The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Review: Hughes - Loyola and the Educational System of the Jesuits

by George Lincoln Burr

Loyola and the Educational System of the Jesuits. By the Reverend Thomas Hughes, of the Society of Jesus. [Series of The Great Educators. Edited by Nicholas Murray Butler.] New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892. — pp. ix, 302.

It would be easy to find fault with the panegyric on his order and its educational career which Father Hughes has given us. But its very faults, — its needlessly apologetic attitude, the narrow range of its sources, the scantness of its sympathies and of its visions, its chaotic historical method, its unconscious pedantries and half-conscious equivocations, even the polyglot flavor of its style and its un-English punctuation, — while they make it come somewhat short of that "adequate description and criticism" of its subject promised by the editor of the series, yet make it the better exponent of the great system of which it is not only an exposition, but a product. Of criticism, indeed, in the current sense there is nothing in Father Hughes's book. Painfully conscious though he is of the odium resting on his order, he never tells us the precise charges against its work. To him emulation and artificial rewards are incentives to study as blameless as they are effective. He is proud of the "consistent uniformity of doctrine" and the "intellectual concord" which "it may be difficult to find, or at least to ensure, outside of an organization such as the Society of Jesus"; for, as he conclusively adds, translating the first great Jesuit code of instruction, "the most learned men have always been persuaded that there is more subtlety shown, more applause merited and comfort enjoyed, in pursuing the lines of approved and received thought, than in a general license and novelty of opinion." To show subtlety, to merit applause, to enjoy comfort: what more could teacher or student seek? Nor does it trouble Father Hughes that the system of education he expounds takes thought neither for the search of truth as truth nor for the development of man as man. He does not, indeed, urge the system as a final one, and he points out the changes it has undergone; but he has neither strictures for its past nor suggestions for its future.

But, if Father Hughes is so blind to Jesuit defects as even, with touching naiveté, to take for sober praise the irony of Frederic of Prussia, he is keen-eyed to the real merits of his order's work; and nobody can read his pages without a fresh sense of the sources of its power. Its organization, its method, its trained teachers, its freedom to all, its democracy of spirit, its flexibility and tact, its courtesy and deference, are set forth with clearness and warmth. The book, like its title, falls into two parts, a historical and a systematic; and only in the latter is the author at his best. His facts he draws most largely from the documents gathered with such loving zeal by Father Pachtler for the Monumenta Germaniæ Pædagogica.

But the deepest secret of the Jesuit teachers is not to be found in the thick volumes of Father Pachtler, nor in all the tomes of Jesuit lore for whose titles Father Sommervogel is ransacking the corners of the earth. Not in their learning, not in their method, not in their manners, lay the essence of that strange power which for centuries drew to their schools and then into their order, regardless of wealth and career, of pleading fathers and of weeping mothers, of threatening courts and often of a frowning church, the flower of young manhood from both Catholic and Protestant Europe. It was in the charm of their personality. Explain it as we may, call it craft or enthusiasm, count it the Holy Spirit, as did their friends, or witchcraft, as did their foes, this was their perennial fascination for boys. They taught by hand; and this vitality of all their work, this repugnance to the mere set lecture, this humanizing companionship with their pupils, however it offend our modern gospel of salvation by facts, is the only answer to the riddle of their influence. The old annals are full of the tales of its magic, and its day is not yet over. Not Father Pachtler's records, but the vibrant voice, the mellow laugh, the noble and sunny face that smiled out from the flowing locks of Father Pachtler's snowy hair — not Father Sommervogel's toilsome bibliographies, but Father Sommervogel's own courteous patience and ready sympathy — these it is that hold the real secret of the Jesuit school-master. And it is a high merit of Father Hughes's book that he not only does not overlook this, but that some sense of it — some touch, perhaps, of his own personality as a teacher — he leaves with us.

An oversight or two may need mention. We are told that with the Jesuits education first entered into the fundamental plan of a religious order. Perhaps the author does not count the Brethren of the Common Life strictly a religious order; but can he ignore the Dominicans? One of his citations from Frederic the Great (pp. 78, 79) is not to be found in the letter to which he ascribes it; and the printer should not have been suffered to make Ganganelli Pope Clement XIII.

George L. Burr.