Juan Luis Vives

Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) was born in Valencia of Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity. Following an education in his native city which included some Greek, he received a thorough training in scholastic logic at the Collège de Montaigu in Paris (1509–1512). Breaking off his university career, Vives found a home among the long-established Spanish merchant community in Bruges, where local humanist scholars secured him a position as tutor to a prominent young aristocrat, Guillaume II de Croy, who was about to begin his studies at the university at Leuven.^[20] Here Vives met Erasmus, who not only encouraged his ambitions but, with Thomas More and others, organized a publicity campaign to promote Vives’s first published work, a humanist critique of scholastic logic.^[21]In Pseudodialecticos (Against the Pseudo-Dialecticians, 1520) attacks Parisian dialectic but not its Aristotelian premises. Like Valla, Vives considers usage the teacher of speech: grammar, rhetoric, and logic “do not teach language [sermo], rather they accept as a given the language spoken by the people.” But scholastic logic in Vives’s day routinely pressed words into unaccustomed phraseology in order to evaluate different types of “supposition” or predication. For example, the proposition “Thou a man art not” (if addressed to something nonhuman) could be true in a material sense but “strictly speaking [de rigore]” false, because “a man” was placed before the verb. For Vives the role of the logic of suppositions in the university curriculum was “like a Trojan horse, from which has come the ruin and conflagration of all the liberal arts.” Unlike Valla, however, Vives did not see Aristotle himself as a corrupter of good usage: “Does anyone think that Aristotle accommodated his dialectic to a language he made up himself, rather than to the common Greek spoken by all the people?” ^[22] Vives’s aim was thus to restore logic to its Aristotelian clarity, and for this plan Erasmus praised him lavishly, comparing his own efforts to “restore theology…to its ancestral dignity” with Vives’s endeavors to “recall studies in the university to better things.” ^[23]

Just as Vives was beginning to make his reputation, news came that the Inquisition in Spain had arrested his father on charges of secretly practicing Judaism (1522); following his trial the elder Vives was burned at the stake in 1524. A few years later Vives’s mother, though dead since 1509, was tried posthumously for the same offense and her bones were exhumed in order to be burned. Vives’s extant writings contain not a whisper of these terrible events; indeed, the fate of his parents was not known to historical scholarship until the documents were published a few decades ago.^[24] Meanwhile, Erasmus had recruited Vives to assume responsibility for The City of God in the edition of St. Augustine’s works to be done by his publisher, Johann Froben in Basel. In his preface (1522) Vives lauds Erasmus as the restorer of true theology and explains that since he is a “profane man” (that is, a layman), his annotations on theological issues “will be more sparing than on other matters.” The annotations do in fact deal mostly with grammar, or classical literature, or Augustine’s Roman world, but occasional comments make it clear that Vives understood well enough the distinctive emphases of Augustine’s theology. A propos of Augustine’s comment that the body is not a mere ornament but “pertains to the very nature of man,” Vives contrasts Augustine’s “truer opinion” with that of the Platonists, for whom “the soul alone was man and the body something put on like clothing, or rather a prison.” Where Augustine says that even the most praiseworthy “yield in some things to carnal concupiscence,” Vives adds that nature has implanted sexual desire so deeply in the hearts of all besouled creatures “that we cannot even think of satisfying that desire without being touched by a certain hidden pleasure, which some consider at least a venial sin.” The views on sexual pleasure which Vives himself expounded in two later treatises on marriage have been characterized by a modern scholar as “almost Manichean.” ^[25] A sternly Augustinian view of the power of sin in human life was perhaps of some solace to a man whose parents had been so brutally stripped of life and reputation.

The premature death of young Croy (1521) left Vives without a livelihood, and for the next several years, with the help of Erasmus’s friend Thomas More, he hunted for patronage in England, albeit without much success.^[26] It was during this period of his life that Vives turned his thoughts to some of the great public issues of the day. Not surprisingly, his writings on war and peace appropriate some of Erasmus’s views, for example, the idea that wars come about because young noblemen are bored by their idleness in times of peace and because self-serving councillors fill the heads of young princes with dreams of emulating the glory of Caesar or Alexander the Great.^[27] But De Europae Dissidiis et Bello Turcico (On Europe’s Wars and the Campaign against the Turk, 1525) advances an idea that would have shocked Erasmus. Toward the end of a dialogue in which the shades of ancient and modern dead discuss Europe’s sad state, the great Scipio, hitherto silent, proposes that Europe’s Christian princes, raging against one another in blind fury, can satisfy their overweening ambition “more lavishly and copiously” by warring against the Turk; the vast riches of Asia lie open, for “Europe has never invaded Asia without capturing and holding it,” because “Asians are timid men little suited to war, more like women than men.” ^[28]

De Europae Dissidiis conveys stereotypes about Asia conventional in European literature from the time of the Greeks,^[29] but it hardly reflects military reality in an era when the armies of Sultan Suleiman the Lawgiver (1520–1560) seemed invincible. Much better grounded in everyday life is Vives’s De Subventione Pauperum (On the Subvention of the Poor, 1526), which mirrors the grim social realities of the great industrial cities of Flanders and helped provoke discussion that led to the eventual adoption in much of Europe of poor laws aimed at centralizing the control of charitable agencies and putting sturdy beggars to work. Vives excoriates the tribes of beggars who “extort rather than plead,” importuning pious burghers even at mass. Meanwhile, though “the rich from their superfluity can support horses, dogs, whores, and elephants,” the honest poor “gnash their teeth in indignation, because they lack the wherewithal to feed their starving children.” In many an urban civil war, he notes, the angry multitude has “vented against the rich the first evidence of its fury.” Hence magistrates make a grave mistake if they think they are “put in office to decide disputes about money, when they ought to think more about how to make their people good citizens.” ^[30] In other words, just as it would profit the Christian commonwealth if princes slaked their thirst for empire at the expense of infidels, magistrates can both safeguard the property of the wealthy and improve the morals of their citizens by providing relief for the deserving poor while subjecting the unruly poor to the discipline of work. Vives did not inhabit a world in which human kindness was strong enough to contain human cruelty; his was a world ruled by sin—we may call it an Augustinian world—in which the best hope of struggling humankind lay in turning from greater evils to lesser ones.

Vives’s major works, dating from the last decade of his life, provide a bridge between early tracts on the humanist reform of the curriculum and the sober appraisals of practical reform in his treatises of the 1520s. De Anima et Vita (On Life and the Soul, 1538) features a rich and nuanced analysis of human passions, while De Tradendis Disciplinis (On the Handing on of Disciplines, 1532) describes how liberal learning can be an auxiliary force in the struggle to keep passion under control. Vives is more optimistic than Valla about reason’s place in the kingdom of the soul. In a passage reminiscent of humanist arguments about whether a wise councillor can influence his prince to the good (as in the first book of Thomas More’s Utopia), De Anima compares the will to a sovereign prince who can command his councillors to give him advice and then decide to ignore it. But Vives rejects the argument that animals can reason and, again contrary to Valla, believes that reason can indeed function as the “adviser [consultrix],” even the “teacher [magistra]” of the will.^[31]

In order to play its proper role reason needs the help that a liberal education can provide. De Tradendis aims to make the liberal arts suitable for use in the education of the soul by drawing them “from pagan darkness into the light of our faith.” ^[32] For Vives, as for Valla, the pagan model of human behavior is one that sharply divides reason from emotion, while the Christian (or, one may say, Augustinian) model is one that recognizes their interpenetration.^[33] In the section “The Causes of the Corruption of the Arts,” Vives departs from the humanist paradigm according to which the pure fons (spring) of a putatively pristine antiquity can be taken as the standard against which to judge the turgid waters of modernity.^[34] From their earliest beginnings, he contends, the arts were corrupted by an undue admixture of human passion (affectus), so that, for instance, legists deliberately made their precepts as complicated as possible and philosophers put forward foolish ideas “out of lust for making a name for themselves.” If the text of Aristotle has indeed been corrupted by bad translations, “water from this spring [fons] was already turbulent when it went into the pipe,” for on some topics (like rhetoric and poetry) Aristotle was not free of the philosopher’s lazy habit of repeating the opinions of others rather than thinking things through for himself.^[35] Through their pagan origins the arts as they have been handed down are especially corrupt in their understanding of morals. Fortunately, Lorenzo Valla has shown that Aristotle was wrong about virtue being a mean between two extremes and that virtue is a vehemence of feeling (energeia) rather than a habit of the intellect; for if one compares the Beatitudes in the Gospel with Aristotle’s concept of happiness (beatitudo) on earth, it is clear that “if Aristotelian happiness is to be sought here on earth, the happiness of Christ is not to be sought.” As for the poets, “Homer expresses his image of the ideal prince in Achilles, than whom no one was more truculent or inhumane.” Orators imagined that to learn eloquence is to learn wisdom—as in Cato’s dictum that an orator is “a good man skilled at speaking”—but even Cicero glimpsed the truth of the matter when he said that teaching evil men to speak well is like giving weapons to madmen.^[36]

In truth, piety is the goal of Christian schooling, and for Vives “piety is more a matter of behavior [actio] than a matter of expertise [peritia].” Yet no “knowledge of things” is in itself harmful to piety, not even if such knowledge comes from books written by pagans or Muslims or Jews. Moreover, in the struggle against that domination of our nature by passion which is the legacy of Adam’s sin, we must learn to know ourselves inside and out, especially “by what things passions are aroused or increased, and by what things they are checked, calmed, taken away”; to this end we may summon “the precepts of moral philosophy, like an army.” In the same way, history rightly taught—not the kind of history that glorifies an Alexander or a Caesar—is the “nurse” of the kind of prudence (prudentia) required to rule cities and peoples, “for what greater prudence is there than to understand by what things the passions of men are either aroused or quieted?” ^[37] The school Vives has in mind must isolate boys from girls and must not be located near a princely court or in a mercantile city; masters should be paid from the public purse and not by pupils; and boys should if possible live at home so as not to risk exposure to shabby and impure masters of the common type. Boys need public disputations to spur their competitive spirits, but not so often as to provide occasions for arrogance and boasting. If education is to “bring the Christian people back to true and genuine simplicity,” the liberal arts must have “fewer of those sparks by which souls are set ablaze”; students do not need to have their critical judgment “sharpened on the whetstone of depravity” if the goal is to make them “not more cunning [astutiores], but more prudent.” ^[38] To such a school a father may send his son not to gain riches or honor but for “cultivation of the soul [cultura animi], a rare and precious thing, so that the young man becomes learned and through sound teaching [doctrina] advances in virtue.” ^[39]