(Brother
Michael, M.Phil, 1996).
In attempting to draw together the many
threads of this thesis a line from William Blake comes to mind:
“He
who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.”
Somehow, everything that has been written
here about Van Crombrugghe seems to come together in this short line. Above all
it seems very neatly to encompass all the multifarious byways of Van
Crombrugghe's politesse.
At
the same time there is a paradox. It is not easy to reconcile the author of
this notion of politesse, of
exquisite charity, with a person who could equally be thought of as arrogant,
manipulative and overbearing. Fr Jorissen has underlined this sort of double
personality to the extent of asking whether there actually were two
personalities inside the Founder. He indicates the “up there”; a higher plane
from which he could communicate with his spiritual and social equals, and the
“down there”, towards which his charity moves almost at arm’s length towards
the rest.
This “double edged sword” of Van
Crombrugghe's personality is also reflected in two graphic images. In the
first, reproduced in the opening pages, there appear all the qualities one
might consider negative. This is almost the face of a bully; maybe a
well-meaning man, but a man prepared to trample over others to achieve his
ends. There appears none of the compassion which he insisted on in others and
one really is led to wonder if he was a truly compassionate man in himself, or
rather a man with a deep sense of a “duty of compassion”. It is the face of an older man, of course,
with a lifetime of achievement behind him, and years of directing the fate of
other people in an autocratic manner. Fr Jorissen has pointed out that most of
the early Josephites were not his social equals, and if the
Josephites were to be “instruments of mercy” they were also very much the
“instruments of Van Crombrugghe.”
In a second image, reproduced at the end
of this Chapter, there appears a totally different man. There is, of course, a
difference of years between the two images but, leaving that aside, this is a
different Van Crombrugghe; the image shows compassion and energy, coupled with
humility and an ability to be wrong.
Which is the real Van Crombrugghe? Although undertaking this research has
revealed all sorts of information about Van Crombrugghe, the answer to this
question has not become fully apparent. Although he said, did and wrote much
which is appealing, there remains the sense that the real man remains distanced
from his achievements. He remains the “self-made man”, hidden behind the
formalised façade of his laboriously created personality.[1]
Van Crombrugghe the man
Fr Jorissen has posed some useful
questions concerning Van Crombrugghe which provide a framework for conclusions
concerning Van Crombrugghe himself:
1. In spite of
Van Crombrugghe being, on the one hand a realist to the point of
meticulousness, was he also an utopist?
No, he wasn’t. Certainly he had a vision
of a certain type of perfection, in life as in education. As a realist he would
realise that the short-term goals might not be fully attainable but were useful
pointers, to be held as examples to be moved towards and beyond. But as a Roman
Catholic educator his ultimate goals, for himself, his congregations and for
his pupils, were eschatalogical and fully attainable in a final union with God.
The things of this world, however laudable, would pass. Within the confines of
time and space, the best possible had to be achieved, and the best possible
means used to achieve them. For Van Crombrugghe those means were outlined par excellence in the Règlement des Professeurs.
2. Was the
attraction of Jesus, even through a man who, captured by his charm, revealed
him in an exemplary manner, enough to transport and transform, even haltingly,
a religious teaching congregation?
Yes, it was. Van Crombrugghe was a man of
strong religious conviction and personal faith. This faith was strong enough to
sustain him through the many trials of his educational career and, more
importantly, to attract others to the same vision.
3. Were the
experiences of Amiens and Alost so exceptional that they could not support Van
Crombrugghe's vision and institutions?
There is no doubt that Van Crombrugghe's
experiences at Amiens were quite exceptional and coloured his whole educational
life. It would be reasonable to say that he wanted his schools to be
reflections of Amiens, his teachers to be reflections of the Fathers of the
Faith, and that in some measure his
life’s work was a pursuit of that ideal. It is true that in his lifetime he did
not fully achieve that ideal. Nevertheless, without the vision of Amiens
ever-present as a goal to be striven for the whole enterprise might have
crumbled and might even never have been embarked upon.
Alost is a different question, or at
least a different set of unanswered questions. We do not know how much the
success of Alost was due to the relief of parents in having the school back on
a stable footing and run by clerics - any clerics - and therefore to them feeling
in some way obliged to support it. We do not know how much its success was due
to the calibre of the staff, the seminarians, of Fr Valentijns who would
re-appear later at Melle. All we do know is that, for whatever reason, it
worked and showed Van Crombrugghe what could be achieved and what he could achieve. In this sense the
experiences of both Amiens and Alost did support Van Crombrugghe's enterprise.
4. Did the
practicalities of the situation almost defeat a method considered almost
unbeatable? Did the Founder have to accept insufficiently motivated candidates
in order to press on with the work of education? Did he give too great a
responsibility to Josephites who were too young?
Quite clearly the answer to all these
questions is “yes”. We know that the vision and the human resources available
were almost incompatible. Much of the genius of Van Crombrugghe lay in his
ability relentlessly to pursue the vision, moulding square pegs into round
holes simply because the work had to be done.
5. Did he not
understand that men with his own strength of character were quite exceptional?
This is a question whose psychological
complexities are beyond the scope of this thesis.[2]
As a member of his social class and background he would be familiar with men
who where directors of the efforts of others; as such he much well have simply
presumed that his own abilities were natural and unexceptional. Whilst the
well-concealed “natural” Van Crombrugghe might have taken some pride in them,
the “artificed” Van Crombrugghe would certainly not.
6. Did he not
understand that, in order to be able to fulfil his vision, the men whom he
accepted needed long and careful training within already formed communities?
The short answer is that he must have
done, but that the exigencies of the situation made this impossible. It’s a
chicken and egg situation: at the beginning of an enterprise, where do you find
these “already formed communities”? Had the Congregation grown more quickly, or
attracted from an early stage a different type of person, or had he lived in a
less turbulent time, things might have been different.
The background to Van Crombrugghe's
action
The two chapters dealing with the history
of the region show that as a Belgian, Constant Van Crombrugghe lived his life
in a period of enormous social and political change. During his lifetime he
knew four régimes: occupation by Austria and France, an uneasy and contrived
alliance with Holland, and finally an independent Belgium. Did this cause in
him any form of struggle for national identity?
Probably not. Until 1830 Van Crombrugghe would probably have though of
himself as a citizen of East Flanders, and, more specifically, Geraardsbergen
rather than anything else. Foreign occupiers would come and go as a fairly
major irritation but would not cause any fundamental instability of identity on
a personal level. Even after the establishment of Belgium it could be imagined
that Van Crombrugghe would not really think of himself as Belgian.
As a Roman Catholic, and more
specifically as a Roman Catholic priest, he lived through a period where the
directing role of the Church in everyday life, and particularly in education,
was being questioned and had been dramatically weakened. As has been noted,
however, as far as Belgium was concerned this was a questioning and weakening
which went hand in hand with foreign occupation and, for many Belgians, the
Church remained at the centre of their lives. For many, a rejection of foreign
occupation would hopefully mean a return to the ecclesiastical status quo. We have seen that at the Collège d’Alost Van Crombrugghe did not throw himself into the
creation of anything radically new: rather he attempted to turn the clock back
by re-inventing the Jesuit college of
1773. One could also ask whether
this was entirely because he thought it the best way, or was there more than a
hint of human nostalgia for his “second family” at Amiens.
As an educator, and as a Roman Catholic
educator (for, as we have seen, the two in Van Crombrugghe cannot be separated)
he inherited a situation in which education in Belgium was something of a
wasteland, having been subjected to well-intentioned (but deeply mistrusted)
interference by Austria and Holland, and revolutionary manipulation by France.
It could be said that Van Crombrugghe's insistence on freedom of education at
the National Congress came as a reaction to the utilitarian function
of education demanded by the unitary states of Joseph II and Willem of Oranje.
He characterises the Belgian people as those “who would go without it
(education) rather than to see it imposed on them by the administration and at
the whim of the civil power.” Above all, the fabric of secondary education had
been deeply damaged by the suppression of the Jesuits and the suppression or transfer to other
authorities of their Colleges.
It could be argued that all of Van
Crombrugghe's “public” life, a period of only seventeen years lasting from 1814
when he became principal of the Collège
d’Alost to
1831 when he more or less retired from public life, was lived as a reaction to
the situation which he inherited. Thus he was to a large degree, a “righter of
wrongs”, seeking to re-establish a past order which was seen to have been of
value rather than a revolutionary thinker striving after a new order. He was,
after all, a member of that Belgian Roman Catholic provincial bourgeoisie whose
sensibilities had been offended on all fronts since 1713; as a Belgian by
foreign occupation; as a Roman Catholic by the subjection of ecclesiastical to
civil authority under an enlightened despot; as a provincial by the notion of
centralised government; and finally as a bourgeois by the withdrawal of the traditional
rights of the burgher in Belgian
society. Much of the offence caused by these measures was, as has been noted,
due to Joseph II’s total misunderstanding of the nature of his subject
populace. Joseph sought an efficient state; Belgians remained attached to a
rather bumbling status quo. Joseph,
and later Willem of Oranje, sought a state of religious tolerance: Belgians
remained attached to the supremacy of the Roman Catholic faith.
Although Joseph’s policies were
mistrusted by the Belgians there are some striking similarities between the
sort of philosophy for which he stood and Van Crombrugghe. It has, for example,
been noted that an educational system designed to produce the “useful citizen”
should produce “a) honest citizens; b) good citizens; that is faithful and
obedient subjects of the authorities; and c) useful people for the Community.” In
many ways this could be considered as a secularised version of Van
Crombrugghe's own aims. The quote from Joseph II’s ordinance in Chapter Three[3]
would sit perfectly well with Van Crombrugghe - although with some
qualification of the last phrase.
The Josephites - why Brothers?
Initially this question may seem to have
no place in an educational thesis; it does, nevertheless, have some bearing on the nature of the enterprise on which Van
Crombrugghe embarked. Whether Van Crombrugghe right from the first days of the
Josephites had visions of the Congregation moving into
middle-class secondary education is subject to question. This was, after all,
the field with which he himself was familiar, in which he had enjoyed much
success, and from which, through Amiens, he had drawn much of his inspiration.
It is also clear that Van Crombrugghe had the personal charisma which could
have attracted around him a group of educated, middle-class priests, or at
least aspirant priests, who could have moved into secondary education much more
quickly and with less pain than was the case with the Josephites. There is
evidence that an Amiens / Alost “old boy network” grew up in Belgian
ecclesiastical circles, remaining in touch with Van Crombrugghe. It is not
beyond reason to suppose that Van Crombrugghe could have used his influence
within this network to achieve his ends more expeditiously.
However, to take this rather simplistic
view would be to misunderstand the evolution of the Josephites as an educational order and to withdraw it
from its chronological and social context.
Primarily it has to be understood that
the Josephites as they stood at the turn of the 20th century,
and therefore much as we see them today, were a long way down the evolutionary
line from the Brothers of 1817 and were not an expression of the Founder’s
original founding intention per se.
As has been seen, the Brothers evolved out of Van Crombrugghe's wish, as the
newly appointed Headmaster of a middle-class school, to do something urgently
to meet the moral and practical needs of an impoverished lower class, not only
for pragmatic reasons but also to attract blessings on the “main work”, i.e.
the Collège d’Alost. Reacting urgently to specific and
contemporary needs Van Crombrugghe had to work with the personnel he could find
and, besides, his career had not yet sufficiently developed to allow him the
sort of networking which has been proposed above. There is also the question of
priority of needs: whilst the provision of a teaching corps for the middle
classes was pressing, relief of the needs of the poor was yet more pressing.
Secondly, the foundation of another order
was, in the political circumstances of 1817, a precarious undertaking. In this
context the establishment of a confederation of co-workers without vows was
much less likely to attract hostile government attention - and be easier to
mutate or dissolve - than a full-blown sacerdotal congregation. Who knows whether, if the Josephites had developed right from the start as a
clerical congregation, whether Van Crombrugghe himself might not have become a
Josephite himself, rather than directing their evolution rather “at arm’s
length” and from above.
Whatever the human material which Van
Crombrugghe had at his disposal, it is clear that he moulded them into a body
of educators dedicated to promoting the ideal vision of education such as he
saw it. What were the features of this vision.
The main features of Van Crombrugghe's
concept of education
Reading through all the Van Crombrugghe
texts, and with an understanding of the vivid Jesuit background to his
educational vision, one can isolate a number of threads which go to make up the
central core of his educational concept.
1. Competition, honesta aemulatio, is a principal means
of encouraging effort and minimising the need for punishment. Of all the traits
identified in Van Crombrugghe's woven cloth of education, the one which might
be seen to be problematic is that of competition. It has already been noted
that the whole idea of competition is possibly something of a mixed blessing. Even
Quintilian suggest that it contains the possibility of evil: “though ambition
may in itself be a vice none the less it is frequently the source of virtues.”
We have also seen that for Compayré competition was a source of ammunition for
an attack on the Jesuits: “fostering of ambition” was
“the characteristic of the corrupt Jesuitical morality”.
In our own times, competition is regarded
as a mixed blessing:
“Competition
is, of itself, neither good nor evil, but when it is used to brand children or
schools in a way which limits their freedom or potential, it is damaging to
human flourishing. It also carries the danger of communicating to children and
young people - and, indeed, to the wider community - that a person's value is
measured solely in terms of academic, sporting or financial success. When, as
St Paul describes it, we try to win the race, we are racing against ourselves.
So, in education when a school encourages its pupils and staff to perform to
the best of their ability for their own sake, its aim is to enable them to
fulfil their God-given potential. If competition sets one school against
another, if success in one institution is achieved deliberately at the expense
of another, it is morally unacceptable.”[4]
Against the existence of league tables
this does, indeed, become problematic. Apart from anything else one would look
for the special benefits of a Constantian school almost exclusively among those
areas which are usually classed as “value added”. The above statement would
also seem to condemn the view expressed by Van Crombrugghe at the National
Congress that:
“By
reclaiming the freedom of education, by demanding for families the quality
which is guaranteed by competition, the free right of the father to choose into
whose hands he wishes to confide his son’s future, what are we asking except to
allow parents to exercise a natural prerogative.”
Nevertheless, as a private, fee-paying
school, an element of competition has to enter into the equation. St George’s
College is in competition with other schools to attract pupils in order to
survive. One would have to be careful, therefore, of competition on two levels;
both within and outside the school. Furthermore, competition would have to be
seen firmly in the context both of honesta
aemulatio as described by Ribadeneira and within the general economy of
striving for excellence as part of the generalised notion of fulfilment of
human potential: “la nature propose, l’éducation achève”.
2. A teacher’s authority is based
on esteem: the esteem of the pupil for the teacher and vice-versa. A teacher
will gain esteem by the virtue of his example, and by his care for and interest
in the individual pupil. There is also an element of fear in the sense of timor reverentialis which is better expressed as respect.
3. A teacher must show a genuine - i.e.
real and human, not based on a supernatural notion - affection for his
pupils, and will seek their affection in return. The bond between teacher and
pupil is characterised by a relationship which goes beyond mutual respect to
genuine affection. This affection is
based on Jouvancy’s “earnestness of a father and the devotion of a
mother”. In this context education is,
for Van Crombrugghe, an intensely personal activity undertaken in the context
of an ordered institution.
4. Education is aimed at transformation
- Umbildung - in Jorissen’s description
a move “beyond” oneself, rather than formation
- Ausbildung. Central to this is the simultaneous cultivation of the hearts
and minds (in that order) of the pupils. This does not in any way minimise the
importance of academic excellence, but rather seeks to place it within a
broader economy of personal development.
5. No education without religion.
Van Crombrugghe was quite unequivocal on this point.
6. Gentleness[5];
a key word which keeps re-appearing in Van Crombrugghe's writings is “doux” and
“douceur”. The teacher must have “un air doux et modeste” - a gentle and modest
manner. Van Crombrugghe was struck by “la douceur et affabilité avec lesquelles
on nous conduit” - the gentleness and affability with which we are led - at
Amiens. Teachers are to win the heart of their pupils by gentleness, and also
to correct them in a spirit of gentleness and humility.
7. Appropriateness: the way in which an individual pupil is
taught, in which he is disciplined, can only successfully be based on a
thorough understanding of the individual. Van Crombrugghe was most insistent
that his teachers should study their pupils.
8. A good education cannot be achieved
without order and method. Nothing can be left to chance and, although
education takes place within a framework built on personal relationships, the
whole is undertaken within a structure in which everything is subject to meticulous
analysis and regulation. There is no place for mavericks in Van Crombrugghe's
organisation. All is to be justified, not by the yardstick of what is novel and
radical, but by what is already proven.
politesse & family spirit
This feature has been left until last
because it is so central to Van Crombrugghe's concept of education that it
needs a full explanation. Indeed, it could fairly be said that for Van
Crombrugghe everything leads to, and is rooted in, this concept of total
respect for the other.
The full expression of the good Christian
and honest man is based on this politesse
for which “politeness” is a totally inadequate translation. It would seem
reasonable to suggest that the notion of “family spirit” which Josephites have traditionally held as definitive but
rather vague should be posited firmly within the context of this politesse. So much is family spirit
subsumed into politesse that a
“family spirit” as such is not here cited as an important element per se.
We have seen that in the mission
statement of St George’s College the only specific reference to Josephite
values is to the “family spirit”. This
is quite wrong, as it seizes on only one small element of Van Crombrugghe's
philosophy at the expense of so much else. Certainly it is a convenient phrase
to latch on to, in wording which is easily understood. One might equally say
that it is capable of miscomprehension: family stability is not what it was in
Van Crombrugghe's day and one wonders what so many products of broken families
in this day and age would make of this definition. For too many people their
experience of family is of a dysfunctional and even painful framework.
But it is a simplistic view of something
which is much broader and richer: distilling the whole thing into “family
spirit” is akin to valuing a diamond based solely on one of its facets taken
almost at random. Even more simplistic is the notion that it is based on the
Holy Family - an entity for whose family values and presumed domestic harmony which
there is no empirical evidence at all. Interestingly enough, at the earliest
opportunity Jesus went missing and when found
three days later in the Temple gave his parent a particularly
patronising explanation of his conduct. In Jesus’ attitude at this moment one
can see strong overtones of Van Crombrugghe dealing with his “inferiors” - the
first Josephites. To quote Luke: “But they did
not know what he meant”[6]
This is not to say that this “family
spirit” is not a useful, if simplistic, image. Certainly the image of family as
an enduring hierarchical structure permeates Van Crombrugghe. The son is in a
position of filial duty to parents; parents have a duty of care to the son. The
place of the parents is taken over by the Fathers of the Faith in Amiens; the son seeks a continuation of
hierarchical structure in the Church; the son becomes parent as Headmaster of
the Collège d’Alost and as Founder. Within the communities an
almost Trinitarian atmosphere is to be engendered whereby the individual
religious lives in harmony with his confrères and with his pupils in a
symbiotic relationship. It is perhaps this notion of symbiosis which most
specifically illuminates Van Crombrugghe's concept of family spirit. A
particular consequence of this concept is that up until quite recently in
Josephite schools there has been little physical separation of “school” and
“religious house”: to ask where the “cloister” was would have been a
nonsensical question.
In our own time and place this
intertwining of the two threads of religious community and school has caused
some real problems. Firstly, as has been alluded to previously, it has caused
problems of definition. If at St George's College the two are now juridically
separated, and if Josephites have traditionally defined themselves in the
context of the school, where are Josephites now to look for a definition of
self? In many ways it is that very question which has engendered the current
research. Secondly, on a purely pragmatic level, there is the pressing question
of who owns and/or controls what.
But the demanding vision described above
of a system based on politesse is to
a degree ultra[7]-human.
This is rather typical for the Founder who
seemed to like things which were ultra-human. Something is needed to
hold it all together otherwise, as it frequently did with the early Josephites, the structure will crumble.
The cement is religion, both in its sense of personal devotion and piety, but
also in its sense of re-ligio; that which re-binds. The bricks and mortar are politesse which goes beyond individual
human personalities and in that sense
is also ultra-human; to be striven for and perhaps never achieved. It is a
bourgeois notion, and one can imagine it sitting awkwardly on the first
Brothers.
The thread which ties it all together,
keeps the individual firmly sighted on these ultra-human goals in spite of the
fallibility of human nature, is obedience to authority, both in the context of
a religious’ duty of obedience to Superiors, and the human and social demands
of politesse.
So, how can one attempt to define politesse?
Politesse is an economy of relationships
based on Van Crombrugghe's bourgeois notions of what is right. It takes in not
only relationships in the human sphere, but also the physical sphere and the
supra-human or religious sphere.
·
Human
sphere:
relationships between individuals must be marked by urbanity and respect for
the other.
·
Physical
sphere: the
physical environment must show evidence of good taste and of being cared for.
·
Supra-human
sphere: the
urbanity and respect for the other which mark the human sphere are firmly
rooted in a religious framework based on the reciprocal love of the Father for
the Son and characterised by the presumed perfection of the Holy Family as
perceived by Van Crombrugghe in the context of his own family and later defined
by him in the terms of 1 Corinthians XIII.
Although this was expressed by Van
Crombrugghe in a late eighteenth and early nineteenth century context, the
basic values expressed endure. One could, of course, argue that moral and
social values are not the same absolutes at the end of the twentieth century as
they might seem to have been in Van Crombrugghe's time. But this would be
totally to miss the point of Van Crombrugghe's insistence on the role of the
Roman Catholic religion in education, because one can argue that for Van
Crombrugghe it is precisely the Roman Catholic Church that bears witness to
eternal truths and unchanging basic moral and social values. This is the key to
the importance of the religious domination of education in Van Crombrugghe's
philosophy. It also underpins Van Crombrugghe's insistence that the best people
to undertake the work of education were priests and religious - precisely
because they had a canonical obligation to uphold those unchanging truths with
“blind obedience, but wise in its blindness.”[8]
Of course a cynic could argue that
religious were precisely the people that Van Crombrugghe could, by virtue of
obedience, bludgeon into doing things the way he thought was right.
Unique or DISTINCTIVE?
The notions of “unique” and “distinctive”
have already been mentioned. If we look over the features of Van Crombrugghe's
educational vision listed above, and their fuller ramifications elucidated in
the main text it is evident that they can, taken separately, be found in a
number of other places. We have already seen how one or other, or a combination
of some, are indicated by Quintilian, Jouvancy, the Ratio Studiorum, Fénélon, Rollin, Don Bosco, Locke, and Erasmus to
name but a few. Any reader will be able to take one or more of these elements
in isolation and note that they appear elsewhere. In that context, it cannot be
claimed that Van Crombrugghe was a unique educator, nor that he
formulated a radically unique system. This is not a criticism: it could equally
be levelled at the whole gamut of founders of education orientated religious
orders right back to Ignatius Loyola. The genius of Loyola and the
Jesuits was in the codification of the best of
existing practices; the same could be said of Van Crombrugghe. There is a
difference: for the Jesuits the burden of codification and direction was not
shouldered by one man; for the Josephites it was.
The distinctiveness of Van
Crombrugghe, and the place that we have to look if we are to define a
distinctiveness in Josephite education, comes from the way in which he weaved these
elements into an elaborated system. Many present-day teaching orders share,
with varying degrees of explicitness, the same Jesuit roots. Many of them share
the same broad circumstances of foundation, and are rooted in the same European
christian-humanist tradition. All of them, however, would claim to have
something special, something not quite definable, which will mark the Josephite
teacher, the Rosminian teacher, the Salesian teacher and the products of their
various schools. This specialness will come principally from the specific
genius of interpretation of the broad tradition by their founders, coupled with
the way in which their followers have lived out the founding vision.
Josephite or constantian?
In the Introduction to this thesis a
distinction was proposed between “Josephite” and “Constantian”, particularly in
the light of the Second Vatican Council’s insistence on a return to the spirit
of Founders. At that point it was stated
that “a Constantian school ..... (is) based on the historical person of Van
Crombrugghe rather than on the lived experience of Josephites since Van Crombrugghe”. In this context it has
been seen that the Jesuits have attempted a focus on Ignatius rather than
“the Jesuit tradition”.
At this stage, however, one could
question whether this is necessarily a good concept for the Josephites. Why?
Although Van Crombrugghe was heavily
Jesuit influenced, albeit at second hand, the Jesuit educational tradition has
been formalised by the Ratio and is
not directly Ignatian. Furthermore, the Jesuits have the quite separate and Ignatius authored Spiritual Exercises on which to base a
spirituality, and the Ratio on which
to base a pedagogy. In that sense their spirituality can be called directly
Ignatian but not their pedagogy. If you like, the foundations of “how to be a
Jesuit religious” and of “how to be a Jesuit teacher” are quite separate.
We have to remember also that the Jesuits
were not explicitly founded as a teaching order. With Van Crombrugghe the
situation is rather different; he founded specific teaching orders and the two
elements of teacher and religious are strongly intertwined and interdependent.
Where spirituality and pedagogy in a teaching congregation are based on
different sources it is possible for one - pedagogy - to change and be adapted
to the exigencies of time and place whilst remaining entirely faithful to the
founding spirituality. Taken to its logical conclusion this argument means that
the move out of the traditional sphere of “total immersion” in the running of
boarding colleges will entail more than an adaptation to new circumstances but
almost a “re-invention” of the Congregation.
Nevertheless the concept of “Constantian”
is worth retaining and will be used in this chapter as a) it focuses attention
on that which can be specifically attributed to Van Crombrugghe and b) it indicates what can be experienced
by non-Josephites in the concrete situation of St George’s College.
From education of the poor to education
of the bourgeoisie
“It
was in the family at home”, wrote Mgr Van Weddingen in 1866, “that the young
Van Crombrugghe learned to love the three things to which he was to dedicated
his life: God, the poor and the Motherland.”[9]
This opinion appeared in the Revue Catholique of 1865, the year of
Van Crombrugghe's death. In view of how his career developed, one wonders if he
did, in fact, dedicate his life to the poor. That he gave service to the poor
cannot be doubted. The original school at Geraardsbergen, the workshop for the
poor and the institution of the proviseur
des pauvres at Alost, the tweede
kostschool; all these show an undoubted concern for the poor. On the other
hand, it has been seen that a duty to the poor was part of Van
Crombrugghe's social background and the fact that he did give service to them
does not necessarily indicate a fundamental life option. The facts of his life
would actually suggest otherwise.
One wonders, for example, if the circumstances
of the Collège d’Alost had not changed, and if Van Crombrugghe had
been able to spend most of his life there, whether the Josephites would have remained the Brothers of Mary and
Joseph and have remained involved solely in the primary education of the poor?
Van Crombrugghe's need for the company of his own class would have been filled
and, at the same time, the duty of helping the poor would have been satisfied.
The years between 1825 (end of Alost) and
1837 (beginning of Melle) were not idle years. He was among other things a
member of the Gent Diocesan Council, advisor to the Bishop, a director of the
influential Catholic newspaper the Catholique
des Pays-Bas. After 1830 he was director for Catholic Education in Flanders
(and as such was instrumental in returning the Jesuits to the Collège
d’Alost).
We know that the taking over of Melle was
not a sudden move. Discussions had been in hand between Van Crombrugghe and Van
Wymelbeke for some years previously and the Chapters from 1835 onwards had been
geared towards steadily improving the educational standards of the Josephites. At some moment, therefore,
Van Crombrugghe must have made a conscious decision to move the Josephites away
from lower class primary education to bourgeois secondary education. Why?
Part of the reason was undoubtedly
financial. Along with problems of personnel, the reasons for the eventual
demise of the failed foundations were partly financial. Being for the most part
free schools, they, and the Josephites, lived on a financial
knife-edge. A move into bourgeois, and therefore fee-paying, education would
guarantee the financial stability of the congregation.
Part of the reason was to do with the
fabric of Belgian society at the time. Van Crombrugghe would have seen the need
for a new, educated, Catholic elite to be at the forefront of the nation’s
affairs after the hectic merry-go-round of occupation of the previous century.
The obvious people to do this would have been the Jesuits, but they were still too much
in disarray after their period of suppression to be able to undertake the task.
Van Wymelbeke’s decision to leave Melle and to entrust it to Van Crombrugghe
must have seemed a felicitous intervention of fate.
Thirdly there was a human factor within
the Josephites. Having split the sisters in
1830 into the “upper-class” Daughters of Mary and Joseph and the “lower-class” Sisters
of Mary and Joseph, Van Crombrugghe feared that the Josephites, seeing
themselves aligned for ever with the second league, might be destroyed by
jealousy. Whilst the split in the sisters had been possible because of the
element of bourgeois ladies already present, the same possibility was not
present in the Josephites and the only remedy would be to lift the congregation
in toto to a new level.
There is, however, a fourth and possibly
most important factor, although this is proposed on the basis of educated
speculation. Having had one successful opportunity to “re-create” Amiens at
Alost, the chance to do so again at Melle must have seemed an extraordinarily
attractive proposition to Van Crombrugghe. One should not consider this to be
inspired simply by an indulgent nostalgia; rather it was an opportunity a) to
move back into the milieu of his own social class and b) to realise his goal of
creating the “honnête homme et parfait Chrétien”, the “honnête homme” being
a concept heavily laden with bourgeois
overtones and a goal which was not going to be easily realised among the gutter
children of Geraardsbergen. Not only would a move to Melle allow Van
Crombrugghe to work among people of his own class, but it would also allow him
to work for them: it has already been shown that at Van Wymelbeke’s
Melle there was the beginnings of a
commercial side which Van Crombrugghe would expand develop until prevented from
doing so by legislation on access to higher education.
the Van Crombrugghe legacy
·
Starting
with his appointment to the Collège
d’Alost in
1814 and the foundation of the Josephites in 1817, Van Crombrugghe elaborated a
distinctive but not unique system of education based on tried and proven
sources in the Christian-humanist tradition, taking his inspiration
particularly from the Jesuits.
·
This
system is based around the nine traits noted above:
·
-
competition,
·
-
authority based on esteem and tempered with mercy
·
-
religion,
·
- politesse,
·
-
affection,
·
-
esteem,
·
-
gentleness,
·
-
appropriateness,
·
-
transformation.
·
At
the same time he founded two religious orders dedicated to education and, for
the Josephites, forced a rapid evolution
over only twenty years from an order of Brothers working in lower-class primary
education into a clerical congregation active in bourgeois secondary
education..
Contemporary implications
What are the implications of these
conclusions for the contemporary situation of the Josephites and the lay staff, specifically the situation
at St George’s College outlined in the introduction?
As has already been stated, the impetus
for this thesis arose out of a perceived need of the Josephites for a basis for self-definition and definition
of a Josephite “ethos”. Having traditionally defined themselves - if there even
was such a thing as a definition - in terms of the school, and furthermore a
boarding school, the transfer of power in the early 1990’s combined with a decline
in community numbers and the closure of boarding meant that this definition
base was swept away overnight. This definition base was rooted in two factors:
the total integration of community and school, and the absence of a specific
Josephite spirituality which did not revolve around a total saturation in the
school. At the same time the school was to continue to operate within the
undefined Josephite tradition.
This assertion led to a further question:
was this Josephite tradition based on the Founder, or on the lived experience
of his successors? From that question arose the current research in an attempt
to discover what could be traced back to Van Crombrugghe and could be, in a
sense, detached from Josephite mythology. The elements listed above are a distillation
of that research.
How, then, does one apply these elements
to the contemporary situation? How is St George’s College, and its Josephite
community, to maintain a Constantian tradition?[10]
1. Constantian education is
unashamedly Roman Catholic. This is more specific than being purely
Christian. Van Crombrugghe is quite clear that education is inseparable from
religion. It is part of the function of a Roman Catholic school to provide
catechesis and evangelisation and this must necessarily be Roman Catholic in
orientation. As the Prefect for the Congregation for Catholic Education said in
1983 when he addressed the Synod of Bishops in Rome:
"The
basic problem of the Catholic school is that of being what it ought to be.
Hence, not only a school of high quality, but a Catholic school in the full
meaning of the term."
In claiming to be Catholic, the school
must commit itself fully to pursuing the meanings and truths specific to the
Catholic faith. Without this, the Catholic school has no reason for existing
since the Catholic school is always internal to the Church and must proclaim
and live the Catholic faith.[11]
In 1996 the bishops of England and Wales set out the key areas of the
distinctive nature of Catholic education:
·
the
search for excellence as an integral part of the spiritual quest;
·
the
uniqueness of the individual, made in God's image;
·
the
education of the whole person, since human and divine are inseparable;
·
the
education of all, with particular care for the disadvantaged;
·
moral
principles, put into practice in the Christian community.[12]
It is a tribute to Van Crombrugghe that
this 1997 list could quite easily have been taken from his own writings.
From what has been written above it
follows that St George’s College must fully maintain its identity as a Roman
Catholic school.
In a Constantian school academic
excellence is valued, but not as an end in itself. Rather it is but one part of a striving
towards overall human excellence, a lifting of self beyond self. This does not
prevent a Constantian school striving for recognition as an academic school,
but only in the context clearly stated above. In any hierarchy of aspirations,
academic excellence does not come first, but is at the service of the
development of the “perfect Christian and the honest man”. As is laid down by
the Catholic Education Service:
“The
pursuit of excellence is intrinsically good when it is seen as an integral part
of the spiritual quest and not simply as a matter of competitive league
tables.”[13]
A Constantian school is distinguished by
the excellence of its pastoral care and its moral standards. It is quite clear that for
Van Crombrugghe the moral values of the school, both explicitly taught and
implicitly demonstrated by example, and the pastoral ambience of the school were
of prime importance. The young people passing through the school are at a
vulnerable stage of their lives and it is demanded that teachers “sympathise
with their weakness”[14]
through the concept of discipline tempered with mercy which Van Crombrugghe elaborates
in the Easter 1815 speech.
The Constantian school is staffed by
teachers who with the active encouragement of the Josephite community accept
and promote the Constantian ethos. We have seen that
for Van Crombrugghe the task of education is undertaken in an intrinsically
religious framework and more specifically in a framework of religious life. For
him the Josephite as religious and the Josephite as teacher could not be
separated. Nevertheless from the early days, and particularly after the move into
Melle, the Josephites have worked in collaboration with lay
teachers. This collaboration has developed from that early period where there
were only a very small number of lay teachers, brought in to teach the optional
subjects such as music and drawing, to more recent years where all Josephite
schools are staffed by an overwhelming majority of lay teachers and active
Josephite participation has been reduced to a minimum. It is clear that from an
early stage lay teachers were to be seen as a part of the unity of the
Josephite school:
“Keep
yourself in perfect harmony with those of your colleagues who share your
responsibilities, so that the same spirit may reign in the manner of leading
the pupils, and so that in everything there may be that unity without which
nothing is solid.”[15]
Those resolutions made in Chapter
concerning education were made known to the lay staff[16]
and by 1855 there existed a “Projet de
Règlement des Professeurs Laïcs pour gouverne de nos Supérieurs” a document
of only sixteen paragraphs, which makes it clear that the same qualities were
expected from the lay teachers as were expected in the religious, particularly
in the realms of christian witness:
“Every
teacher attached to this establishment must above all fulfil his duties as a
good christian, and to conform to everything that the best catholic families
are entitled to demand from those who are appointed to educate their children.”[17]
and of submission to the general
“method”.
“They
will conform precisely to the methods of teaching, the authors to use and the
instructions of the Headmaster.”[18]
A rather longer document, undated,
entitled the “Guidon des Professeurs
Laïcs”, appears in the same file in the Archives. It is a lengthy
elaboration of the Projet and contains
quotes from the Règlement des Professeurs
and the Guide Pédagogique,
underlining just how fully the lay teachers are to be involved in the
maintenance of the Constantian ethos of the school.
In our own day, St George’s College is
committed to seeking to “promote our Josephite (Constantian)[19]
tradition”[20]. It is
committed to doing so with a staff which is 99% non-Josephite and more than 50%
non-Catholic, and a pupil body which is also approximately 50% non-Catholic.
This makes it even more essential a) that the tradition be defined, since it
can no longer be transmitted by a process of “osmosis”, b) that those
responsible for the appointment and induction of staff be aware of and
committed to the tradition, and c) that the Josephite community, whether still
actively involved in teaching or not, be aware of their own responsibility in
the matter. In a worst case scenario there could come a point where, however
“good” a school St George’s College might be, even as a Catholic school, it
could grow so far away from being a Josephite / Constantian school that the
community might feel obliged to withdraw its endorsement of the product. Thus,
in a very real sense it is even more important for the community to be aware of
the definable elements of the tradition now that they are promoting it rather
than living it in the traditional way.
definitions
So, then, how is all this to be
distilled? As both a conclusion and as a basis for debate the following
statement is proposed:
“St George's College cannot under its present
constitution lay a valid claim to a Josephite
ethos in the traditional sense, but could and should aspire to a Constantian ethos which is rooted in the
distinctive, but not unique, characteristics synthesised into a coherent whole
by Constant Van Crombrugghe, and which takes its impetus from the ongoing
mission of the Roman Catholic Church and the historical witness of the
Josephite Congregation.”
The distinctive features of a school with
a Constantian ethos are that it is:
·
a
truly Roman Catholic institution which promotes