journal of jesuit studies 1 (2014) 400-418 brill.com/jjs 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 treat- ment 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 rela- tionship 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 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/22141332-00103003Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 03:39:57PM via free access <UN> 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 rep- resented 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 spiri- tual 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 col- leges 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 spiri- tuality. 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 (educa- tion) 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 edu- cational 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). journal of jesuit studies 1 (2014) 400-418 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 03:39:57PM via free access <UN> 402 Casalini 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 punish- ments 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 mis- sion. 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. journal of jesuitDownloaded studies from 1 Brill.com09/23/2021 (2014) 400-418 03:39:57PM via free access <UN> 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 indispens- able 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 corrup- tion of the flesh as the only legitimate space for the exercise of humans’ free judgment.