The attitude of the ‘extreme’ Christians towards pagan literature is not, therefore, entirely inexplicable. But all were not extreme. The better spirits like Augustine, realizing that Christian education inevitably depended largely on the nobles who had come to the Church from the rhetorical schools, went on the principle of ‘spoiling the Egyptians’, of taking from pagan education and literature whatever was good and useful. Jerome protests against the narrow standpoint with considerable emphasis. He criticizes those who neglect style, and flares up at the suggestion that he is afraid of the pagan training of his opponents in controversy.[997] Ignorance, he says, is not holiness, and lack of culture is unfitting in a student of the Apostles. ‘Nec rusticus et tantum simplex frater ideo se sanctum putet si nil noverit, nec peritus et eloquens in lingua aestimet sanctitatem.’[998] He felt the need of rhetoric as a weapon against opponents. A holy ignorance, he argued, is a gain only to itself (he is curiously reluctant either to accept pagan learning entirely or to condemn it utterly), but all it builds up of the Church of Christ is lost if it does not meet its opponents.[999]
So, too, Paulinus of Nola and Prudentius ‘quidquid e paganis operibus novae fidei non adversabatur laudabant et servabant’.[1000] Sedulius, again, refused to draw the rigid line which the extremists drew: he wants to retain the culture of his time, but in a Christianized form. In the dedication of his Carmen Paschale to Macedonius he argues that he writes in verse because ‘there are many who, owing to their training in secular studies, are attracted rather by the delights of verse and the pleasures of poetry’; and that the Church must make use of this artistic tendency in people (horum mores non repudiandos aestimo). They will remember divine truths better if they are pleased with the form in which they are presented, and everybody must be freely won for God along the line of his particular bent (ut quisque suo magis ingenio voluntarius acquiratur Deo). The way in which you approach the faith does not matter so long as you get there and remain there.[1001] It is clear that he stands for liberalism in this matter and does not object to pagan literature if only the object in view is the right one.
Thus the wiser among the Christians opposed the policy of exclusiveness. They foresaw that though bigoted zeal and a natural antipathy might keep out pagan letters for a time, in the end they could not do so; and they realized that it was one of the functions of the Church to hand down what was good in the old culture. So the two Apollinarii (fourth century), Christian teachers of Laodicea, turned the Old Testament into heroic verse and the New Testament into Platonic dialogues;[1002] Juvencus put the gospels into metre, and Nonnus wrote out St. John in hexameters. In order to appeal to the intellectual classes the Christian writers were bound to follow the pagan models, and so a virtue was made of necessity: for amid the distraction of the failing Empire it was the Church alone that could have saved the form and content of the ancient culture by providing scribes for the one and thinkers for the other. It would have been interesting to have Paulinus of Nola’s Panegyric on Theodosius. ‘Quid interfuerit tum inter Christianum oratorem, et oratorem, in scriptis saltem, paganum’ (says Monnard[1003]) ‘diiudicare liceret, nisi temporis invidia Panegyrico Theodosii, quem Paulinus scripserat, quemque cum Ausonii Panegyrico conferre potuissemus nos privavisset.’ We should also have been able to see how far he followed the pagan model, especially in view of his extreme statements to Ausonius[1004] on the subject of pagan literature. Probably he was just as rhetorical as Hilary in his Demosthenic denunciation of Constantine. This supposition is confirmed by the words of Jerome, who is enthusiastic in his praise of the speech. ‘If the author’, he says, ‘surpasses others in the beginning of his oration, towards the end he excels himself. His style is brilliant with Ciceronian purity, yet copious in thought.’[1005] There was a certain amount of hypocrisy in the railing of the Christian writers against the pagan authors.
In spite of her criticism and antipathy, therefore, the Church listened to her leaders in their wiser moods and saved pagan culture. She set her monks to copy the ancient authors.[1006] Augustine ‘brought Plato into the (Christian) schools under his bishop’s robe’, and even Jerome expounded lyric and comic poets to the children at Bethlehem.[1007] Vergil, in particular, was admitted on account of the prophecy supposed to be contained in the fourth Eclogue. Roman law, of which Bossuet said that good sense, the master of human life, reigned throughout it, was regarded by the Church as a reflection of divine justice, and studied more particularly on account of its supposed similarity to the law of Moses.[1008] Through the Church it passed to the barbarians, and so became a heritage of the civilized world.
This ultimate attitude of the Church is the determining factor of Christian education, and it forms the background without which that education cannot be rightly studied. Kaufmann maintains that towards the end of the fifth century the rhetorical school lost its pedagogic significance,[1009] but his statement needs modification. The number of the rhetorical schools in Gaul certainly decreased as Christianity advanced during the fifth century: their spirit, their importance and meaning for education survived and, to a large extent, still survives.
3. The Rise of Christian Schools in Gaul
One of the ways in which Christianity supplemented paganism was the development of elementary schools. It began with the masses, where knowledge was small and opportunities few, but these common people it inspired with a desire to learn and made them potential scholars, who, though backward, were yet not decadent, and who shared their spiritual possessions with one another just as much as their material property.
In touching this kind of man Christian education did what the pagan schools had neglected to do, as we have seen, on account of the rigid class-distinctions. In paying particular attention to elementary education the Church followed her own needs and Christ’s example of sympathy with children. In so far as the Church applied the Pauline teaching of the essential brotherhood and equality of man these hard distinctions tended to disappear, and education became more generally diffused. There was a real democratization of letters, but the masses had so long been neglected that the diffusion was very slow. Caesarius knew prominent business men who could not even read or write.[1010] Their culture consisted largely in folk songs and tales handed down by word of mouth. And besides, the Church was not always true to her principles: the pagan influence, backed as it was by education, proved too strong when it came to organization. The old relation of simple sincerity between clergy and congregation had long passed away, and the fifth century was a time of ecclesiastical dissensions. The bishops were chosen more and more from the aristocracy, and the sort of church ‘cursus honorum’ which had been instituted soon created barriers. In theory the government of the Church was democratic, but Sidonius gives us a picture of the practice at the episcopal elections, which shows how unstable the democracy was. On one occasion there was a great tumult caused by the contending candidates: one boasts of his ancient see, one relies on the attractiveness of his kitchen, a third has a secret arrangement whereby he will allow his followers to pillage the church property if he is elected. Finally, the bishops, Euphranius and Patiens, take the matter into their own hands, nominate an obscure worthy man, a ‘reader’ called John, and proclaim him their colleague.[1011] So, too, at Bourges, Sidonius is asked by the faction-wearied people to nominate them a bishop.[1012] In fact, the general impression, derived from reading the account of bishops and their elections in Sidonius, is that they would have said with Horace, in exactly the same pagan spirit (though they might have resented being connected with a pagan name), ‘Odi profanum vulgus et arceo’. They go in for charities,[1013] but these are often only a form of patronage.
Thus, in attempting to provide for plebeian education, Christianity had to contend with many difficulties. The first appearance of organized Christian education is represented by the catechumen schools which sprang up everywhere after the establishment of Christianity. The most prominent one was that of Alexandria,[1014] dating at least from the second century. The bishop, or, more frequently, a subordinate church official, following the Apostolic example,[1015] would go to some lecture-hall after the sermon and expound the doctrine of the Church to all who cared to come, or would gather his disciples round him in some private house. The school was therefore intended for adults. It had no formal organization nor was it of a permanent character. It was a kind of missionary movement that spread to all parts of the Empire. Among the first attempts in the direction of Christian elementary education, apparently, was the school at Edessa, where Lucian, a presbyter of the third century, who became famous as a teacher at Antioch,[1016] was educated.[1017] It was a place worthy of being a cradle of Christian education; its church was martyred in the second century, its teachers Protogenes and Eulogius were driven into banishment in the fourth, and in the fifth it became famous for its active share in the Nestorian controversy.