Nor was there anything in the general conditions of society to counterbalance the ill effects of school and university education. Quintilian lamented that, even in his time, the old Roman family education by example was corrupted; and the moral degradation of later times, though it has doubtless been exaggerated, was certainly real and widespread. Nor does the religious revival of Paganism which synchronized with the early centuries of Christianity appear to have effected any reform in life. Alexandria, the birthplace of Neo-platonism and the intellectual centre of the later empire, was also a very sink of moral obliquity.
It was into such a decaying civilization, which by its want of vitality sterilized education, oppressing it under the weight of a dead tradition, that Christianity brought new life. Of course, careful instruction in the Faith was given Christianity and Pagan education. in catechetical schools, of which that at Alexandria was the most famous. But the question as to the attitude of Christians towards the ordinary classical culture was important. On the one hand, literature was saturated with Paganism, and the Pagan festivals formed a regular part of school life. On the other hand, the Pagan education offered the only means of higher culture, and thus furnished the only weapon with which Christians could successfully meet their controversial antagonists. Quite at first, no doubt, when the converts to the new faith were few and obscure, the question scarcely arose; but as men of culture and position were attracted to the Church it became urgent. The answers given by the Christian leaders were various, and largely the outcome of temperament and previous training. The Greek Fathers, especially Clement of Alexandria (150-217) and Origen (185-253), regarded Christianity as essentially the culmination of philosophy, to which the way must be found through liberal culture. Without a liberal education the Christian could live a life of faith and obedience but could not attain an intellectual understanding of the mysteries of the Faith. On the other hand, Tertullian (160-240) was very suspicious of Pagan culture; though he granted the necessity of employing it as a means of education, yet he did so with regret, and would forbid Christians to teach it in the public schools, where some recognition of Paganism would be implied. The general practice of the Christians, however, did not conform to Tertullian’s exhortations. Indeed, many of the cultivated Christians of the 3rd and 4th centuries were little more than nominal adherents to the Faith, and the intercourse between Christian and Pagan was often close and friendly. The general attitude of Christians towards the traditional education is evidenced by the protest raised against the edict of Julian, which forbade them to teach in the public schools. The ultimate outcome seems to be fairly expressed in the writings of St Augustine (354-430) and St Jerome (346-420), who held that literary and rhetorical culture is good so long as it is kept subservient to the Christian life.
In another way Greek philosophy exercised an abiding influence over the culture of future ages. The early centuries of Christianity felt the need of formulating the Faith to preserve it from disintegration into a mass of fluid opinions, and such formulation was of necessity made under the influence of the philosophy in which the early Fathers had been trained—that Neo-platonism which was the last effort of Paganism to attain a conception of life and of God. In the West, this formulation had to be translated into Latin, for Greek was no longer generally understood in Italy, and thus the juristic trend of Roman thought also became a factor in the exposition of Christian doctrine. This formulation of the Faith was one of the chief legacies the transition centuries passed on to the middle ages.
Had classical culture been less formal than it was during the early centuries of Christianity, the innate antagonism of the Pagan and Christian views of life and character must have been so apparent that the education which prepared for the one could not have been accepted by the other. It was only because rhetorical culture was so emphatically intellectual, and so little, if at all, moral in its aims, that its inherent opposition to the Christian conception of character was not obvious. That its antagonistic influence was not inoperative is shown by the not infrequent perversions of cultured Christians to Paganism. But generally the opposition was so obscured that the ethical writings of St Ambrose (340-397) are largely Stoic in conception and reasoning. Yet the Pagan ideal of life, especially as it had been developed in the individualistic ethics which had prevailed for more than six centuries, was antithetical in essence to that of the Christian Church. The former was essentially an ethics of self-reliance and self-control showing itself in moderation and proportion in all expressions of life. An essential feature in such a character was high-mindedness and a self-respect which was of the nature of pride. On the contrary, Christian teaching exalted humility as one of the highest virtues, and regarded pride and self-confidence as the deadliest of sins. It recognized no doctrine of limitation; what was to be condemned could not be abhorred too violently, nor could what was good be too strongly desired or too ardently sought. The highest state attainable by man was absorption in loving ecstasy in the mystic contemplation of God. The practical attempt to realize this gave rise to monasticism, with its minutely regulated life expressing unlimited obedience and the renunciation of private will at every moment. The monastic life was regarded as the nearest approach to the ideal which a Christian could make on earth. Naturally, as this conception gathered strength in generations nurtured in it, the value of classical culture became less and less apparent, and by the time of St Gregory the Great (d. 604) the use of classical literature except as means of an education having quite another end than classical culture was discouraged.
Of course, during these centuries, the gradual subjugation of the western empire by the barbarians had been powerfully operative in the obscuring of culture. Most of the public schools disappeared, and generally the light of Effect of barbarian inroads. learning was kept burning only in monasteries, and in them more and more faintly as they became more or less isolated units exposed to attack by ruthless foes or living in continual dread of such attack. Though the barbarians absorbed the old culture in various degrees of imperfection, yet the four centuries following the death of St Augustine were plunged in intellectual darkness, relieved by transitory gleams of light in Britain and by a more enduring flame in Ireland. The utmost that could be done was to preserve to some extent the heritage of the past. This, indeed, was essentially the work of men like Boethius, Cassiodorus, Isidore and Bede.
During these same centuries another process had been advancing with accelerating steps. This was the modification of the Latin language. In the early centuries of Christianity literary Latin was already very different from colloquial Modification of Latin. Latin, especially in the provinces; and, as has been said, the literary output of the last age of Paganism was marked by sterility of thought and meretricious redundancy of expression. On the other hand, the writings of Christianity show a real living force seeking to find appropriate expression in new forms. Thus, with Christian writers, slavish imitation of the past gradually gave way to the evolution of a new and living Latin, which showed itself more and more regardless of classical models. To express the new ideas to which Christianity gave birth fresh words were coined, or borrowed from colloquial speech or from the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. This Christian Latin was a real living instrument of expression, which conformed itself in its structure much more closely to the mode of thought and expression of actual life than did the artificial imitation of antiquity in which the literary productions of Paganism were clothed. It is the Latin in which St Jerome wrote the Vulgate. But with the obscuring of culture during the barbarian invasions this current Latin became more and more oblivious of even such elements of form as grammatical inflexions and concords.
It was to the reformation of this corrupt Latin by a return to classical models, and to the more general spread of culture, especially among clergy and nobles, that the Carolingian revival addressed itself. The movement was essentially The Carolingian revival. practical and conservative. Alcuin (735-804), who was Charlemagne’s educational adviser and chief executive officer in scholastic matters, was probably the best scholar of his time, and himself loved the classical writings with which he was acquainted; but the text-books he wrote were but imperfect summaries of existing compendia, and the intellectual condition of his pupils forbade a very generous literary diet even had he thought it desirable, of which there is some doubt. The most valuable outcome of the movement was the establishment of the palace school, and of bishops’ schools and monastic schools throughout the empire. Of these the latter were the most important, and each of the chief monasteries had from the time of Charlemagne an external school for pupils not proposing to enter the order as well as an internal school for novices. Thus, the educational system north of the Alps was pre-eminently ecclesiastical in its organization and profoundly religious in its aims. For two centuries the new intellectual life was obscured by the troubled times which followed the death of Charlemagne, but the learning which the Carolingian revival had restored was preserved here and there in cathedral and monastic schools, and the sequence of well-educated ecclesiastics was never altogether interrupted.
The scope of that learning was comprised within the seven liberal arts and philosophy, on the secular side, together with some dogmatic instruction in the doctrines of the Church, the early fathers, and the Scriptures. Theology The medieval curriculum. was as yet not organized into a philosophical system: that was the great work the middle ages had to perform. The seven liberal arts (divided into the Trivium—grammar, dialectic, rhetoric; and the more advanced Quadrivium—geometry, arithmetic, music, astronomy) were a legacy from old Roman education through the transition centuries. They appear in the Disciplinarum libri IX. of Varro in the 2nd century B.C., where are added to them the more utilitarian arts of medicine and architecture. But they reached the middle ages chiefly through the summaries of writers in the transition centuries, of which the best known were the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of the Neo-platonist Martianus Capella, who wrote probably early in the 5th century; the De artibus ac disciplinis liberalium litterarum of the Christian Cassiodorus (468-562); and the Etymologiarum libri XX. of St Isidore of Seville (570-636).
The scope of the arts was wider than their names would suggest in modern times. Under grammar was included the study of the content and form of literature; and in practice the teaching varied from a liberal literary culture to a dry and perfunctory study of just enough grammar to give some facility in the use of Latin. Dialectic was mainly formal logic. Rhetoric covered the study of law, as well as composition in prose and verse. Geometry was rather what is now understood by geography and natural history, together with the medicinal properties of plants. Arithmetic, with the cumbrous Roman notation, included little more than the simplest practical calculations required in ordinary life and the computation of the calendar. Music embraced the rules of the plain-song of the Church, some theory of sound, and the connexion of harmony and numbers. Astronomy dealt with the courses of the heavenly bodies, and was seldom kept free from astrology. In philosophy the current text-books were the De consolatione philosophiae of Boethius (470-524), an eclectic summary of pagan ethics from the standpoint of the Christian view of life, and the same writer’s adapted translations of the Categories and De interpretatione of Aristotle and of Porphyry’s Introduction to the Categories.
It is evident that though such a scheme of studies might in practice, during ages of intellectual stagnation and general ignorance, be arid in the extreme, it was capable in time of revival of giving scope to the widest extension of culture. It was, indeed, at once comprehensive and unified in conception, and well adapted to educate for the perfectly definite and clear view of life which the Church set before men.