Benet Perera’s Pious Humanism: Aristotelianism, Philology, and Education in Jesuit Colleges. An Edition of Perera’s Documenta quaedam perutilia

Abstract

This chapter discusses the philosophical pedagogy of Benet Perera (1535–1610) through an analysis and transcription of his treatise on the useful, error-free study of Christian philosophy, the Documenta quaedam perutilia iis qui in studiis philosophiae cum fructu et sine ullo errore versari student. It places Perera’s treatise within its historical context—that of the Jesuit Roman college of the 1560s—in order to elucidate how his promotion of his own idea of a Christian philosophy for schools provoked criticism among his fellow Romans Diego de Ledesma and Achille Gagliardi. It shows the position of Perera’s project within the multiple forms of Aristotelianism in the early modern period and how Perera was able to justify his own position as ‘sufficiently pious’ through his emphasis on philology as an approach to philosophy. Perera came up with a strictly Christian philosophy curriculum by integrating different trends of Aristotle’s philosophy into his own, even including approaches that were considered impious by some of his fellow Jesuits.

Jesuits in the Early Modern Period (1540–1773)

“…Some of the most important Jesuits of the early modern age taught there: Francisco de Toledo from 1559, Juan de Mariana from 1561, and the German mathematician Christopher Clavius from 1564. Important theologians were also active at the Collegio Romano such as Gregorio de Valencia, Francesco Bellarmino, Benet Perera, Francisco Suárez, and Athanasius Kircher (Casalini and Sander 2017;Casalini and Pavur 2016;Sander 2014;Ponzio 2014). Many of these teachers had themselves been among the early students there, including Clavius, Bellarmino, and Perera.…”