical machinery of a Jesuit performance must have exercised an irresistible appeal upon the senses and the emotions, more immediately than to the intellect and reason. This appeal to the senses, to be regarded not as a superficial stimulant but solely in terms of the spiritual aims of the Society, may explain the astounding and well attested effect that its productions had on the largely illiterate public of the seventeenth century.

Many of the scenes in Jesuit theatre resembled the gymnastic sequences of Olympic athletics: as tight a series as possible of set pieces and acrobat- ics in which the authors and actors demonstrate a mastery of the most refined virtuosities of the language. Such rhetorical levels are the outcome of contortions forced on the tongue by the pressure of expressing strong emotions which must have an immediate theatrical effect—and in a dead language besides: and furthermore, promote, in counterbalance, that infinitely ample rhythm, those monologues of hundreds and hundreds of verses that transform these scripts into a real artistic challenge, and, in the meantime train the students in the rare abilities of extensive memorisation and the ability to hold an audience spellbound.40

38 Nigel Griffin, Jesuit School Drama: A Checklist of Critical Literature: Supplement (London: Grant & Cutler, 1986). 39 Cristiano Casalini and Luana Salvarani, “Roma 1566. I collegi gesuiti alle origini del teatro barocco,” Educazione. Giornale di pedagogia critica 2 (2013): 29–51. 40 Luana Salvarani, “Venegas e gli altri. Il teatro nella prassi pedagogica gesuita del Cinquecento,” Educazione. Giornale di pedagogia critica 1 (2012): 54.

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Active Leisure 417

What were the roots of this image-rich theatre, where actions coordinated with declamation, dance, and song, backed by a combination of the most effective tricks of what became paradigmatic Baroque stagecraft, were deployed not to provide enjoyment but to proclaim the greater glory of God? How can we explain this attempt to achieve purely spiritual ends by entirely sensual means? Schnitzler suggests that the answer to these questions can be found in the teachings of Ignatius: “In fact many of the things that might seem odd in an educative theatre dedicated to religious ends can be traced back to Loyola’s Exercises.”41 To render effective his/her act of contemplation the spectator is compelled to have recourse to what Ignatius calls in the Exercises “the application of the senses,” which is to say, he/she must try, using his/her imagination, to hear, see, smell, taste, and touch every detail that can help bring to life, as far as possible, the subject in question. What could be more logical than to go a step further and stimulate the imagination, which in some individuals might not be suffi- ciently advanced? This might be achieved by showing what the Exercises put forward as mere “objects of contemplation,” thus making a direct appeal to the senses to bring about the desired empathic response. The discovery of these powerful possibilities not only contributed to the development of the Jesuit educational theatre, but also explains its surprisingly sensual qualities.

Conclusions

Far from proposing models of governing and disciplining the conscience that suppressed the corporeal dimension or that sought to punish it, the Society of Jesus saw education in its colleges as an exercise in psychosomatic unity. The training of the individual was not conceived in terms of a progressive libera- tion from material needs, or of the annihilation of the body’s vital impulses, nor again as a sort of deactivation of the senses in order to liberate the soul from the soma in which it is imprisoned at birth. On the contrary, an analysis of the writings and prescriptions of Ignatius demonstrates how the spirituality of the Society’s founder actually takes off from corporeality as an active instrument and a locus of the manifestation of the divine in the world. The body, far from being “unconcerned,” is an active factor in the awakening of the soul, an essential vehicle for the sharpening of one’s appraisal of one’s particular vocation in the world.

41 Schnitzler, “The Jesuit Contribution,” 283–292.

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418 Casalini

This theoretical base, which flows into a mysticism of action—so typical of Ignatius—is the background to subsequent Jesuit pedagogy, fleshed out in an educational program which envisages the introduction of educational practices specific to the body and its exercise. Critics have often misunderstood the education offered by the first Jesuits, basing their view on the letter of the Ratio studiorum which, like any official document, presents to the superficial reader the bare essentials of the regulations, but cannot convey the vitality of the practices to which these apply. The statutes of the individual colleges and the testimonies at various levels and in various forms of the students and masters who attended those colleges, on the other hand, render justice to the existence of a “physical education” that was planned and cultivated by the Society from its earliest days. Seen in this light with the help of these sources, the disciplining of the body ceases to resemble an extension of religious practices stem- ming from the mendicant orders of the previous centuries; it acquires instead the modern meaning of “exercising” the body as part of planned spiritual training. The body in the ambit of the college thus becomes the focus of care and hygiene, of a balanced rhythm of exercise and repose, of conditioning and training in sports, emerging finally as an instrument of spoken discourse and stage performance with an aesthetic (as much as a psycho-pedagogical) scope—all in only the first fifty years of the existence of Jesuit education. The education of the body in the Jesuit colleges was indispensable, a recognized and even obligatory highway for the Exercises. Many of the practices adopted by the colleges were an improvement on existing traditions traceable to other educational institutions of the time; but their systematic application in the Society of Jesus is in itself a clear sign of their difference, a temporal watershed dividing these colleges from those run hitherto along traditional rules. The Jesuits provided a new form of education that can best and most simply be defined as “modern education.”

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