Juan Luis Vives: Politics, Rhetoric, and Emotions

Kaarlo Havu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032146713
• eBook ISBN: 9781000581409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

By looking at rhetoric and politics, this book offers a novel account of Juan Luis Vives' intellectual oeuvre. It argues that Vives adjusted rhetorical theory to a monarchical context in which direct speech was not a possibility, demonstrated how Erasmian languages of ethical self-government and political peace were actualised rhetorically and critically in a princely environment, and finally, rethought the cognitive and emotional foundations of humanist rhetoric in his late and famous De anima et vita (1538). Ultimately, towards the end of his life, Vives epitomised a distinctively cognitive view of politics; he maintained that political concord was not a direct outcome of institutional or legal reform or of the spiritual transformation of the Christian world (an optimistic Erasmian interpretation) but that concord could only be upheld once the dynamics of emotions that motivated political action were understood and controlled through responsible rhetoric that respected decorum and civility.

1Becoming a HumanistFrom Paris to Louvain (1514–1520)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003240457-2

Vives’s Quest for Wisdom

In 1514, a young Spaniard named Juan Luis Vives entered the European literary scene by publishing his first writings, some of which were gathered in a larger volume entitled simply Opera.¹ The central text that offered an interpretative framework for the eight pieces of Opera was a playful dialogue, Sapiens, the short preface of which (In suum sapientem praelectio) served as an introduction to the whole Opera as well as to the dialogue itself.² In the preface, Vives contrasts the current ignorant state of learning to the wisdom of the ancients and early Christianity that had produced large numbers of wise men. He writes that ‘formerly the tongue of philosophers was free’ and that in the free cities of Athens and Rome as well as in early Christianity, it was allowed to speak against deformation and vice while also professing particular admiration for satire capable of truthful speech.³ The dialogue proper was in fact a satire, which was performed by Nicolas Bérault (c.1470–c.1545), Gaspar Lax (1487–1560), and Vives himself, who offer the reader a fictional tour around the halls and corridors of the colleges of the University of Paris in a quest for true wisdom.

The quest is, however, full of deceptions. One after another, the masters of different disciplines fail to produce a satisfactory answer irrespective of whether they come from a humanist or scholastic background. While the dialectician, the philosopher, the physician, and the mathematician are criticised for their technical, scholastic language, the exponents of the linguistic arts are hardly portrayed in a more satisfactory light. The grammarian interrogates the three main interlocutors on scattered biographical and orthographical details in a confused manner which leads Lax to exclaim to Vives that he should ‘not expect wisdom’ from this dull man of letters.⁴ The poet, for his part, mumbles a confusing sequence of poetical sentences, where, to use the words of Lax, ‘the profane, the humane and the divine are entangled’, which counts as true mockery of the ‘sacred theology’ the poet had claimed to possess.⁵ The rhetorician is not much better. Vives’s call for a Ciceronian or Quintilian orator embellished with wisdom and capable of moving all emotions is not responded by a rhetorician hopelessly unable to move even the emotions of his students.⁶ The search for a wise man versed in the ‘circle of disciplines’ is finally fulfilled by a theologian who pronounces that ‘true wisdom is the Son of God’, which is contrasted with temporal and bodily goods.⁷ This true wisdom would provide one with a tranquil soul free of harmful passions. The path propagated by the theologian highlights the contemplative – even monastic – dimension of wisdom as an exercise in inner spirituality.

Despite its ambiguities, the contents of the dialogue and its attitude towards learning as a quest for wisdom that would manifest itself across all disciplines resonated well in the academic ambiance of Paris of the time, as this chapter will reveal. By expounding on the academic milieus of Paris and, later, Louvain, the aim is to show what was at stake, both conceptually and in practice, in the nascent rivalry between the scholastic and humanist strands of learning. These have traditionally been seen as two competing educational paradigms with scholasticism emphasising dialectic and focusing on formal questions of reasoning and humanism paying more attention to grammar, rhetoric, and the historical dimension of semantics. The reconstruction of the academic debates on education and developments in the trivium will enable us to understand better what Vives himself thought he was doing not only in the introductory dialogue to his Opera but also his other 1510s texts centred on language teaching. This also puts us in a better position to comprehend how Vives came to think that a reformed trivium could serve as a basis for an active life in the service of the community and how that connection was thought to function. The link between the renewal of language teaching and active life was occasionally made in his 1514 Parisian writings, but, as we will see, it was much more fully expressed in his 1519 oeuvre (printed in Louvain) and in his 1520 Declamationes Syllanae, which offered a more comprehensive account of the significance of humanist studies for a life of negotium.

Grammar Teaching and Poetry at the University of Paris

Vives had moved from Valencia to Paris most likely in 1509, and the printing of his 1514 oeuvre represented the culmination of his Parisian experience.⁸ For a long time, it was believed that he stayed in Paris for three years, until 1512, studying at the conservative and scholastic minded Collège de Montaigu. This interpretation was challenged by Enrique González González who, in his Joan Lluís Vives: De la Escolástica al Humanismo (1987), convincingly demonstrated that Vives’s activities in Paris continued until 1514 and were most likely not solely focused on the Collège de Montaigu.⁹ As González González has shown, in Paris Vives attended courses at different colleges, collaborated with printers, gave courses on classical and humanist materials, published inaugural lections to his courses (praefatio), and cultivated friendships with the humanist circles of the French capital centred on Nicolas Bérault.¹⁰ Vives’s enthusiasm for some of the currents of humanist learning and his experimentations with different literary styles have effectively opened up the intellectual context within which he can be placed.

The widening of Vives’s intellectual milieu in Paris does not, of course, mean that his writings can be understood by employing a conventional notion of humanism. The significance of humanism as a historiographical category has, as is well known, been hotly debated in scholarship and the very existence of a deep gulf between humanist and scholastic cultures has become increasingly problematic.¹¹ More importantly, the meaning of humanism or humanist education was very much a question for contemporaries themselves. Although the discourse of the time frequently invoked a dichotomy between bonae litterae and scholastic barbarism, by 1514 there was no open confrontation between two clearly defined forms of knowledge in Paris. In fact, prior to the emergence of the famous Reuchlin case, which dealt with the application of Jewish studies and humanist philology to scriptural exegesis, the disputes between scholastics and humanists were not very heated in the French capital.¹²

The relatively peaceful coexistence was facilitated by the fact that humanism developed at certain colleges within the propaedeutic Faculty of Arts, whereas the higher faculties, especially the theological faculty, continued to work in a scholastic fashion. Indeed, individual scholars such as Josse Clichtove (1472–1543), a doctor in theology and an associate of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1450–1536), could draw on both traditions.¹³ Vives’s 1514 works were also rather ambivalent in their portrayal of the scholasticism – humanism debate. Although his Sapiens is often read as a humanist critique of scholasticism, a sort of an early version of his polemical and more famous In pseudodialecticos (1519), the text did not amplify on the differing academic backgrounds of its protagonists Gaspar Lax and Nicolas Bérault. The prominent French humanist Bérault seemed to be in total agreement with Lax on the deficiencies of Parisian academic life. Lax was a scholastic specialist in dialectic and a relatively well-known student of the most famous member of the theological faculty, the dialectician John Mair (1467–1550). As a matter of fact, in his 1514 Life of Jan Dullaert (Vita Ioannis Dullardi), dedicated to one of his own scholastic-minded teachers who had studied under Mair, Vives wrote, in a tone that was by no means critical, that Mair had been ‘certainly the best philosopher of his time’.¹⁴

The absence of an open confrontation did not mean, however, that the Parisian academic community was unaware of the popularity of new humanist materials and how these could imply change for the teaching of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) at the Faculty of Arts.¹⁵ Since the Faculty of Arts was heavily based on the linguistic arts of the trivium and since it served as a propaedeutic faculty that prepared students for the higher faculties, the way in which reading, speaking, and arguing was taught was considered relevant to the whole circle of arts and disciplines. Already in 1509, the theologian John Mair was irritated by some of the developments of humanism that were potentially threatening to the scholastic process of clarifying truth through its dialectical methods. By referring to a famous epistolary dispute between Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) and Ermolao Barbaro (1454–1493), he reminded his readers that even Pico had defended the technical language of scholastics as the appropriate tool for this task. In 1516, Mair was more worried about recent developments and implied that the Faculty of Arts was not preparing students for the study of theology in a suitable manner. He affirmed the necessity of other arts for theology yet complained that ‘although such things are treated in certain faculties, perhaps, however, they are not treated sufficiently’.¹⁶

Mair was right that some of the strongholds of nominalist scholasticism were affected by new materials. In 1516, François du Bois (c.1483–1536), a teacher at the Collège de Montaigu, published his Progymn...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Becoming a Humanist: From Paris to Louvain (1514–1520)
• 2 Conversation and the Rhetoric of Counsel (Around 1520)
• 3 Managing Discord: Vives on Politics (1523–1529)
• 4 Redefining Rhetoric in De disciplinis (1530–1531)
• 5 Rhetorical Decorum and the Functioning of the Soul (1532–1540)
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index