Juan Luis Vives

From Hispanopedia
Juan Luis Vives
Anonymous portrait of Juan Luis Vives, Museo del Prado.
Born(1492-03-06)6 March 1492
Valencia, Kingdom of Valencia, Crown of Aragon
Died6 May 1540(1540-05-06) (aged 48)
Bruges, Spanish Netherlands
OccupationsPedagogue, professor and university lecturer

Juan Luis Vives[1] (Catalan: Joan Lluís Vives;[1] Latin: Ioannes Lodovicus Vives;[2] Valencia, March 6, 1492 – Bruges, May 6, 1540) was a Spanish humanist, philosopher, psychologist and pedagogue from the Kingdom of Valencia.[3]

A leading figure of Renaissance humanism in Europe, Vives was an eclectic and universalist man who put forward innovative ideas in many fields, and proposed actions in favor of peace and union among Europeans and the care of the poor.[4]

Biography

He was born on March 6, 1492, in the city of Valencia, then part of the Kingdom of Valencia and today of the Valencian Community, in Spain. The Vives family was prominent within the city's community of Jewish merchants, religious and economically well-off. To protect the lives of their relatives as well as their property, and likewise to avoid the risk of being expelled, they were forced to convert to Christianity.

His father, Luis Vives Valeriola (formerly Abenfaçam), was a small Valencian merchant whose property was all confiscated when he was condemned in an auto-da-fé and burned at the stake in 1524,[5] as a crypto-Judaizer. His mother, Blanca or Blanquina March Almenara (formerly Xaprud) (1473–1508), related to the famous Valencian poet Ausiàs March, was condemned in effigy for heresy and apostasy by the inquisitors Arnau Alberti and Juan de Churruca; her memory was anathematized and her remains were exhumed 21 years after her death to be burned in 1529. Thus two of Vives's sisters, Beatriz and Leonor, could no longer claim their right to the 10,000 sueldos of their mother's dowry, nor to any property of their two parents, confiscated by the Royal Treasury, for, although they won a lawsuit at first instance, the appeal left them with nothing.[6] Juan Luis, the humanist, was the eldest of the siblings: Jaume, Beatriu, Anna Leonor and Isabel. During the revolt of the Germanías (between 1519 and 1523), members of his Jewish-convert family took radically different positions: while most of the Vives opposed the rebels, such as Baltasar, uncle of Joan Lluis Vives "who took a decisive part in the repression, another uncle, Enric March, a jurist, took part in the revolt as an adviser to the Junta of the Thirteen and was sentenced to a fine of 420 sueldos. Another uncle of Joan Lluis, Joan March, made a pact with the Genoese Spinola on behalf of another agermanado, Diego de Trevinyo".[7]

Vives's Jewish origin was not discovered until the 1960s, and it then allowed biographers to explain his permanent exile from Spain and, probably, part of his work. The Vives had continued to practice Judaism in a synagogue they had in their house, whose rabbi was a first cousin of Juan Luis, Miguel Vives. But the Inquisition discovered Miguel and his mother in the synagogue in the middle of the liturgy, which gave rise to the general trial against the Vives family. Baltasar Vives, Lord of Vergel in 1522 and treasurer appointed by King Charles I to raise money to finance the war against the Germanías, was the paternal uncle of Juan Luis Vives.[8]

At fifteen, Juan Luis Vives began to study at the University of Valencia, what were then called the general studies, founded five years earlier. He attended that institution from about 1507 until 1509; there the struggle between the scholastics and the humanists was still going on and, by one of the many paradoxes that life holds for men, in defense of his great teacher Jeroni Amiguet i Breçó, professor of rhetoric and of convert origin, in 1507 he delivered a speech against the teaching method of Antonio de Nebrija, the greatest champion of humanism in Spain.[9] He also had as a teacher there Daniel Siró of Lleida. Both Amiguet and Siró taught him Latin grammar, and already then he must have been writing his first short works in a very pure Latin, free of the solecisms and barbarisms contained in the scholastic Latin of his time, as can be seen in his works published in 1514. Greek was taught to him by Bernardo Navarro.[10]

Statue of Luis Vives in the portico of the National Library of Spain, by Pere Carbonell.

The trial against his family continued, and in 1509 his father, who had seen his wife die of the plague in 1508, and who was moreover worried about the turn the matter was beginning to take, decided to send his son to study abroad, or rather sheltered him from what was coming. Thus, in the autumn of 1509, barely seventeen, Vives set out for Paris to perfect and broaden his knowledge of Arts and Philosophy at the Sorbonne, a center of attraction for many students from the Crown of Aragon and where many Spanish professors taught, in the colleges of Beauvais and Montaigu. However, the three years he spent there were not very pleasant for him, and he complained of finding there the same scholastics and dialecticians who had so annoyed him in Valencia.

Relations between Louis XII and Ferdinand of Aragon began to grow tense and the situation of the Spaniards became compromised, so he interrupted his studies in 1512 and moved to Bruges (Belgium), where several families of Valencian merchants lived, among them that of Bernardo Valldaura and Clara de Servent, parents of his future wife, Margarida or Margarita Valldaura, then eight years old, whom they entrusted to him to instruct in Latin grammar together with the rest of her siblings. He would marry her twelve years later, so that he established his second home in Bruges, also befriending the jurist Francisco Cranevelt and the famous physician Juan Martínez Población.[11]

He received the news that his father had been condemned and burned by the Inquisition in 1524, and that his mother Blanca March, who had already died in 1508, had been exhumed so that her remains could be burned in 1530.[12] Vives, who loved his mother dearly, as shown by the fond memories of her gathered in his Dialogues on Education, fell into a deep depression and decided never to return to Spain.

He returned to Paris and there wrote his first work, The Triumph of Jesus Christ. From there he went to Leuven, drawn by the prestige of its university, where he met Erasmus of Rotterdam and formed a great friendship with him. He was appointed professor at the university and tutor to Gilherme or William de Croÿ, Bishop of Cambrai and later Archbishop-elect of Toledo (1517–1521), with whom he made many journeys through Flanders and France; Vives then wrote several short works: Meditations on the Seven Penitential Psalms, a Fable of Man, a Soul of the Old Man, an Introduction to the Georgics of Publius Virgil and a Horoscope of Jesus Christ, but his pupil died very young, from a fall from a horse, and Vives was left not only without his protection but also eaten up by debts, as can be seen in his correspondence with Erasmus.

Feeling ill, he returned to Bruges to be cared for by his fellow countrymen, and settled in the house of the Spaniard Pedro de Aguirre. At the University of Leuven he taught two subjects: the Naturalis historia / Natural History of Pliny the Elder and the Georgics of Virgil. He also met Thomas More, who was captivated by his profound humanistic knowledge (Erasmus had already written to the French humanist Gilherme or Guillaume Budé or Budaeus: "Either I know Vives badly, or he will not rest until he has left us all behind".[13] At Erasmus's urging, moreover, he became absorbed in preparing Commentaries on The City of God of [Augustine of Hippo]. While still between Bruges and Leuven, but already planning to go to England, he turned down a vacant chair to teach at the University of Alcalá de Henares, replacing the late Antonio de Nebrija, for fear that the Inquisition would persecute him because of his family background.

The University of Oxford granted him the degree of doctor of civil law, and in the summer of 1523 he was chosen as reader of the recently founded (it was founded in 1517) Corpus Christi College by Cardinal Wolsey, a post that also entailed being appointed chancellor to King Henry VIII of England. Vives thus saw fulfilled his longing to settle at a court, the only place where a humanist could worthily carry out his research work on culture and teach the discoveries of his studies. There he befriended Thomas More and Queen Catherine of Aragon.

However, he soon became disheartened, since he missed his Flemish friends and the academic life of Leuven, in which Erasmus of Rotterdam stood out, especially because the most exciting discussions among the most prominent European humanists took place there.

His friendship with Queen Catherine enabled him to be granted, on April 28, 1525, a license to import wine and wool into England and to export wheat to the continent. With the profits from this trade and the royal pension, his financial situation improved.

From May 1526 until April 1527 he lived again in Bruges, where he learned of the death sentence passed on his friend Thomas More for opposing the King's divorce.

In Bruges Vives wrote his treatise on pauperism or relief of the poor (De subventione pauperum, 1526), in which he analyzed and systematized the organization of aid to the poor and how it should be carried out. For this reason Vives is considered the first person in Europe to plan a public service of social assistance. He was therefore the forerunner of the future organization of social services in Europe and one of the forerunners of organized, welfare-oriented State intervention on behalf of the needy.

Catherine invited Vives to return to England to teach Latin to her daughter, Mary Tudor. In an attempt to help the Queen, Vives wrote to the Emperor Charles, the King's enemy, and to Pope Clement VII, but his notes were intercepted by Cardinal Wolsey. Seeing that his efforts were useless and that the King would never give up the divorce, he tried to persuade the Queen to accept it. This strategy displeased both Henry and Catherine. He wrote to a fellow countryman:

The Queen became angry with me because I did not immediately obey her will instead of keeping to my own opinion; but this is worth as much to me as all the monarchs put together.[14]

He was briefly imprisoned, his royal pension was withdrawn and he was expelled from England. He then sought the protection of Charles V, to whom he dedicated his treatise De concordia et discordia in humano genere, and another to the Inquisitor General of Spain, which he titled De pacificatione. He was granted an annual income of 150 ducats, which covered half of his expenses; however, he never obtained the ecclesiastical benefice he requested.

Statue of Juan Luis Vives in the cloister of the University of Valencia, by Josep Aixa Íñigo.

He devoted the last years of his life to perfecting the humanistic culture of Henry III of Nassau-Breda, uncle of William the Silent, and of his wife, Mencía de Mendoza (1508–1554), Marchioness of Cenete. He became a reformer of European education and a moral philosopher of universal stature, proposing the study of the works of Aristotle in their original language and adapting his books intended for the study of Latin to students; he replaced the medieval texts with new ones, with a vocabulary adapted to his time and to the way people spoke then: he treated Latin as a living language. His book of Dialogues intended for the teaching of Latin was published 65 times between 1538 and 1649. To this day more than 600 editions have been produced. Because, in reality, it goes beyond that purpose, in the manner of Erasmus's Colloquies, and reflects autobiographical memories and his pure humanistic ideals of reforming society, nor does it lack humor. His De Disciplinis in twelve books is a classic of universal Pedagogy. The first seven deal with the corruption of studies in general; he points out as the main causes the pride and vanity of those who devote themselves to studies, the obscurity of ancient writings, the ignorance or bad faith of their commentators, excessive submission to authority, the neglect of knowledge of nature, the eagerness for controversy that prevails in the schools, the base desire to profit from studies, laziness, and the little esteem in which teachers are held. In the second part he sets out his convictions on religious feeling as the foundation and supreme end of education; the need to take into account the natural dispositions of children, the advantages of intuition and of contact with nature; the importance of the mother tongue, which must be learned by hearing it spoken well from the beginning and by speaking it; the qualities of the teacher, who must be serious and kind; punishments, which should be few and timely; the dangers of overwork; the frequent physical exercises so necessary for the development of childhood; games, which strengthen the body and invigorate the spirit; the importance of good examples, owing to children's instinct for imitation; and, finally, he outlines his vast and magnificent plan of teaching founded on rational and scientific principles, lacking none of the details that the Pedagogy of our times regards as new and fundamental achievements of the science of education.[15]

He also proposed the reform of the Sorbonne, refining its philosophical education and improving the quality of its instruction.

By 1539 his health was already very delicate: suffering from gout since 1533, he also suffered from headaches and a stomach ulcer. An arthritis degenerated into severe pain, and on May 6, 1540, he died at his home in Bruges from a gallstone. He was buried in the church of Saint Donatian. But with the later destruction of this church during urban redevelopment, his tomb disappeared.

Works

Thus it is that, through ignorance of the languages of the great writers, we did not understand what they commanded us, what they advised us concerning the path to follow and the goal to be attained. Ignorance of those languages deprived us almost entirely of knowledge of those authors who wrote their monumental literary productions in the Greek or Latin language and handed them down to posterity. These languages, with the unbroken continuity of so many wars, almost fell into total disuse when those nations that people the North, straying from their lands, poured over Italy and the whole West. (...) Those barbarous hordes, savage by nature and utterly foreign to all cultivation of the intellect, began by causing gigantic destruction in the libraries, by setting cities on fire and by laying waste entire kingdoms, and in that impious, criminal conflagration the works of the great minds were reduced to ashes, works with which their authors, poor prophets, had promised themselves life and robust immortality. (...) But the loss or great obscuring of those two august languages, Latin and Greek, necessarily brought it about that the arts and disciplines that had found their expression in those languages were plunged into the same darkness and debasement, and that words lost their precise meaning and unknown and ugly idioms were introduced

— J. L. Vives: De disciplinis (1531)[16]

His Complete Works have been translated into Spanish by Lorenzo Riber (Madrid, Aguilar, 1948, in two volumes) and in another edition sponsored by the Valencia City Council on the occasion of the fifth centenary of his birth (1992). The following deserve mention:

  • Opuscula varia (Lovanii, 1519), a collection of short works in which we find what was his first work of a philosophical character, De initiis, sectis et laudibus philosophiae.
  • Adversus pseudodialecticos (Selestadii, 1520), presents the reading of the classics, as the humanist he is, as a means of acquiring mental agility.
  • De subventione pauperum. Sive de humanis necessitatibus libri II (Brugis, 1526), deals with the problem of begging, seeking solutions in public institutions, which must help the truly poor and make those who are merely idle work; for this an organization of public charity and a reform of the health and asylum system are needed... It is a plan of action against poverty in the city of Bruges.
  • De Europae dissidis et Republica (Brugis, 1526).
  • De concordia et discordia in humano genere (Antuerpiae, 1529).
  • De pacificatione (Antuerpiae, 1529).
  • Quam misera esset vita christianorum sub Turca (Antuerpiae, 1529).
  • De disciplinis libri XX (Antuerpiae, 1531), an encyclopedic work containing his pedagogical work, divided into three parts: De causis corruptarum artium, De tradendis disciplinis, and De artibus. The last in turn contains: De prima philosophia, De explanatione cuiusque essentiae, De censura veri, De instrumento probabilitatis, De disputatione.
  • De conscribendis epistolis (1534), a work on the art of letter writing.
  • De anima et vita (Basileae, 1538), his mature work, in which the author develops concepts of psychology.
  • Lingvae latina exercitatio, Dialogues on Education dedicated to the Prince who would later be Philip II, whose aim is to instruct in the Latin language while introducing pleasant questions of morals and social conduct and evoking his childhood memories.[17]
  • De Europeae statu ac tumultibus, addressed to the Pope to demand his mediation in favor of peace among the Christian princes, along the same lines as the Complaint of Peace of his friend Erasmus.
  • Introductio ad sapientiam (Lovanii, 1524), the most important of his pedagogical works.
  • Satellitium sive symbola (Lovanii, 1524),[18] protective moral maxims for Princess Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.
  • De institutione feminae christianae, translated into Castilian in Valencia in 1528, a treatise on the education of the Christian woman.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Juan Luis Vives in the Virtual International Authority File. VIAF: 71399403
  2. ↑ Ioannis Lodovici Vivis Valentini, De conncordia & discordia in humanno genere, etc.
  3. ↑ Conrad Gessner, Bibliotheca universalis, Zürich, 1545, fol. 430 v.: «Ioannes Ludovicus Vives Valentinus, natione Hispanus», cited in Calero, Francisco, «“Traiciones” a Luis Vives», in Anales del seminario de historia de la filosofía, 13 (1996), p. 238.
  4. ↑ "Juan Luis Vives, humanista, filósofo y pedagogo español. Biografía". www.españaescultura.es (in español). Retrieved 2023-06-19.
  5. ↑ https://dbe.rah.es/biografias/5928/juan-luis-vives-march
  6. ↑ Cf. Henry Kamen, «"Procesos inquisitoriales contra la familia judía de Juan Luis Vives. I. Proceso contra Blanquina March, madre del humanista", ed. M. de la Pinta Llorente and J. M. de Palacio y de Palacio (Book Review)», Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 44, no. 1, January 1967, p. 75
  7. ↑ Cf. Patricia Banères, «Histoire d'une répression: les judéo-convers dans le royaume de Valence aux premiers temps de l'Inquisition (1461-1530)», LLAC, Université Paul Valéry - Montpellier III, November 24, 2012, p. 373 ff.
  8. ↑ García Cárcel, Ricardo (1975). "El coste de la guerra de las Germanías". Las germanías de Valencia (in español) (1st ed.). Ediciones Península. p. 140. ISBN 84-297-1098-1. OCLC 1552175. Retrieved 2022-08-21.
  9. ↑ Cf. Vicente Campo Palacio, «Los humanistas», in his Historia de la educación y de la pedagogía, Huesca: Viuda de Justo Martínez, n. d., pp. 84-85.
  10. ↑ Giselli Bernardo, Débora (2005). "3.1 Vida". Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) e os ideas humanistas de educaçâo na aurora da modernidade (in português). Universidad Estadual de Maringá. Retrieved February 24, 2023.
  11. ↑ Cf. Vicente Campo, op. cit., p. 85 and Débora Giselli, op. cit., p. 45.
  12. ↑ Escudero López, José Antonio (2009). "Luis Vives y la Inquisición" (PDF). Revista de la Inquisición: (intolerancia y derechos humanos) (in español) (13): 11–24. ISSN 1131-5571.
  13. ↑ Apud Vicente Campo, op. cit., p. 85.
  14. ↑ Apud Vicente Campo, op. cit., p. 86.
  15. ↑ Cf. Vicente Campo, op. cit., pp. 88-89.
  16. ↑ Artola, Miguel (1982). Textos fundamentales para la Historia (in español) (Seventh ed.). Madrid: Alianza Universidad. p. 175. ISBN 84-206-8009-5.
  17. ↑ "Copia archivada" (in español). Archived from the original on September 24, 2008. Retrieved August 21, 2008.
  18. ↑ Tello, Joan. "The Satellitium sive Symbola of Joan Lluís Vives: Critical Edition with a Short Introduction". Humanistica Lovaniensia. 69: 35–114. Archived from the original on February 23, 2021. Retrieved December 6, 2022.

Bibliography

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