The American Jesuits: A History

7 Schoolmasters and Preachers

7 Schoolmasters and Preachers “They’ll Study or Kill Themselves” Jacques Barzun, in From Dawn to Decadence, his cultural history of the West, delivers this assessment of the mid-17th-century Society of Jesus: Meanwhile, by care and thought and continually revised methods, the Jesuits shone as schoolmasters—unsurpassed in the history of education. They taught secular subjects as well as church doctrine and did so with unexampled understanding and kindness toward their pupils. Their success was due to the most efficient form of teacher training ever seen. They knew that born teachers are as scarce as true poets and that the next best cannot be made casually out of indifferent materials, so they devised a preparation that included exhaustive learning and a severe winnowing of the unfit at every phase of a long apprenticeship. This was the presuppression Society at the height of its influence, when it had set up so many schools in Europe that there were almost too many, in fact more than in the mid-19th century. But the improvisational context of establishing schools in what was still a frontier mission made exhaustive preparation an unattainable goal. When Michael Nash and Edward Tissot proctored study hall and played football with the boys at Fordham, they were still, as Jesuits, students themselves, with Latin theses in philosophy to memorize for the next day. Colleges for scholastics opened and closed according to how vocations rose and fell and where the men were needed, and the scholastics had to cheerfully pack and shuttle to another home. The system was hard on their health and detrimental to their intellectual development. Ideally the formation process was supposed to move through graded steps, phases of action and contemplation, each building on the previous. First came two years of the novitiate, strict 86 spiritual discipline, methods of prayer, Society rules, and the 30-day silent retreat with the Spiritual Exercises. Next, a two-year classical curriculum, Greek and Latin literature, rhetoric, and science, followed by three years of philosophy, taught in Latin, centered on St. Thomas Aquinas’s thought organized into theses, in which adversaries of truth are set up and refuted. This culminated in an oral exam designed, allegedly, to gauge the student’s knowledge and quick wits. It also determined, depending on the score, whether the student stayed “up” and continued in a “long course” of studies that would qualify him for the fourth vow of obedience to the pope or went “down” into “short course.” The long course also made him eligible for “profession ,” to be named superior of a house or for other leadership positions . All this presumed a connection between the ability to do well in a philosophy oral in Latin and the ability to lead men. Thus prepared, he was ready for regency, to teach high school—to engage the 14-year-old mind—for three to five years, depending on the school’s needs and whether his performance was up to snuff. He was presumed ready to teach anything—religion, history, language, literature, science—whether trained in it or not. Generally, young Jesuits loved teaching. They submitted humbly to professors for seven years; then they had adult responsibilities. Boys looked up to them, tried to outsmart them, to “break” them. And both students and teachers thrived in the relationship of challenge, attention, and affection. Then, after years of “action,” they went back to “contemplation,” four years of theology—scripture, sacraments, dogma, and morals, with ordination after the third year. Theology also climaxed with an oral exam on “everything,” in which one could stay “up” or go “down.” The overall assumption of the whole process was that the philosophical system called neo-Thomism was a sort of wax that links philosophy and theology to each other, wherein answers to theological questions on how Christ is present in the Eucharist or how God can be three persons in one nature were anticipated in the philosophy courses on the distinction between essence and existence, and between “virtual” and “real,” learned five years before. This inspired jokes about the scholastic asking a question during philosophy and being told it would be answered in theology. And when he asked the question in theology, he was told . . . But so far the American Jesuits lacked the money, place, and manpower to make this sequence happen. They were in a mix of missions, Schoolmasters and Preachers 87 floating across...