Family Policy: Aristotelian Ideas and the Role of Women in Jesuit Thought of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

Abstract

The article examines how Jesuit Aristotelianism in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania linked household governance to civic order, focusing on Aaron Alexander Olizarovius’s work De politica hominum societate (1651) and a Jesuit funeral oration Classicum publici doloris (1695) written on the occasion of the funeral of Catherine Sobieska-Radziwill. Olizarovius adapts Aristotle’s practical philosophy to argue that the family is a ‘small state’ and the moral foundation of the polity: while he distinguishes royal from civil authority, he frames marriage as a civilis (constitutional) partnership in which the wife freely consents and serves as the husband’s partner (socia), advising him in the matters of conscience and the household. In this scheme, domestic happiness aggregates into public happiness, so wives’ virtues – prudence, justice, piety, fortitude, beneficence – carry political weight by stabilising the social fabric. The Jesuit oration for Catherine dramatize this model: they elevate her domestic virtues into civic exemplarity, liken her to renowned women from classical and Christian tradition, and recast her as a dynastic and public figure (‘the Radziwill Eagle’, ‘the heart of the people’). Read together, the treatise and the panegyric show ideas circulating across scholastic philosophy and baroque rhetoric: household discipline becomes a template for public order, and the noble woman emerges as a civis domestica – a domestic citizen whose moral authority undergirds the state. The result is a gendered vision of citizenship that preserves patriarchal hierarchy yet demands mutual accountability and, through the household, grants women a constitutive, politically meaningful role.