At once, with that careful attention to details so characteristic of the order, they began to systematize education, and the great ratio studiorum, probably the most significant contribution to the literature of methods of education ever made, was the result. It emphasized particularly the necessity for the prelection, that is, of preliminary discussion and explanation of the lesson which the students were expected to study for the next day, careful methods of recitation and demonstration and then finally insisted on the need of frequent repetitions. Competition was looked upon as a most precious element for the arousing of student interest. After a period of neglect, we are coming back to this thought once more. Themes, that is, written exercises, and especially those [{215}] in which the language to be learned was directly employed, were set down as a most important factor in linguistic education. The actual use of the language to be learned in class was dwelt on. After the classics the student was expected to take a course in philosophy, that is, in logic and general metaphysics and psychology, before graduation. Above all, moral as well as intellectual training was insisted on.
In his "Essays on Educational Reformers," Quick summed up in the first paragraph of his book the place of the Jesuits in education rather strikingly: "Since the revival of learning, no body of men has played so prominent a part in education as the Jesuits. With characteristic sagacity and energy, they soon seized on education as a stepping-stone to power and influence; and with their talent for organization, they framed a system of schools which drove all important competitors from the field, and made Jesuits the instructors of Catholic, and even, to some extent, of Protestant Europe. Their skill in this capacity is attested by the highest authorities, by Bacon and Descartes, the latter of whom had himself been their pupil; and it naturally met with its reward: for more than one hundred years nearly all the foremost men throughout Christendom, both among the clergy and laity, had received the Jesuit training, and for life regarded their old masters with reverence and affection."
If the estimation of any body of teachers is to be rightly adjudged, surely there can be no better source of evidence with regard to them than what is to be obtained from their students. Almost without exception pupils of the Jesuits are most ardent in their praise. Only those who do not know them personally have been bitter in denunciation of them. To know them well enough is to love and honor them.
A few of the names of the great pupils of the Jesuit schools will serve to exemplify the sort of men that they were influencing by their education. Among them were: Bossuet, Corneille, Molière, Bourdaloue, Tasso, Fontenelle, Diderot, Voltaire, Bourdelais, Descartes, Buffon, Justus Lipsius, Muratori, Calderon, Vico the jurisconsult, Richelieu, Tilly, Malesherbes, Don John of Austria, Luxemburg, Esterhazy, Choiseul, St. Francis de Sales, Lambertini, one of the great scholars of his [{216}] time, afterwards the most learned of Popes under the name of Benedict XIV, and the late Pope Leo XIII, one of the greatest of the moderns.
Some idea of the productiveness of the Jesuits as scientific, philosophic and literary writers may be obtained from the catalogue of their works issued by the Fathers de Backer and which has been brought up to date by Father Sommervogel. Hughes, in "Loyola and the Educational System of the Jesuits" in the Great Educators Series (Scribner's, 1902), has summed up the significance of these works:
"But at length the two Fathers de Backer published a series of seven quarto volumes, in the years 1853-1861; and the first step they followed up, in the years 1869-1876, with a new edition in three immense folios, containing the names of 11,100 authors. This number does not include the supplements, with the names of writers in the present century, and of the anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Of this last category. Father Sommervogel's researches, up to 1884, enabled him to publish a catalogue, which fills a full octavo volume of 600 pages, with double columns. The writers of this century, whom the De Backers catalogued in their supplement, filled 647 columns, folio, very small print. Altogether the three folios contain 7,086 columns, compressed with every art of typographical condensation.
"Suarez of course is to be seen there, and Cornelius à Lapide, Petau, and the Bollandists. A single name like that of Zaccaria has 117 works recorded under it--whereof the 116th is in thirteen volumes quarto, and the 117th in twenty-two volumes octavo. The catechism of Canisius fills nearly eleven columns with the notices of its principal editions, translations, abridgments; the commentaries upon it, and critiques. Rossignol has 66 works to his name. The list of productions about Edmund Campion, for or against him, chiefly in English, fills in De Backers' folio, two and a half columns of minutest print. Bellarmine, in Father Sommervogel's new edition, fills fifty pages, double column.
"Under each work are recorded the editions, translations, sometimes made into every language, including Arabic, [{217}] Chinese, Indian; also the critiques, and the works published in refutation--a controversial enterprise which largely built up the Protestant theological literature of the times, and, in Bellarmine's case alone, meant the theological Protestant literature for 40 or 50 years afterwards. Oxford founded an anti-Bellarmine chair. The editions of one of this great man's works are catalogued by Sommervogel under the distinct heads of 54 languages.
"In the methodical or synoptic table, at the end of the De Backers' work, not only are the subjects well-nigh innumerable, which have their catalogues of authors' names attached to them, but such subjects too are here as might not be expected. Thus "Military Art" has 32 authors' names under it; Agriculture 11; Navy 12; Music 45; Medicine 28.
"To conclude then this history of our Educational Order, we have one synoptical view of it in these twelve or thirteen thousand authors, all of one family. We have much more. This one work 'attesting,' as De Backer says in his Preface, 'at one and the same time a prodigious activity and often an indisputable merit, whereof three and a half centuries have been the course in time, and the whole world the place and theatre, is a general record of religion, letters, science and education in every country, civilized or barbarous, where the Society of Jesus labored and travelled.'"
Very often it seems to be thought that, since the basis of Jesuit education was the classics, therefore little or no attention was paid to the sciences and consequently an important phase of human intellectual development was neglected and an essential set of interests of humanity were set back or at least failed of their evolution. Those who think that, however, fail entirely to know the history of the Jesuits and their educational efforts and achievements. As a matter of fact, the Jesuits have always had distinguished scientists among them, and many of the great discoverers and teachers in science for the last three centuries and a half have been members of the order. Very early in their history the Jesuits turned their attention to astronomy, then the one of the physical sciences most developed, and nearly every important Jesuit College soon had an observatory in which good work [{218}] was done. When Gregory XIII, scarcely more than a quarter of a century after Ignatius' death, wanted to bring about the reformation of the calendar, it was to a Jesuit, Father Clavius, that he turned. Ever since that time there have been distinguished Jesuit astronomers. In our own time, Father Secchi, the Jesuit, probably did more important work than any other single astronomer of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Among the names of the Jesuit astronomers are: Father Scheiner, who made observations particularly on the sun; Father Cysatus, whose papers on comets are justly numbered among the most important concerning this subject; Father Zupi, who first described the dark stripes or bands on Jupiter and first saw the phases of Mercury which Galileo surmised rather than saw; Father Grimaldi, who studied Saturn and drew up one of the first maps of the moon worthy of the name; Father Riccioli, who introduced the lunar nomenclature; Father Maximilian Hell, whose memory our own Newcomb vindicated, and many others.
They were noted for their intimate relations with scholars who were devoting themselves to similar subjects, and they were close correspondents of Kepler and succeeded in helping him to keep his professorship at the University of Gratz when the Emperor of Austria issued a decree banishing all Protestant professors from Austrian Universities. [Footnote 21]
[Footnote 21: About this same time when Harvey on a trip through Europe went to visit the Jesuits in their colleges in a number of towns, the fact was noted by the men who accompanied him, and they jested with him as regards the possibility of his either converting the Jesuits or being converted by them. He said, however, that he found nowhere more sympathetic friends and interested scholars than among these religious. His friendship for them has even given some ground for the declaration that he may have been a Catholic.]
It must not be thought, however, that the Jesuits were interested only in astronomy. They had a large number of mathematicians and of teachers of all the physical sciences. The famous Roman College, founded in St. Ignatius' time, was always looked up to as the type of what a Jesuit College should be. It was here that the great scholarly Father Kircher taught for nearly half of the seventeenth century. He was invited to Rome to begin his teaching there just [{219}] before the condemnation of Galileo. He would not have received the invitation had there been the slightest feeling of opposition on the part of the Church or his order to the teaching of science. While teaching at the Roman College he wrote a series of text-books on all phases of physical science. There are several text-books on magnetism, one on light, a second on sound, a third on astronomy, a fourth on the subterranean world and many others.