The Conduct of the Christian Schools by John Baptist de La Salle (review)

BOOK REVIEWS473 modify it.The dispute reached its denouement in the trial of 1633,when the Jesuits found themselves caught between Dominican claims that their position was unorthodox and Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two ChiefWorld Systems , which demonstrated an affinity with the ideas of Jesuit educators and mathematicians. Redondi tried to establish an "evidential paradigm" to support his account by searching for"clues and signs" in the milieu of seventeenth-century Rome. Feldhay seeks support for her account by returning to the sixteenth century, to the Council ofTrent and its decrees on education, to the traditional role ofDominicans as an educating elite,to the development ofthe Jesuits as an alternative educating elite, and to the resulting rivalry between the two religious orders that culminated in the dispute on free will and predestination. This is the longest part of the book, and it attempts to explain the denouement of 1633.The final part of the book focuses on the dialogue between Galileo and Jesuit mathematicians , focusing on the debate on sunspots with Christopher Scheiner. Feldhay's approach is anachronistic. She interprets sixteenth-century developments and documents on the basis oflater developments and documents, incorrectly reading interpretations into the earlier material that support her views on the Church's condemnation of Galileo. For example, instead of considering the vigorous debate within the Society on the shape of its educational program as a natural outcome of the Jesuit development as educators, she considers it as a manifestation of a cultural crisis, an intellectual crisis, a moral crisis , and a crisis over authority within the Society. Similarly, to prove her points about Jesuit theater in the early seventeenth century she uses material from the late seventeenth century. Ultimately, Feldhay's Jesuits are only slightly less hackneyed than those of Redondi. According to Feldhay, Jesuits were militant subversives who did not hesitate to undermine the traditional authority in the Church; the Society"used all possible means not only to capture power bases to build up its position, but also to gain recognition and legitimation for that position " (p. 195). Feldhay's account of Galileo's condemnation is far from being a "Tchernobyl de l'érudition," but neither is it an unqualified success. A. Lynn Martin The University ofAdelaide The Conduct ofthe Christian Schools. ByJohn Baptist de La Salle.Translated by F. de La Fontainerie and Richard Arnandez. Edited with notes by William Mann. [Lasallian Sources,Volume 6.] (Landover, Maryland: Lasallian Publications . 1996. Pp. 287.) This is a richly detailed handbook for the day-by-day and rninute-by-rninute running of an elementary school in the neglected parts of Reims, Rouen, Paris, and a growing succession of other cities in the early eighteenth century. From the beginnings ofthe Christian Brothers' order in the l680's, De LaSaIIe and the 474book reviews first teachers began to accumulate operational tactics in manuscript form. On parallel tracks, rules of the order and spiritual reading treatises were also being produced. But this manual stays with the operational, and it leaves nothing to chance. To contemporary teachers accustomed to almost-presiding over chaos, the Conduct can seem oppressive. But the evidence is that it worked, and in an environment of almost unimaginable deprivation. Long known in English as Management of Christian Schools, the Conduct has been brought out in a scholarly edition of the 1720 first printing from the 1706 manuscript. For manyyears, loyal Christian Brothers treated this and other works as if they had sprung from the brain of St. John Baptist de LaSaIIe, our founder, in publishable form. A surge of modern research has revealed a far more human and appealing process of collaboration between De LaSaIIe and the first Brothers, on all the central documents of their then-new-model congregation : rules, readers for students, and the historically most significant Conduct . (Certain other writings for the Brothers, notably meditations, are more clearly De LaSalle's own.) What is not attempted here is a survey of the work's permutations as it has followed the Brothers into higher levels of education and other cultures. The monumental French-language series, Cahiers LaSalliens, will certainly get around to doing so. But this lack,ifit is one,in the current...