Diego José Abad

Diego José Abad (born June 1, 1727 in La Lagunita near Jiquilpan de Juárez , Michoacán , Mexico ; † September 30, 1779 in Bologna , Italy ) was a Jesuit , writer, educator and humanist in colonial Mexico - which was then part of New Spain - and later in Italy.

Life

Diego José Abad was first trained by private tutors and then studied literature and philosophy at the Jesuit Academy of San Ildefonso in Mexico City with excellent success . He entered the Jesuit Order on July 24, 1741 and was ordained in Mexico City on October 3, 1751. He worked as a teacher of rhetoric, philosophy, theology, canon law and civil law at Jesuit schools in Mexico City, Zacatecas and Querétaro and enjoyed a good reputation among his students and his fellow teachers. In his courses he also introduced new teaching methods and, in particular, designed his rhetoric lessons with a humanistic approach. Due to the intense commitment to his work, his health was affected by the age of 40. Dissatisfied with the inadequate treatment methods used by the doctors, Abad studied medicine himself and the knowledge he gained in the process may have extended his life by a few years.

When the Jesuits in 1767 by a decree of the Spanish King Charles III. were expelled from New Spain, Abad was currently rector of the San Francisco Xavier Jesuit School in Querétaro. He emigrated to Italy, first living in Ferrara and later in Bologna, where he died in 1779.

Works

In Mexico, and especially in Italy, Abad devoted himself to writing, using Latin, Spanish and Italian. He wrote poems on various topics. His most important work is the didactic poem De deo, deoque homine heroica , which he began to write while working in Querétaro and which he completed in Italy. It is written in Latin hexameters and is divided into two parts: a theological treatise and a life story of Jesus of Nazareth . It was edited several times under different titles, first by the oratorian J.-B. Gamarra y Dávalos as Musa Americana, seu de Deo carmina in 29 songs without giving the name of the author (Cádiz 1769). Then Abad himself published the work as De deo homine heroica under the pseudonym Jacobi Josephi Labbe Selenopolitani (Venice 1773; Ferrara 1775). Finally, the relevant edition was published as De deo, deoque homine heroica in 43 songs posthumously under the correct name and with a biographical sketch of the author by Manuel Fabri (Cesena, 1780). The poem found many admirers and was written by Fr.-X. Lozano translated into Spanish verse (Barcelona 1788). In 1974, Benjamín Fernández Valenzuela obtained a new translation of the work under the title Poema heroico .

In 1750, on the occasion of the consecration of a Jesuit church in Zacatecas, Abad wrote the poem Rasgo épico descriptivo de la fábrica y grandezas del templo de la Compañía de Jesús en Zacatecas in eight-line stanzas in the manner of the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora . He also partially translated Virgil's Aeneid into Castilian, as did his eighth Eclogue .

In addition to poetry, Abad wrote treatises on theology, philosophy, mathematics and geography. In 1775 he published a four-volume Cursus philosophicus ( Philosophical Course ). He also wrote a dissertatio ludicro-seria num possit aliquis extra Italiam natus bene latine scribere (Padua 1778) under his pseudonym Jacobi Josephi Labbe Selenopolitani as a witty and irrefutable answer to a joking remark by G.-B. Roberti that only Italians would have a good command of the Latin language.

More works by Abad:

• Compendio de álgebra
• Tratado del conocimiento de Dios (in Italian)
• Geografía hidrográfica (about major rivers in the world)
• De Livino Meyer, el alma y su inclusion in the pequeñez del cuerpo
• El embrollado problema de las matemáticas resuelto
• Disertación cómico seria acerca de la cultura latina de los extranjeros
• Himnos del oficio de San Felipe de Jesús

literature

• NF Martin: Abad y Sánchez, Diego José . In: New Catholic Encyclopedia , Vol. 1. pp. 3f.
• E.-M. Rivière: Abad (Diego José) . In: Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques , Vol. 1, 1913, Col. 8.