Jesuit psychagogies: an approach to the relations of schooling and casuistry

Abstract

The article explores the usefulness of the term “psychagogy” for analysing the net of instruments used by contemporary authors for guiding or helping – that is, for intentionally transforming – the souls of early modern Europeans. The article analyses Jesuit anthropology (free will) and its links with the most important vocations of the order of prists of souls, the penance–confession sacrament and schooling. It studies also some of the relations among the latter. In particular, the article advances that the moral doctrine maintained by the Jesuits as basis for their casuistry, probabilism, was related to the focus on schooling. Probabilism, which was the direct legal–moral expression of free will anthropology, was fostered by the practices of the disputatio and Ciceronian rhetoric in Jesuit schools. However, Jesuits faced a contradiction, as the leniency of probabilism undermined one of the most important disciplining instruments of the Catholic Church: penance–confession. The article concludes with the argument that the experience of schooling allowed the accepting of probabilism, as school discipline compensated for probabilism’s leniency.