Matteo Ricci Read Free Page A

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    The most important Jesuit university, regarded as a model for all the others, was the Roman College, today the Pontifical Gregorian University. Organized on the same lines as the University of Paris, it received papal recognition as a center of higher education in 1556. According to a letter written by Loyola on the plans for the college in March 1553, 15 “most learned and assiduous” professors were to teach “intelligent and virtuous students of good background and education” and seek to turn out “eminent Jesuits.” The order’s teachers included experts in specialized disciplines like mathematics and astronomy.
    Matteo Ricci was admitted to the Roman College on September 17, 1572, after a short period at its Florentine counterpart, 16 where he had been sent on taking his initial vows. Ugo Boncompagni, a convinced supporter of the Jesuit schools and missionary work, became Pope Gregory XIII in the same year.
    The home of the Roman College, the fourth since its foundation and the last before its definitive move to the premises built by the order of Pope Gregory, was a solemn Renaissance palazzo built with funds donated by the Marquise of Tolfa, the widow of Paul IV’s nephew Camillo Orsini. The complex consisted of two separate buildings “harmoniously laid out around two large arcaded quadrangles,” 17 one for the students and classrooms, the other for the religious community, beside which the church of the Annunziata stood. The Roman College taught over a thousand young people from all over Europe free of charge in that period.
    The 130 of these who belonged to the order, 18 like Ricci, were offered an overall education but only on condition that they lived in the college and that their contacts with parents and relatives were kept to the bare minimum. For nearly five years, from the moment Ricci crossed the threshold of the building, his real family was to be the group made up of his fellow students and the teaching body. The Jesuit would always remember them with affection and nostalgia, as is clearly revealed on reading his letters from the East. In one of the first, written shortly after his departure for the missions and sent from Cochin, India, in November 1580 to Ludovico Maselli, rector of the Roman College in the years when Ricci attended it, we read as follows:
    I do not feel so much sadness . . . at being far away from my family secundum carnem , even though I am very attached to the flesh, as at being away from Your Reverence, whom I love more than my own father. 19
    The young Ricci set about the course of studies laid down for those belonging to the order: two years of rhetoric, three of philosophy, and three of theology. He studied Latin, the language in which the lessons were taught, as well as Greek and Hebrew in the first two years. The decision of the teachers at the college to present pagan authors of antiquity as models of style was influenced by humanism, the intellectual movement that had led to the rediscovery and reappraisal of Greek and Latin classical culture in the previous century. The texts studied were, however, vetted in advance by the ecclesiastical authorities, who took care to cut anything deemed inappropriate. Ricci’s reading included the Latin authors Martial, Horace, Ovid, Virgil, and Quintilian, as well as Homer, Hesiod, Thucydides, and Demosthenes among the Greeks. The paradigm to be followed for Latin was Cicero, considered an unsurpassable example of Roman rhetoric. While rigid control was maintained over the content of the courses, the teachers’ choices revealed a significant degree of independence with respect to the ecclesiastical authorities, as shown by the fact that Erasmus of Rotterdam was also read in the Jesuit colleges even though his works had been placed on the Index . Having completed the first two years, Ricci embarked on the three years of philosophy with in-depth study of Aristotelian logic, ethics, and metaphysics, as well as the ethics of the