Vives, Juan Luis
VIVES, JUAN LUIS
VIVES, JUAN LUIS (1492–1540), Spanish humanist. A recent study by Pinta y Llorente and Palacio, Procesos Inquisitoriales contra la familia judía de Luis Vives (1964), established that his mother became a Christian only in 1491, that she was said to have continued Jewish practices after her baptism, that she was condemned by the Inquisition 24 years after her death, and that her remains were burned and her property confiscated. Vives' father was delivered in 1524 "to the secular arm" by the Inquisition, which usually meant death. This evidence indicates that Vives was of Jewish origin and that he must have been fully aware of this through the fate of his parents.
Vives studied Latin and Greek at Valencia and then, in 1509, went to the University of Paris. He found the scholasticism taught there sterile, and later bitterly attacked his studies and teachers. He said the university was like "an eighty-year-old lady, sick, senile, and in imminent danger of death." Vives' first major work, Adversus pseudodialecticos (1520), was a strong attack upon the school. In 1512 he moved to Bruges where he studied and taught children of influential families. In 1517 he began teaching at the new University of Louvain and became a close friend of Erasmus, whom he had long admired. The religious struggles in the Low Countries, Erasmus' departure for Basle, and the condition of the university led Vives to go to England, where he was immediately received by the humanists and by the court. Vives was offered a post at Alcalá, but refused to return to Spain. Instead he became a professor at Oxford. Political problems involving Henry viii and Catherine of Aragon finally led to Vives' dismissal. He returned a bitter and poor man to Bruges, where he wrote his major works in isolation and discontent.
Vives' writings include criticisms of scholasticism, reform of education, the classics, social problems, philosophy, and religion. His most famous works, extremely popular in the 16th century, were his commentaries on Saint Augustine (1522); De Anima et Vita (1538); Dialogi: Exercitatio Lingae Latinae (1538; trans. W.H.D. Rouse, Scenes of School and College Life, 1931); De Institutione feminae Christianae (1524; trans. R. Hyrde, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, 1541); lntroductio ad Sapientiam (1524; trans. R. Morison, An Introduction to Wysedome, 1540); and De Veritate Fidei (posthumous, 1543). Vives was the first advocate of secular education and state, rather than Church, social welfare. His philosophical concern was not to find ultimate truth (since he believed that metaphysics could only yield conjectures), but rather a basis for human conduct. He was the first modern to investigate human psychology empirically, and developed an early form of naturalism. Though many of his writings deal with Christian religious subjects (including a criticism, mild for the time, of Judaism in De Veritate Fidei), he was not concerned with doctrinal or institutional elements of Christianity, but mainly with morality. Like Erasmus, he advocated a nontheological religion as a way of life. Vives' philosophical-ethical religion may represent a Marrano compromise with Christianity, interpreting it as an ethic rather than as a set of dogmas.
bibliography:
C.G. Norena, Juan Luis Vives: A Humanistic Conception of Philosophical Knowledge (Thesis, San Diego, 1967), incl. bibl.
[Richard H. Popkin]