Juan Luis Vives: biography of this Spanish philosopher

Considered one of the greatest humanists in Renaissance Europe, the life of Juan Luis Vives was long forgotten. Philosopher, philologist, pedagogue and, in a certain way, psychologist Vives was a man of extensive knowledge and many concerns.

Trying to save himself from the yoke of the Inquisition he fled to England and Flanders, places where he had the opportunity to rub shoulders with the highest echelons. His advice and words full of wisdom reached the ears of monarchs such as Carlos V, Francisco I, Enrique VIII and Catalina de Aragón.

Juan Luis Vives maintained a close relationship with other great Renaissance figures such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Tomás Moro and, here, we are going to delve a little more into his personal history, in addition to the wide repertoire of his works, through from a biography of Juan Luis Vives.

• Related article: "Juan Huarte de San Juan: biography of this precursor of Psychology"

Brief biography of Juan Luis Vives

Juan Luis Vives (in Valencian Joan Lluís Vives and in Latin Ioannes Lodovicus Vives) was born in Valencia on March 6, 1493 into a family of Jewish converts. Although the family had left its Hebrew creeds behind, he could not save himself from the religious persecution of his time, retaliating against the Vives.

Early life and flight from Spain

From a young age Juan Luis Vives had to face bad news when he discovered that his cousin Miguel was accused of having served as a rabbi in a clandestine synagogue. To prevent these same problems from haunting him, when he had the opportunity, Juan Luis Vives fled abroad.

Having already studied in Valencia, he went to the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1512 he settled in Flanders, where he was a professor at the University of Louvain and established a close relationship with Erasmus of Rotterdam.

In 1524, his father, Luis Vives, was condemned to burn at the stake. Her sisters claimed the dowry from her mother, Blanca March, a relative of the famous Valencian-language poet Ausiàs March. Her mother had died several years before, but even so, the Holy Inquisition managed to accuse her of heresy, exhuming her corpse and turning it into a fire. Everything was valid to keep the confiscated money.

Being abroad he received an offer to return to Spain and teach at the University of Alcalá de HenaresHowever, seeing how his country was treating his family, it is not difficult to understand why he decided to reject these types of offers. By then he had already established himself in England, a place where the dark shadow of the Inquisition was not so powerful, and he lived well on the fame he had earned. He taught at the Corpus Christi College of the University of Oxford.

• You may be interested in:

Counselor to the Kings of England

His prestige as a man of extensive knowledge opened many opportunities for him, being able to rub shoulders with the highest English aristocracy. He became a figure very close to Queen Catherine of Aragon and also approached the politician and humanist Tomás Moro.

His friendship with Moro happened just in difficult times. These intellectuals were united by common concerns, since both believed that humanism had gone into decline because of his own representatives, now concerned about the interests politicians.

In 1526, after staying briefly in Bruges, Flanders, he wrote his Treaty of Relief of the Poor. It is a text in which he advocates a vision of assistance to the most disadvantaged, defending that the Public administration must do everything possible to improve the quality of life of the people who live in its land. The ideas he presents in this text are considered the forerunners of social services in Europe.

• You may be interested in: "Differences between Psychology and Philosophy"

Abandonment of England and last years

On his return to England, thanks to the favor he enjoyed at court, he earned the title of Latin teacher from Maria Tudor, future queen of the country. But despite the sympathies of the kings, his position was truncated by the political changes that were coming.

Henry VIII requested the Church to separate from Catherine of Aragon since she was not giving him a male child, but this request was denied, causing the English monarch to decide to create his own church, the Church of England, in which he was his ultimate representative.

Vives was not in favor of either divorce or Enrique's unilateral decisions, but instead of supporting Catalina was asked to keep a low profile rather than speak out against the decisions of her husband. Both the king and the queen saw the non-positioning of Vives in a position contrary to theirs, which made him lose the favoritism of both monarchs very quickly. Consequently, he lost the pension offered by the royal house in order to survive, and began to worry.

Vives, already an expert in escaping from countries where he was not wanted, saw how the pattern lived in Spain was repeated. If in his native land the cruelty of the ecclesiastical authorities was because he was Jewish, in England he would be because he had not been openly opposed to the Church. Thomas More had asked Henry VIII to obey the Pope, which earned him his execution in 1535. Vives' fears were not unfounded and, after the death of his friend, he decided definitely not to return to England.

The last years of him were spent in Flanders. There he dedicated himself to moral philosophy and pedagogy, in addition to delving deeply into the need of the European peoples to unite in peace and harmony, but fighting bellicose against the enemy Muslim. Juan Luis Vives would die on May 6, 1540 in the Flemish city of Bruges, after having lived the last ravages of a very bad health, despite being only 47 years old.

Thought and work

The work and thought of Juan Luis Vives are truly attractive, since they are those of a humanist, renaissance man, defender of a common European identity, Catholic-based, to deal with Islamic threats. He saw Christianity split again, this time into Catholics and Protestants. In a world in which the scepter and the throne went hand in hand, any change in the way of interpreting religion implied a whole political change.

Although at first he believed that the rupture of the Church of England with that of the rest of the Christian world would be simply theological dispute, the events experienced by Thomas More and himself served to change his mind quickly. That is why, Far from firmly defending the unilateralism of the rulers and the Pope, Vives defended that Christian kings should unite as brothers, in peace and harmony, to make the continent progress. He used the term Europe not to refer to the region, but to its civilization.

He opined that in the schism of England and the papacy their sovereigns should speak to reach a common position. The problem had to be solved by means of the word and the dialogue, not using the sword. Thus, Juan Luis Vives shows a true democratic, conciliatory spirit, something that would sow will of later councils that would try to remove iron from the "betrayal" of Christians English.

He was critical of how many Catholics lived the faith. In a letter addressed to Pope Alexander VI, better known as Rodrigo de Borja (or Borgia) and a Valencian like him too, Vives showed his concern about how Sunday Masses had become an almost parodic representation of what Christians should do and they did not. Charity was promoted, but not done; Understanding and peace were promoted, but kings and religious men engaged in absurd brotherly wars.

As for the way of teaching and more academic thinking of him, Vives tried to recover the thought of Aristotle leaving aside the medieval scholastic interpretations, in addition to being a promoter of an ethic inspired by Plato and the Stoics. He was an eclectic and universalist man who advanced innovative ideas in multiple philosophical, theological, pedagogical, and political subjects. The total of his writings amounts to sixty and he wrote them entirely in Latin. In all of them he insists that teaching should be given for method problems rather than giving a master session.

He understands the student's mind, which is why he has been considered a great pedagogue and psychologist. In his treatise "On the Soul and Life", although he follows Aristotle and defends the immortality of the soul, he attributes the empirical study of spiritual processes to psychology. He studies the theory of affects, memory and the association of ideas, with which he is considered the forerunner of seventeenth century anthropology and modern psychology.

Another of the pedagogical works that stand out from him include "Institutione de feminae christianae" (1529), a kind of ethico-religious manual directed for the good Christian woman, be it young, married or widowed. We also have “De ratione studii puerilis”, which is considered one of the first programs of humanistic education. Other books along the same lines are "De ingeniorum adolescentium ac puellarum institutione" (1545) and "De officio mariti", "De disciplinis ”(1531), finally, it is divided into three parts:“ De causis corruptarum artium ”,“ De tradendis disciplinis ”and“ De artibus ”.

As for his works of a more social nature, we find several treatises, among them the "Help of the Poor" or "De subventione pauperum" (1526) and "De communione rerum" (1535). In his works, Vives always writes about specific topics and with proposed solutions., such as "De conditione vitae christianorum sub Turca" (1526) or "Dissidiis Europae et bello Turcico" (1526), ​​works in which he addressed the problems of Christianity in relation to the Turks and the Protestant Reformation, defending the idea put forward that Europeans should unite against Muslims, especially the ottomans.

Linked to his reputation as a good connoisseur of the Latin language we have his "Linguae latinae exercitatio" or "Latin language exercises" (1538), a book with dialogues full of great simplicity that he dictated to facilitate the learning of the language of Plutarch among his students.

Bibliographic references

• G. Bleiberg and J. Marias. (1994) Dictionary of Spanish Literature, Madrid: Revista de Occidente
• You live, Juan Luis; Calero, Francisco (1999). Political and pacifist works. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas - Library of Spanish Authors. ISBN 84-363-1093-4.
• Fantazzi, Charles, ed. (2008). A Companion to Juan Luis Vives, Leiden: Brill (Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition, 12).