The History of Education / Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western Civilization

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

This personal instruction became common everywhere in the early Church, and the training was known as catechumenal, that is, rudimentary, instruction. Two sets of catechumenal lectures have survived, which give an idea as to the nature of the instruction. They cover the essentials of church practice and the religious life (RS. 39, 40). It was dropped entirely in the conversion of the barbarian tribes. This instruction, and the preaching of the elders (presbyters, who later evolved into priests), constituted the formal schooling of the early converts to Christianity in Italy and the East. Such instruction was never known in England, and but little in Gaul.

The life in the Church made a moral and emotional, rather than an intellectual appeal. In fact the early Christians felt but little need for the type of intellectual education provided by the Roman schools, and the character of the educated society about them, as they saw it, did not make them wish for the so-called pagan learning. Even if the parents of converts wished to provide additional educational advantages for their children, what could they do? A modern author states well the predicament of such Christian parents, when he says:

All the schools were pagan. Not only were all the ceremonies of the official faith—and more especially the festivals of Minerva, who was the patroness of masters and pupils—celebrated at regular intervals in the schools, but the children were taught reading out of books saturated with the old mythology. There the Christian child made his first acquaintance with the deities of Olympus. He ran the danger of imbibing ideas entirely contrary to those which he had received at home. The fables he had learned to detest in his own home were explained, elucidated, and held up to his admiration every day by his masters. Was it right to put him thus into two schools of thought? What could be done that he might be educated, like every one else, and yet not run the risk of losing his faith? [16]

CATECHETICAL SCHOOLS. After Christianity had begun to make converts among the more serious-minded and better-educated citizens of the Roman Empire, the need for more than rudimentary instruction in the principles of the church life began to be felt. Especially was this the case in the places where Christian workers came in contact with the best scholars of the Hellenic learning, and particularly at Alexandria, Athens, and the cities of Asia Minor. The speculative Greek would not be satisfied with the simple, unorganized faith of the early Christians. He wanted to understand it as a system of thought, and asked many questions that were hard to answer. To meet the critical inquiry of learned Greeks, it became desirable that the clergy of the Church, in the East at least, should be equipped with a training similar to that of their critics. As a result there was finally evolved, first at Alexandria, and later at other places in the Empire, training schools for the leaders of the Church.

These came to be known as catechetical schools, from their oral questioning method of instruction, and this term was later applied to elementary religious instruction (whence catechism) throughout western Europe. Pantaenus, a converted Greek Stoic, who became head of the catechumenal instruction at Alexandria, in 179 A.D., brought to the training of future Christian leaders the strength of Greek learning and Greek philosophic thought. He and his successors, Clement and Origen, developed here an important school of Christian theology where Greek learning was used to interpret the Scriptures and train leaders for the service of the Church. Similar schools were opened at Antioch, Edessa, Nisibis, and Caesarea (See Map, p. 89), and these developed into a rudimentary form of theological schools for the education of the eastern Christian clergy. In these schools Christian faith and doctrine were formulated into a sort of system, the whole being tinctured through and through with Greek philosophic thought. Out of these schools came some of the great Fathers of the early Church; men who strove to uphold the pagan learning and reconcile Christianity and Greek philosophic thinking. [17]

REJECTION OF PAGAN LEARNING IN THE WEST. In the West, where the leaders of the Church came from the less philosophic and more practical Roman stock, and where the contact with a decadent society wakened a greater reaction, the tendency was to reject the Hellenic learning, and to depend more upon emotional faith and the enforcement of a moral life. By the close of the third century the hostility to the pagan schools and to the Hellenic learning had here become pronounced (R. 41). Even the Fathers of the Latin Church, the greatest of whom had been teachers of oratory or rhetoric in Roman schools before their conversion, [18] gradually came to reject the pagan learning as undesirable for Christians and in a large degree as a robbery from God. Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, hopes that God may forgive him for having enjoyed Vergil. Jerome's dream [19] was known and quoted throughout the Middle Ages. Tertullian, in his Prescription against Heresies, exclaims:

What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there
between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and
Christians?… Away with all attempts to produce a mottled
Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition.

Gregory the Great, Pope of the Church from 590 to 604, and who had been well educated as a youth in the surviving Roman-type schools, turned bitterly against the whole of pagan learning. "I am strongly of the opinion," he says, "that it is an indignity that the words of the oracle of Heaven should be restrained by the rules of Donatus" (grammar). In a letter to the Bishop of Vienne he berates him for giving instruction in grammar, concluding with—"the praise of Christ cannot lie in one mouth with the praise of Jupiter. Consider yourself what a crime it is for bishops to recite what would be improper for religiously-minded laymen."

As a result Hellenic learning declined rapidly in importance in the West as the Church attained supremacy, and finally, in 401, the Council of Carthage, largely at the instigation of Saint Augustine, forbade the clergy to read any pagan author. In time Greek learning largely died out in the West, and was for a time almost entirely lost. Even the Greek language was forgotten, and was not known again in the West for nearly a thousand years. [20]

THE CHURCH PERFECTS A STRONG ORGANIZATION. As was previously stated (p. 92), but little need was felt during the first two centuries for a system of belief or church government. As the expected return of Christ did not take place, and as the need for a formulation of belief and a system of government began to be felt, the next step was the development of these features. The system of belief and the ceremonials of worship finally evolved are more the products of Greek thought and practices of the East, while the form of organization and government is derived more from Roman sources. In the second century the Old Testament was translated into Greek at Alexandria, and the "Apostles' Creed" was formulated. During the third century the writings deemed sacred were organized into the New Testament, also in Greek. In 325 the first General Council of the Church was held at Nicaea, in Asia Minor. It formulated the Nicene Creed (R. 42), and twenty canons or laws for the government of the Church. A second General Council, held at Constantinople in 381, revised the Nicene Creed and adopted additional canons.