Teaching As a Spiritual Exercise: A Jesuit Way to Find God in All Classrooms
Wednesday, June 30, 2021
by Claude Pavur, S.J., Institute of Jesuit Sources
The timely pedagogical wisdom of an early modern Jesuit is now available in English. The Institute of Jesuit Sources at Boston College has produced an annotated bilingual edition of two famous educational essays by Francesco Sacchini (1570–1625). These compositions have often been printed together as a single work entitled Exhortation and Advice for the Teachers of Young Students in Jesuit Schools. The author intended these pieces to be a readily available source of comfort, inspiration, and practical guidance for those Jesuits (usually the younger scholastics) who found themselves on the front lines of the teaching enterprise, obliged to manage worthily the “lower” or earlier classes in Jesuit schools, classes in which grammar and composition were the main order of the day. Anyone who reads Sacchini’s words will find that they emanate from a deep care for souls and from an experienced understanding of the Jesuit spirituality of studies, or docta pietas (learned devotion). The book sets a very high bar for the professionalism and spiritual integrity of the teacher who is also a member of a religious order.
These elegantly written pieces actually provide much more, and for a far wider audience. They are a handy summation of the spiritual and apostolic rationale for all Jesuit education, composed just as theorder’s schools were entering into their golden age, the seventeenth century, immediately following the issuance of the grand but lapidarily expressed codification of the Society’s entire educational program, the Ratio studiorum (1599). The exhortation, the larger part of the work, creatively employs a range of arguments to communicate the high worth, the importance, and the impact of the teaching effort, finally declaring not only that the hard labor involved should definitely not daunt beginners, but also that this kind of teaching is actually an activity “preferable above all others.” In a magnificent peroration, Sacchini brilliantly exploits classical and Biblical examples to set even the droopiest of souls on fire to accomplish this good and saving work.
In the advisory portion of the book, the reader will find specific Jesuit emphases and ways of proceeding in a school’s day-to-day routines. There Sacchini first attempts to shape the attitudes of the teacher towards his work and towards his students, portraying the high responsibility and duty involved in this effort and the infinite worth of the young persons before him in the schoolroom. The author covers many perennial and some special dimensions of the educational effort: how to keep and even increase his students’ interest; how to promote their real advancement in abilities and character; the importance of memory and focused language study (particularly Greek); how to manage contests, awards, punishment,and corrections; how to attend to religious belief and practice (catechetics, prayers, sacraments); how to cultivate behavior consistent with such devotion; how the teacher can use words and examples to edify the young; which virtues are especially important to encourage; the use of the daily routine as itself a means of improvement. He ends his advice with a consideration of the attitudes the teacher should have towards his own colleagues and towards those from other schools. In this respect, as with the larger impact of the educational project that was detailed in his first essay, Sacchini shows himself to be fully aware of the importance of giving careful attention to the interpersonal and social dynamics of the educational enterprise.
Yet for all that his work might reveal about that great episode of Jesuit schooling in the history of Western education, for all that his engaging style and impressive erudition might delight and edify his audience, Sacchini’s overall vision and his insights into the significance of teaching and its best practices could be the most valuable aspect of what he can offer our—or any—times. We might honestly ask ourselves if there is any such document now in use that accomplishes what Sacchini’s did so well for the author’s own religious circle. Theories and assessment forms and statistics and checklists and guidelines we have, along with our rampant and contentious diversity, electivism, activism, and ideology. But a Sacchini? Do we come close? At least we can look back to his achievement and wonder. Given the heap of books critical of education in our day, we no doubt stand in need of sure guidance. It is time to reconsider such educators as this once again.
The unassuming author was a man who led a reclusive, scholarly, and scrupulously observant religious life. He served as teacher (in Florence, then in Rome) right during the days when the Ratio studiorum was being worked out in its final form. Later at the Society’s headquarters in Rome he was made an assistant to the Society’s official historian (Niccolò Orlandini, 1554–1606) whom he eventually succeeded in that position. There, in his scholarly sequestration, he wrote these two precious essays using all of his rhetorical skills and his long-acquired wide-ranging scholarship. Though he had been a renowned orator and had composed not only major parts of the official history of the Society but also biographies of illustrious Jesuits like Canisius, Kostka, and Aloysius Gonzaga, and some smaller educational works, his posthumously published Exhortation and Advice was what made his lasting reputation. Subsequent generations went on reading him, absorbing his counsels, and producing all the better results in the schools. Francesco Sacchini’s honest attempt to express the best he knew about the apostolate of teaching helped to make the Jesuit educational project a great success. We owe him more than we realize.