The dramatic success of Jesuit schools since the Society admitted the first lay, or extern, students to its college in Gandia, Spain, in 1546 is unparalleled in the history of education. By the time Ignatius of Loyola died in 1556, the Society had thirty-one schools, with more than ten times that number, 373, at the death of the fifth Father General, Claudio Aquaviva, in 1615. During Aquaviva's tenure, in response to this educational explosion, a comprehensive set of school regulations, the Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis lesu, was drafted, debated, and finally promulgated in 1599 after fifteen years of preparation. The letter of transmission included Aquaviva's injunction that "this plan of studies . . . ought to be observed in the future by all of ours, setting aside all other plans."1 But how faithfully was it followed? Was the Ratio the timeless ped? agogical guide its proponents asserted, "the best means for giving the mind the much desired liberal training and general culture"? Or was its result, as the Polish intellectual Tadeusz Czacki said in 1804 of the Jesuit schools in Belorussia, that "the citizens they have educated there are stupider and more immoral than those from our provinces"? How true was Charles Eliot of Harvard's claim in 1899 that "the curriculum of the Jesuit colleges ... has remained almost unchanged for four hundred years, disregarding some trifling concessions made to natural science"? A look at two Jesuit schools that flourished in early-nineteenth-century Russia reveals notable deviations from the Ratio, particularly in the curriculum, but also remarkable continuity in methodology and spirit. St. Petersburg's Pauline College (1801) and Noble Pension (1803) took root in an envi? ronment far removed from the sixteenth-century Western European set? ting of the Ratio, and although Tsar Alexander I summarily closed the schools and expelled the Jesuits from the capital in December 1815, his action was the culmination of a much broader political, cultural, and religious