Juan Luis Vives

Vives, Juan Luis (1493-1540) Spanish humanist and scholar. Owing to the perturbed state of Europe Vives lived in many places, including Paris and Oxford, although often based at Bruges, where his Stoic teaching and hostility to Aristotle were largely tolerated. He edited Augustine's City of God, and wrote widely on educational matters, producing among other things a highly popular teaching manual for Latin. De anima et vita (Of the soul and life, 1538) is an early empirical study of the emotions.

Vives, Juan Luis (1492–1540), sixteenth-century Spanish humanist. Juan Luis Vives spent most of his life outside Spain. Born in Valencia to a family of Jewish converts to Christianity, Vives began his studies in his native city but eventually chose to move to Paris in 1509, possibly fearing the Inquisition, whose severity would eventually take a toll on his family. In Paris he studied in the colleges of Beauvais and Montaigu along with other Spanish scholars like himself. In 1512 Vives left Paris and settled in Bruges, which he would call his home for the rest of his life. In 1516 the scholar from Valencia met Erasmus of Rotterdam, an encounter that initiated a decades-long association between the two and helped bring Vives into the circle of humanist thought.

In 1519 Vives was teaching at the University of Louvain, where, under Erasmus's influence, he undertook one of his most important works, a commentary on St. Augustine's City of God, published in Basel in 1522 and dedicated to Henry VII of England. It seems Vives's fame was extensive, for that same year he was offered a chair at Spain's prestigious University of Alcalá, recently vacant due to the death of the godfather of Spanish humanists, Antonio de Nebrija. He refused the honor and instead found himself one year later in England, teaching at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was named tutor to the princess Mary and reader to the queen, Catherine of Aragon, by Henry VIII. In 1523 he dedicated his De Institutione Feminae Christianae (On the education of a Christian woman) to the queen. His relationship with the royal family would become complicated, however, when he sided with Catherine in the dispute over Henry VIII's wish to divorce her for Anne Boleyn. Although he did not lose his life, as did his friend Sir Thomas More, Vives was eventually banished from England by the king. By then a married man, Vives returned to Bruges in 1528, where he would remain until the end of his life, resuming his post as professor at Louvain.

A prolific writer, Vives focused his formidable intelligence on a wide range of subjects. He had specific ideas about education, to which he devoted a number of works, railing against the utilitarian concept of knowledge as information as well as the idea of studying in order to obtain fame. In De Institutione Feminae Christianae, he defended the education of women, but it would be an exaggeration to label him a proto-feminist. Perhaps one of the best-known traits of Vives's thought is his criticism of a type of Scholasticism that had degenerated into a fixation on dialectics and syllogisms. In his monumental encyclopedia De Disciplines Libri XX (1531; Twenty books on the disciplines) Vives insisted that dialectics be subordinated to the other branches of philosophy such as morals and metaphysics. He also leveled frequent criticisms at his contemporaries' slavish reliance on ancient philosophical authorities to the detriment of the exercise of human reason, though he always did so with a genuine respect for Aristotle and his commentator Thomas Aquinas.

Vives's treatise De Anima et Vita (1538; On the soul and life) is recognized as a foundational text in the study of the inner life of the human being. In Vives's view, in order to know the soul, one must study its operations and functions, a study that is founded on a thorough knowledge of earthly life in its different forms. The third book of De Anima et Vita, an examination of the passions, takes much of its inspiration from the Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, but it has also gained Vives a place among the precursors of modern psychology, thanks to its employment of introspection and self-observation.

Thoroughly interested in the affairs of his times, Vives was an avid letter writer and corresponded with kings, cardinals, and emperors. Later dubbed a pacifist because of his desire for peace among peoples and his special concern for ending the fratricidal wars afflicting Europe, Vives also pointed out the threat to Christendom posed by Turkish expansion in the Mediterranean in works such as De Conditione Vitae Christianorum sub Turca (On the conditions of Christians under the Turks).

Though an educator by vocation, Vives was also a commercially successful author, and some of his most popular works were dedicated to the subject of Christian apologetics and devotion. His last book, which he was working on at the time of his death in 1540, was entitled De Veritate Fidei Christianae (On the truth of the Christian faith).

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Vives, Juan Luis. Declamationes Sullanae. Edited and translated by Edward V. George. Leiden, Netherlands, 1989.

——. The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual. Translated by Charles Fantazzi. Chicago, 2000.

——. On Assistance to the Poor. Translated by Alice Tobriner. Toronto, 1999.

——. The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita. Translated by Carlos G. Noreña. Lewiston, N.Y., 1990.

——. Somnium et Vigilia in Somnium Scipionis. The Library of Renaissance Humanism, Vol. 2. Edited by Edward V. George. Greenwood, S.C., 1989.

Secondary Sources

Abellán, José Luis. Historia crítica del pensamiento español. Vol. 2, La edad de oro. Madrid, 1979. An in-depth reference work on the major figures in Spanish philosophy.

Bataillon, Marcel. Erasmo y España. Mexico City, 1997. A classic text on Spanish humanism.

Copenhaver, Brian P., and Charles B. Schmitt. Renaissance Philosophy. Oxford, 1992.

Fraile, Guillermo. Historia de la filosofía española. Madrid, 1971. A concise historical introduction to Spanish philosophy.

Noreña, Carlos G. Juan Luis Vives and the Emotions. Carbondale, Ill. 1989.

——. A Vives Bibliography. Studies in Renaissance Literature, vol. 5. Lewiston, N.Y., 1990.

Schmitt, C. B., ed. The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K. 1991.

—DAMIAN BACICH