Alcuin’s method was not without originality, but it is a great mistake to say that it resembles the method of Socrates. Alcuin doubtless proceeds by interrogation; but here it is the pupil who interrogates, and the teacher who responds.
“What is speech? asks Pepin, the eldest son of Charlemagne. It is the interpreter of the soul, replies Alcuin. What is life? It is an enjoyment for some, but for the wretched it is a sorrow, a waiting for death. What is sleep? The image of death. What is writing? It is the guardian of history. What is the body? The tenement of the soul. What is day? A summons to labor.”[65]
All this is either commonplace or artificial. The sententious replies of Alcuin may be fine maxims, fit for embellishing the memory; but in this procedure of the mere scholar, affected by the over-refinements of his time, there is nothing which can call into activity the intelligence of the pupil.
Nevertheless the name of Alcuin marks an era in the history of education. His was the first attempt to form an alliance between classical literature and Christian inspiration,—to create a “Christian Athens,” according to the emphatic phrase of Alcuin himself.
81. The Successors of Charlemagne.—It had been the ambition of Charlemagne to reign over a civilized society, rather than over a barbarous people. Convinced that the only basis of political unity is a unity of ideas and of morals, he thought to find the basis of that moral unity in religion, and religion itself he purposed to establish upon a more widely diffused system of instruction. But these ideas were too advanced for the time, and their execution too difficult for the circumstances then existing. A new decadence followed the era of Charlemagne. The clergy did not respond to the hopes which the great emperor had placed on them. As far back as 817, the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle decided that henceforth no more day-pupils should be received into the conventual schools, for the reason that too large a number of pupils would make impossible the maintenance of the monastic discipline. No one of Charlemagne’s successors seems to have taken up the thought of the great emperor; no one of them was preoccupied with the problems of education. It is upon despotic authority, and not upon the intellectual progress of their subjects, that those unintelligent rulers wished to found their power. Under Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald there were constructed more castles than schools.
The kings of France were far from imitating the Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred the Great (849-901), to whom tradition ascribes these two sayings: “The English ought always to be free, as free as their own thoughts”; “Free-born sons should know how to read and write.”
82. Scholasticism.—It was not till the twelfth century that the human mind was awakened. That was the age of Scholasticism, the essential character of which was the study of reasoning, and the practice of dialectics, or syllogistic reasoning. The syllogism, which reaches necessary conclusions from given premises, was the natural instrument of an age of faith, when men wished simply to demonstrate immutable dogmas, without ever making an innovation on established beliefs. It has often been observed that the art of reasoning is the science of a people still in the early stage of its progress; we might almost say of a barbarous people. A subtile dialectic is in perfect keeping with manners still rude, and with a limited state of knowledge. It is only an intellectual machine. It was not then a question of original thinking. All that was necessary was simply to reason upon conceptions already acquired, and the sacred depository of these was kept in charge by Theology. Consequently, there was no independent science. Philosophy, according to the language of the times, was but the humble servant of Theology. The dialectics of the doctors of the Middle Age was but a subtile commentary on the sacred books and on the doctrines of Aristotle.[66] It seems, says Locke, to see the inertness of the Middle Age, that God was pleased to make of man a two-footed animal, while leaving to Aristotle the task of making him a thinking being. From his point of view, an able educator of the seventeenth century, the Abbé Fleury, pronounces this severe judgment on the scholastic method:—