Julian Sanz del Rio

Julián Sanz del Río (Torrearévalo, March 10, 1814-Madrid, October 12, 1869) was a Spanish philosopher, jurist, and educator. Francisco Giner de los Ríos and friend of Fernando de Castro. His pedagogical work was decisive in the evolution of Spanish thought and the overcoming of the teaching system monopolized by the Catholic Church since the XVI .

Biography

Training

Julián, born at the beginning of the XIX century in a Soria village, was the son of Gregoria and Vicente, poor farmers. In 1824, when he became an orphan, he was taken in by his maternal uncle Fermín, a priest, who took charge of his elementary instruction at the San Pelagio Conciliar Seminary in Córdoba, where his uncle was a prebendary. Between 1830 and 1833 he followed Law courses at the Colegio del Sacromonte, within the University of Granada, which he continued in 1834 at the Royal University of Toledo until he obtained a bachelor's degree in Canons, after which he returned to Granada. Back in the Andalusian capital, he completed the sixth and seventh years of Canons at Sacromonte, with which he obtained the degrees of Licentiate and Doctor at that University, where he began his work as a professor of Roman Law.

In 1836 he moved to Madrid, where he would finish his law studies at the Central University in 1840. Two years later he worked as a substitute professor of law and in 1843 he was appointed interim professor of History of Philosophy at the Complutense University. That same year he was sent to Germany by Pedro Gómez de la Serna, professor of Political Law and at that time Minister of the Interior.

The Krausist Mission

Through his friendship with Ruperto Navarro Zamorano, translator of the first edition of Heinrich Ahrens's Filosofía del derecho (1841), he met in Brussels with the latter, an outstanding disciple of Krause's, conversations that were recorded in the notebook entitled Travel Diary to Germany (within the Unpublished Manuscripts of Sanz del Río kept at the Royal Academy of History). In Heidelberg he met with other German thinkers from the Krausist circle such as the jurist Röder, the naturalist Leonhardi, the Catholic Schlosser, the historian Gervinus, the Swiss writer Henri-Frédéric Amiel and especially with Georg Weber (in whose house he came to stay and whose Compendium of Universal History he would translate years later), with whom he maintained an interesting correspondence throughout their lives.

The death in 1844 of Fermín del Río, his uncle and protector, interrupted his stay in Germany. After a period of isolation, he rejoined the Madrid university where he obtained in 1845 the Chair of Expansion of Philosophy. But he soon gave up on her because he did not consider himself sufficiently prepared for her.

Retreat in Illescas

Between 1845 and 1854 he retired to Illescas (a town in Toledo where Sanz del Río would marry Manuela Jiménez years later, in 1856). From there he encouraged some colleagues to create a Literary Society for the study and discussion on Analytical Science, which gave rise to the first "Philosophical Circle". Finally, in 1854 he returned to teaching. As a professor of Philosophy of Law, del Río aroused such admiration among his students that it would lead them to launch an unprecedented intellectual ideological movement, which would culminate in a great reform in education, in addition to other changes related to society and politics. and the creation of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza in 1876 that Professor Sanz del Río died in 1869 did not get to know.

Persecution and expulsion of Sanz del Río

The response of the conservative forces to the work of Europeanization and renewal of Sanz del Río, an upright and religious man, but considered a threat to the teaching monopoly of the Catholic Church and "recalcitrant heretic", It was a long persecution with harsh campaigns (both un-Christian and legally inconsistent) orchestrated by traditionalists and ultramontanes of "neo-Catholicism", a new ultra-conservative and traditionalist faction, fostered by the recent encyclical of Pius IX. harassment and persecution, perhaps renewing the fury of the Inquisition processes, he obtained a disciplinary file against Sanz del Río in 1864 and his expulsion from teaching in 1867, signed by the Minister of Public Works Manuel Orovio Echagüe. Sanz del Río, far away Feeling defeated or intimidated by the conspiracy, he drafted his Letter and Account of Conduct.

Similarly, the expulsion of Sanz del Río from his professorship would lead to a reaction of rejection against the teaching government establishments among his disciples and other prominent krausists, such as Joaquín Costa, Francisco Pi y Margall, Rafael María de Labra, Ángel Fernández de los Ríos, Emilio Castelar, Nicolás Salmerón and Adolfo Camús.

Return and death

On October 19, 1868, with the triumph of the "Gloriosa,", Sanz del Río was reinstated in his chair and proposed as rector of the University of Madrid. He did not accept it, but he did accept the appointment as dean of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Central University, taking office on November 1 and resigning a month later for health reasons. Retired for a year to his home in Illescas, he died in Madrid in the fall of 1869, at fifty-five years of age. Five years later his colleague Fernando de Castro would also die; together they rest in the civil cemetery of Madrid.

"Eppur si muove" ("And yet it moves")

Around 1850, after three centuries of ecclesiastical monopoly in the distribution and exploitation of education and culture in Spain, the unwavering intellectual integrity, the result of the analysis and development of philosophical and scientific curiosity, placed Sanz del Río in a situation similar to the one that confronted the Catholic Church with the Renaissance Galileo Galilei. If the Italian's sin was to say that the sun does not revolve around the Earth, but on the contrary; Sanz del Río's was to awaken the critical spirit of the student away from politics and religion and sharpen "moral sensitivity with respect to the life of thought and all public functions" (to be honest to be free) based on the postulates of Krausist philosophy.

Professor Joaquín Casalduero, an eminent Cervantist, exposes with a brief brushstroke the merits of Sanz del Río and the circumstances in which he was produced. Since Felipe II, by Royal Decree of 1559, prohibited Spaniards from studying abroad, with the exception of the Catholic universities of Bologna, Naples, Rome and Lisbon, the aforementioned three centuries had to pass until the minister Pedro Gómez de la Serna, promoter of the creation of the Faculty of Jurisprudence, gave Julián Sanz del Río a pension to study at the German University of Heidelberg. Thus ended the sad feat of Felipe II — "monstrously criminal" in the opinion of international observers, and simply criminal in the case of those persecuted and executed by the Court of the Holy Office of the Inquisition — of freeing Spain from the Heretical Europe. Without proposing any kind of revenge, based on the intellectual and moral renewal of his university, Sanz del Río took the first step to incorporate his country into the rest of the continent.

The human nature of Sanz del Río was evident when, on his return from Heidelberg, precipitated by the death of his uncle and tutor, and being aware that he was not sufficiently prepared to carry out his teaching work, he resigned from his professorship. Nine years later, in 1854, when he considered that he was already in a position to carry out his educational task, he returned... «Much more valuable than the lively desire for knowledge» that he instilled in his students, was «the intellectual integrity that accompanied him».

Master of Teachers

About sixty years ago, in the 1860s, an admirable group of lords broke into our country, which, among other things of high rank, brought here a philosophy. These gentlemen were the krausists and his unique teacher, teacher of all: Sanz del Río.

Ramiro Ledesma Ramos (1929)

This paragraph and the assessment that Ledesma Ramos makes of Sanz del Río as a teacher of teachers, are reinforced with the list of students of the introducer of Krausism in Spain. In a biographical sketch from 1922, within the study by Santiago Valentí Camp titled Ideologists, theorists and seers, data are given on the projection of Sanz del Río on some heads of thought in Spain in the second half of the from the XIX century. Valentí Camp notes that: «Sanz del Río's students, in his early days, included, among other distinguished personalities, Luis María Pascual, ex-minister of the Moderate Party; Agustín Pascual González (introducer of Forest Science in Spain); Manuel Ruíz de Quevedo, with the other attendees at the philosophical gathering, and Fernando de Castro, already a professor at the Faculty of Letters in Madrid. Later, the politicians Francisco de Paula Canalejas, Emilio Castelar, the educator Juan Fernández Ferraz, and the professors Miguel Morayta Sagrario and Francisco Fernández y González (who later became rector of the University of Madrid) paraded through the Sanz del Río chair, among others.)... In the decade from 1860 to 1870, the disciples of Sanz del Río were Federico de Castro, Mamés Esperabé Lozano, Juan Uña Gómez, Facundo de los Ríos Portilla, Nicolás Salmerón, Teodoro Sainz Rueda, Segismundo Moret, Antonio González Garbín, Alfonso Moreno Espinosa, Francisco Giner de los Ríos —perhaps his main successor—, José María Maranges, Gumersindo de Azcárate, Luis Vidart Schuch, Manuel Sales y Ferré, Tomás Tapia, José de Caso and Manuel María del Valle. Most of them, men who later held high positions in the teaching profession and in politics, attended Sanz del Río's chair for several courses, without having been for the most part official students or having already ceased to be.

Works

Sanz del Río, who —as would also happen later to two of his followers, also teachers, Giner de los Ríos and Cossío— gave preference to oral teaching and was reluctant to publish his own studies, left a work (books, articles, translations) as diverse as it is dispersed. Apart from the Spanish translation of the Krausism manuals and a few books published during his life, most of his legacy can be found, not without difficulty, in the editions brought to the press by some disciples and testamentaries, among them: Análisis del pensamiento rational (1877), Philosophy of death (published by Sales and Ferré in 1877), or his Unpublished Letters (published by Manuel de la Revilla).

In the central body of his production, the following titles should be listed: Lessons for Krause's system of analytical philosophy (1850); System philosophy; Metaphysics. First part, analysis) (1860); The Ideal of Humanity for life (first edition in 1860 and second in 1871); Doctrinal of Logic (1863); Psychology, Logic and Ethics Programs; Lectures on the system of Philosophy (1868); System philosophy; Metaphysics. Second part, synthesis (1874); Analysis of Rational Thought (1877); Philosophy of death (1877). It should be concluded from this overview that many of his unpublished works could see the light of day in the Bulletin of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza .

Rational religiosity

His Speech delivered at the Central University at the solemn inauguration of the 1857-1858 academic year is also interesting, not only as a pedagogical essay, but also because it is considered a beautiful example of Castilian prose. To him belongs the fragment that can be read below (and that is included so that the reader can discern for himself what reasons could exist to demand that Sanz del Río be "burned at the stake" following the slogans of Pius IX, and that the Catholic Church, in this case as in many others, has not yet retracted):

The Man who contemplates in God the beginning and end of his life, imprints to all his conduct the unchanging direction of the good for good, immediately recognizing himself in his own freedom and in the legitimate merit of his actions; supremely, in the law, justice and goodness of God. See this Man Religion as the ultimate end, never as a means for a foreign end; he professes it with work and word and penetrates his spirit, and pours out into doctrines and works and examples of building; he practices it as a sign of alliance, which binds it more closely to Humanity and to all beings, and with them to God in a bond of filial love. With this beautiful harmony between his moral conscience and his religious conscience, he knows in the moral law the manifestation of God as infinite personal will, our finite personal will; as holy and eternal consciousness to our free and limited consciousness. For this reason we find the law enacted in advance to the entry of life, and promulgated with such a sanction, that no human authority can unleash, no historical circumstance excuse or prescribe; that is imposed and superimposed to our conscience with unchanging authority.

Julián Sanz del Río: Speech delivered at the Central University at the solemn inauguration of the academic year of 1857 1858. Madrid.