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Cover Letter to the Revised Ratio Studiorum, Jan Roothaan (1832)

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Cover Letter to the Revised Ratio Studiorum, Jan Roothaan (1832) Cover Letter to the Revised Ratio studiorum, Jan Roothaan (1832) The 20th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus—held in 1820 and the first following the order’s restoration—offered Jesuits an opportunity to respond to the new system of state-sponsored, or at least state-sanctioned, schools that had emerged since their suppression in 1773. The restored Jesuits faced the challenge of adjusting to several educational developments, many of which proved to be quite successful, without abandoning their own educational heritage. Therefore, the congregation’s delegates empowered the superior general to begin a process of revising the Ratio studiorum and to test those revisions. The process culminated in 1832 with the issuance of a revised Ratio. Jan Roothaan, superior general since 1829, affixed the following cover letter to the Ratio sent to Jesuits around the world. The Ratio of 1832, Roothaan explains, was not a new document but rather an articulation of the old plan’s “mere” adaptation to “present-day circumstances.” In the larger context, Roothaan seeks to assuage concerns within the Catholic Church that the Jesuits were abandoning their tradition so soon after their restoration. The version below is the first English translation of the full cover letter. To Provincial Superiors, Rectors of Colleges, Prefects of Studies, and Teachers Jan Roothaan, General Superior of the Society of Jesus In the first general Congregation after the restoration of the Society, the provinces petitioned for, and subsequent experience has all the more demonstrated the great necessity of updating the plan for our studies. This task has been attended to on the authority of the last Congregation and it has finally found its way to completion. I set the results before you, Reverend Fathers, to be realized in such way that if anything detrimental is discovered in its employment, it can be remedied; and if any likely improvement might be made, it can be added in its own good time. I called to Rome, as you know, several Fathers chosen from different provinces. They had brought along with them points noted and commented upon in the Ratio Studiorum. After devoting long effort and careful attention to the comparison of these items with one another, they finally proposed what the Fathers Assistant and I have examined and carefully analyzed. At last I offer this to you to be tested by experience and practice, so that then, corrected anew where there is need, or expanded, they might obtain the universal force and sanction of law. Whatever else it was, it was certainly a weighty undertaking, one in which nothing could have been done nonchalantly or precipitately. But neither was it a matter of having to fashion a new order of studies (as I pointed out in the letter to the provinces that called for fathers to be deputed to draw up what was necessary for this work). Rather, it Cover Letter to the Revised Ratio studiorum, Jan Roothaan (1832) was a matter of adjusting the very same venerable text to our times, so that people might realize with what great reverence this undertaking had to be handled, and how nothing was to be changed offhandedly or rashly in that work that had been composed by the very best men after a long process of gathering a great body of advice, well tested by the successful experience of almost two centuries, and often recommended by the praise even of the very enemies of the Society. What, then? Of all the many innovations introduced into the education of young people over the last fifty years and more, could they all possibly be approved and adopted in our schools? New methods, new forms devised day after day, new arrangements of content and sequences in treating the disciplines, often in fact even conflicting and contradicting one another — how could these be able to become a norm for our studies? Rather what right-thinking person would not deplore so many innovations that have born such bitter fruits for Church and Society? That in the more advanced classes or in the treatment of the more serious studies there is nothing really solid though there is much with a superficial appeal; that there is a disordered abundance of exuberant erudition and too little precise reasoning; that the disciplines, if you except physics and mathematics, have not made genuine progress but hover in almost utter confusion so that often you can hardly tell where the truth stands—all well-meaning people everywhere groan over these realities. From the abandonment and disregard of the study of rigorous logic and dialectic, errors worked their way even into the minds of quite educated people, and (by some unfathomable fate or fortune) the following propositions are celebrated as certain truths and praised to the skies: that nothing can be precisely and accurately said, and that no account should be taken of definition or distinction. And so, after the philosophical disciplines have been lightly sampled, young people go forth furnished with no weapons against the sophistries of the innovators, which they do not even know how to distinguish from solid arguments. Hence their minds are ensnared and captivated by all manner of errors (even ones so completely absurd that, if it did not involve the most important issues, they would deserve laughter than refutation)—but they have no way to unmask and demonstrate their falsity. About secondary schooling what should I say? Every effort has been made that the boys learn as much as possible, but that they learn it in as short a time as possible and with the least possible effort. All well and good! But if the boys barely taste so many different disciplines without truly digesting them, that variety may indeed lead them to think they that know a great deal and someday to swell the mob of the half-educated that undermines the learned disciplines just as much as society, if anything else—and yet they know nothing truly and solidly. A bit of everything; nothing fully. So, covering the humanities in a short time at a very impressionable age, even with their talent still undeveloped, they proceed to the most serious study of philosophy and the higher disciplines, from which they take almost no real profit, and by their enjoyment of greater freedom, they are swept headlong along on the wrong way as captives, soon to be teachers, to be sure, but (to put it quite mildly) not fully mature. 2 Cover Letter to the Revised Ratio studiorum, Jan Roothaan (1832) The devising of ever easier methods, if it has any advantage, certainly has the disadvantage (not at all a small one) that what first is attained without effort also is only most tenuously rooted in the mind, and what is quickly acquired is quickly forgotten. Then, there is a far more serious loss in the education of children, although perhaps many people do not pay it much attention: the important capacity gained by becoming accustomed at a very young age to serious intellectual endeavor and to enduring the work as they experience some pressure on themselves. All wise persons throughout history have realized how valuable this habit is, from youth on into every period of life, in mastering wicked emotional impulses and exercising self-control. The Holy Spirit teaches the same lesson where he says: “It is good for a person to bear the yoke from the time of his own youth” [Lamentations 3:27]. These manifold innovations and harmful procedures, therefore, especially insofar as they damage Church and society, are such that we cannot adopt them at all unless we would like to clearly deviate from the end for the sake of which the Society involves itself in the labors of education: that end is not at all limited to literary training alone but has especially as its goal the Christian education of youth. Without that, the unhappy experience of many years has proven that any abundance of scholarship and learning whatsoever brings more loss than advantage to society. But although it is not fitting that we should permit these new methods nor right that we should do so insofar as they run counter to the Society’s Institute and aim, and although we could not even satisfy these lovers of innovations even if it were quite allowable or useful to do so, since many of them demand things as inconsistent and contradictory among themselves as with what is traditional, nevertheless, in some things that do not touch on the substance of a solid education, the necessity of the times compels us to diverge from the practice of our Fathers. In this case, serving that necessity is not only not wrong but even quite fully compatible with the manner of our Institute for the greater glory of God. And indeed in taking up higher studies, how many points that once were not even controversial but that are now being sharply attacked in the unreasonableness of the times need to be established with secure arguments so that the very foundations of the truth are not overturned! And again, how many things that once were also elaborated at great length more to exercise ingenuity than to establish the truth should now be more profitably omitted, so that there may be time for more necessary matters, to confirm those teachings, I say, on which everything depends, and so that there might be in the light of truth an analysis and refutation of what ill-intentioned or wicked people have devised to raise doubts about even the most certain and most obvious matters! A better age might have been allowed and those who seek no harm are allowed to indulge their talent and to dwell at length on less useful questions; but now certainly we have a greater obligation to attend to what is necessary, even all the more so because the course of studies is circumscribed almost everywhere within narrower limits.
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