Benito Jeronimo Feijoo

Benito Jerónimo Feijoo y Montenegro (Pazo de Casdemiro, Pereiro de Aguiar, Orense province, October 8, 1676-Oviedo, September 26, 1764) was a Benedictine religious, essayist and polygraph Spanish. Along with the Valencian Gregorio Mayans, he constitutes the most outstanding figure of the first Spanish Enlightenment. He is the author of the speech & # 34; Defense of women & # 34; (1726) considered the first treatise on Spanish feminism.

Biography

Benito statue Jerónimo Feijoo in Orense.

He was born into a noble family of the very ancient lineage of Feijoo, in the Casdemiro pazo, parish of Santa María de Melias, on the banks of the Miño river. His parents were Mr. Antonio Feijoo Montenegro y Sanjurjo and Mrs. María de Puga Sandoval Novoa y Feijoo. He completed his primary studies at the Royal College of San Esteban de Ribas de Sil, in the municipality of Nogueira de Ramuín. In 1688, at the age of twelve, he entered the Benedictine Order in the monastery of San Julián de Samos, when Fray Anselmo de la Peña was its abbot, who would later be general of his congregation in Spain and Archbishop of Otranto (Kingdom of Naples)..

Becoming a Benedictine monk meant that he took a vow of poverty and, therefore, renounced his rights as eldership of his house. Since then he devoted himself to study, becoming named "general teacher"; in his order, and he gave classes in different places in Galicia, León and Salamanca, in whose University he also studied. He won a chair of Theology at the University of Oviedo by competitive examination and lived there from 1709 until the end of his days, dedicated to the study, teaching, composition and defense of his works (which raised a great deal of dust in terms of detractors and followers since the first volume of his Teatro Crítico came out in 1726) and to maintain a large correspondence, either with other scholars and scientists of his own order, such as Fray Martín Sarmiento, or with scholars and writers from all over the world. Spain, Europe and America. His main works, the Universal Critical Theater and the Erudite and Curious Letters, were probably the most printed and widely read works in Spain in the XVIII, so he was able to dismiss all arguments of authority and proudly proclaim:

I, a free citizen of the Republic of the Letters, neither slave of Aristotle nor ally of his enemies, will always listen with preference to every private authority what dictates my experience and reason.

In the last years of his life he was attacked by deafness, and extreme weakness in his legs forced him to bring him to the choir services in a wheelchair; He died at his school in San Vicente de Oviedo on September 26, 1764, at eighty-seven years, eleven months and eighteen days, and is buried in the church of Santa María de la Corte (Oviedo).

The Economic Society of Seville included him among its full members; Fernando VI gave him the title of royal adviser as a pledge of his esteem and Carlos III gave him for the same reason a copy of The antiquities of Herculaneum . Pope Benedict XIV and Cardinal Quirini praised him highly and he was respected and honored by many writers and scholars.

Feijoo is considered the introducer of the essay genre in Spanish literature, as well as one of the most famous members (along with Mayans) of what is considered the First Spanish Illustration (from 1737 until shortly after the death of Fernando VI), after a first stage of pre-enlightenment represented by the novatores: a group made up mainly of doctors and whose works were reprinted without pause throughout the entire eighteenth century.

Amalio Rodríguez Telenti revealed an unknown facet of Father Feijóo in the doctoral thesis that he dedicated to him and read at the University of Salamanca: Medical aspects in the work of Master Fray B. Jerónimo Feijoo.

Writings

Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, main biographer of Feijoo and promoter of the publication of his Complete works in several volumes to his death in 1765.

It was not until 1725 that Feijoo began to publish his works, almost all of them collections of polemical pamphlets that he called discursos (from discurrir, that is, to speak freely), true essays if the freedom of his thought had been absolute. His work in this genre is integrated, on the one hand, by the eight volumes (118 speeches), plus an additional one (supplement) of his Universal Critical Theater, published between 1726 and 1740 (the title theater must be understood with the meaning, today forgotten, of "panorama" or general vision of the whole), and, on the other, by the five of the Erudite and Curious Letters (166 essays, shorter), published between 1742 and 1760. To these works must also be added an extra volume of Additions that was published in 1783 and his copious private correspondence, which remains unpublished to this day. The topics on which these dissertations deal are very diverse, but they are all presided over by the vigorous patriotic desire to put an end to all superstition and his determination to disseminate all kinds of scientific news to eradicate what he called "common errors", which he did with all hardness and determination, like Christian Thomasius in Germany, or Thomas Browne in England:

Error, as I take it here, means nothing but an opinion that I have for false, dispensing with whether or not I judge it. Not under the name of common mistakes, I want to mean that those who impugn are transcendent to all men; put me down to give them that name that are admitted to the common Vulgo or have among the Literates more than ordinary entourage. This should be understood with the reservation of never introducing me to judge on those issues that arise between several schools [...] To write in the native language there is no need for more reason than to have any to do the opposite. I do not deny that there are truths that must be hidden from the vulgo, whose weakness is more dangerous than in the news than in ignorance; but those in Latin must not go out to the public, because there are many who understand this language and easily go from these to those who know nothing more than Spanish. [...] Although my attempt is only to propose the truth, it is possible that in some matters I lack penetration to know it and in the most force to persuade it. What I can assure you is that nothing I write is not as I feel. Propose and prove unique opinions only by holding teaspoon wits for puerile pruritus and unworthy falsehood of every good man. In a conversation can be tolerated by hobby; in a writing it is to deceive the public. The greatness of discourse is to penetrate and persuade truths; the lowest skill of ingenuity is to entangle others with sophistry.

Feijoo, «Prologist» Universal critical theatre, vol. I

Portrait of Feijoo (ca. 1780-90) by Mariano Salvador Maella. Museum of Fine Arts of Asturias.

He called himself a "free citizen of the republic of letters", although he submitted all his judgments to Catholic orthodoxy, and he possessed an incurable curiosity, as well as a very flat and attractive style, free of the games of ingenuity and post-baroque obscurities, which he abhorred, although Gallicisms frequently creep in. He kept abreast of all the European developments in the experimental and human sciences and reported them in his essays, but rarely set out to theorize concrete reforms in line with his implicit progressivism. Philosophically, he favored the empiricism of Francis Bacon and his Novum Organum (1620), his bedside book, and flirted with eclecticism and skepticism, sometimes calling himself "eclectic& #3. 4; or "mitigated skeptic". He applies Bacon's classic precautions against eidola or deceptions that hinder the correct interpretation of experience or experiment: common modes of thought (Idola tribes), modes of individual thought (Idola specus); proper modes derived from an excessive dependence on language (Idola fori) or an excessive dependence on tradition (Idola teatri). But, although his conceptual equipment is not complicated, it becomes complex when applied pedagogically, because experience requires, and therefore develops, the sagacity to hit the right choice and pose the experiment, the perspicacity to capture all the circumstances that The perseverance to perform it the number of times necessary to obtain valid results, the precaution to unmask any random factor, reasoning to compare some experiments with others and diligence not to superficially conclude a misleading statement can influence it. Among the authors he most cites, outside of Francis Bacon, are Isaac Newton, Pierre Gassendi, Emmanuel Maignan, René Descartes, Nicolás Malebranche, Robert Boyle, John Locke, the Mémoires de Trévoux and Pierre's dictionaries. Bayle and Louis Moreri.

In terms of aesthetics, he was singularly modern (see, for example, his article "El idiot") and advances positions that Romanticism will defend, but he mercilessly criticizes superstitions that contradict reason, empirical experience and rigorous and documented observation.

On issues related to the Indies, which he addresses in the Critical Theater on some occasions, he refuted the idea that indigenous people lived less than the inhabitants of other continents. On another occasion he wanted to deny that the intelligence of the natives developed early and also disappeared very soon.

Among the variety of topics that Feijoo addresses is also the role that women play in society, with a notable milestone in the history of feminism, the speech "Defense of Women" published in volume I of the Critical Theater, considered the first Spanish feminist treatise.

His speeches aroused a veritable storm of rejections, protests and challenges, especially among the Thomist and scholastic friars. The most important were those of Ignacio de Armesto Ossorio, author of a two-volume Teatro anticritico (1735), and Fray Francisco de Soto Marne, who published two volumes of Reflexiones crítico- apologetics in 1748; Salvador José Mañer, who published a Critical Antitheatre (1729), Narciso Bonamich, in his Duelos médicos contra la teatro crítico del reverendísimo padre Fray Benito Feijoo... in 1741; Diego de Torres Villarroel, and many others. Doctor Martín Martínez and the parents Isla and Martín Sarmiento defended him, as well as King Fernando VI himself, who, by a royal decree of 1750, forbade any attack on him.

Father Feijoo also published other minor works: Apology for medical skepticism (1725), Satisfaction of the Scrupulous (1727), Response to Physiological-Medical Discourse (1727), Apologetic Illustration (1729), Supplement of the Critical Theater (1740) and Just rejection of iniquitous accusations ; As a curious note, it is possible to say that in the fourth volume of his Erudite and Curious Letters, the twentieth verse on Augustin Calmet's treatise on vampires.

Advocacy for women

The figure of Feijoo is key in the history of women's rights in Spain in the 18th century. The speech XVI "Defense of women" Published in the first volume of the Teatro Crítico Universal in 1726, it is considered the first Spanish feminist treatise. She mixes rationalist criteria, typical of the first enlightened generation to which she belongs with other traditional criteria based on the argument of authority using numerous scholarly references. She questions the common opinion and misogyny of the time about the inferiority of women, defends intellectual equality between men and women, the moral dignity of women and their right to access scientific knowledge and high culture.

The text begins with these words:

I'm serious. It is no longer just an ignorant vulgo with whom I enter into the contest: To defend all women, it comes to be the same as to offend all men: for it is rare that you should not be interested in the precedence of your sex with dismissing the other. As common opinion has spread in vilipendium of women who barely admit good in them.
In the morals they fill them with defects, and in the physicists of imperfections. But, where more force does it is in the limitation of understandings. For this reason, after defending them with some brevity on these chapters, I will spend more time on their aptitude for all kinds of sciences and sublime knowledge.

Feijoo's disciples

Fr. BENITO GERÓNIMO FEIJOO.
Bishop Benedictine removed from the vulgar worries and mistakes. Natural Casdemiro. He died in Oviedo in 1764. José Vázquez engraving by drawing of José Maea Portraits of Spanish Ilustres1791.

Followed in the footsteps of Feijoo, authors such as Francisco Santos, who published Beautiful fashion taste in Literature, or the right idea of the illustrious Feijoo, continued in a universal instruction of several curious, select, critical and erudite Letters in all kinds of subjects, a very useful work to form the spirit of youth and free them from worries (Barcelona, 1753); less protected than Feijoo's, his work was denounced to the Inquisition. Juan Martínez Salafranca, one of the editors of the Diario de los Literatos, published Erudite Memoirs for the Criticism of Arts and Sciences (1736). The Jesuit Antonio Codorniú published Dolencias de la crítica (1760) and fray Íñigo Gómez de Barreda was responsible for the four volumes that occupy The ghosts of Madrid and court scammers, a work where they give the public the errors and fallacies of humane treatment as a precaution for the unwary. Excited by some speeches of the luster of our Spain and Benedictine religion, the most illustrious and most reverend Feijoo, about some common errors. The author of the Disappointment, and dedicated to the Truth (1761-1763). As late as 1802 Antonio Marqués y Espejo still published a Feijonian Dictionary.

Works

In his Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (1882) Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo counted at least fifteen editions of Feijoo's Complete Works. The classic edition is the one paid for by the enlightened minister Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes in 14 volumes, with a "Biographical News" composed by Campomanes himself, according to Sempere and Guarinos, in Madrid, 1765 ff. It consists of eight volumes of Critical Theater, five of Eruditic Letters and one of Apologetic Illustrations. Today the full text is accessible on the Internet through the Philosophy project in Spanish.

• Universal critical theatre (118/117 speeches published in nine volumes between 1726 and 1740, the nono, supplement to the previous ones, was redistributed, since 1765, in the corresponding places of the other eight)
• Erudite and curious letters (163 letters published in five volumes between 1742 and 1760)
• Apology of medical skepticism1725.
• Satisfaction to the Scrupulous1727.
• Response to physiological-medical discourse1727.
• Apologetic illustration1729.
• Supplement to the Critical Theatre1740.
• Justa repels unjust accusations1749.
• Addendum[1783].
• EpistolaryStill not picking up.
• Poetry,