Such a one may be
nourished
with emulation; reproach
will sting him; honor will rouse him.
will sting him; honor will rouse him.
Aristotle and Ancient Educational Ideals by Thomas Davidson
The history of the
last two thousand years is but a commentary on this text. From the day
when the master-mind of the Greek world credited man's nature with a
divine element having a supreme activity of its own, European thought
and life have been agitated by three questions, and largely shaped by
the answers given to them: (1) What is the nature of the divine element
in man? (2) In what form or institution shall that element find
expression and realization? (3) How shall that institution relate itself
to the State? And they have not yet been definitely answered.
Principles that are to move the world are never the result of mere
abstract thought, but always of a crisis or epoch in human affairs. And
so it was in the present case. The separation between the man and the
citizen was accomplished in fact, before it was formulated in theory. On
the other hand, the theory received emphasis from the events which
accompanied and followed its promulgation. The battle of Chaeronea, which
took place sixteen years before Aristotle's death, by putting an end
forever to the free civic life of Greece, removed the very conditions
under which the old ideal could realize itself, and forced men to seek
a sphere of activity, and to form associations, outside of the State.
The State, indeed, still maintained a semblance of life, and the old
education, with its literature, gymnastics, and music still continued;
but the spirit of both was gone. The State was gradually replaced by the
philosophic schools, while intellectual training tended more and more to
concentrate itself upon rhetoric, that art which enables the individual
to shine before his fellows, and to gain wealth or public preferment.
From this time on, the spiritual life of Greece found expression in the
pretentious, empty individualism of the rhetorician, the lineal
descendant of the sophists, and in the philosophical sects, which
embodied the spirit of Socrates, their opponent.
The founder of the rhetorical schools may be said to have been
Isocrates, who, after being a pupil of Socrates', turned against the
philosophic tendency, and championed elegant philistinism. The aim of
these schools was to turn out clever men of the world, thoroughly
acquainted with popular opinions and motives, and capable of expressing
themselves glibly, sententiously, and persuasively on any and every
subject. They usually made no profession of imparting profound learning
or eliciting philosophic thought: indeed, they despised both; but they
did seek to impart such an amount of ordinary knowledge as to place
their pupils in the chief current of the popular thought of their time.
They thus became the bearers of practical education among a people who,
having lost their political life without finding any higher, sought to
obtain satisfaction in social intercourse. For hundreds of years they
exerted an enormous influence, and, indeed, at certain times and places
were formidable rivals of the philosophic schools.
The first man of Greek race who attempted to found a sect or school
outside the State was Pythagoras, and there can be no doubt that all
subsequent schools were in some degree modelled upon his. It is true
that the Pythagorean school had been broken up and dispersed long before
the days of Plato and Aristotle (see p. 54); nevertheless, his
followers, scattered over Greece, had carried with them the ideas and
principles of their master, and now that Athens had fallen into the
condition against which the Pythagorean discipline had been a protest,
these ideas found a ready response in the hearts of those men whom the
social life of the time could not satisfy. Hence the schools of Plato
and Aristotle, which had originally been mere educational institutions,
turned, even during the lifetime of the latter, into sects (? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ,
heresies, as they were called later on), with definite sets of
non-political principles, in accordance with which their members tried
to shape their lives. It cannot be said that these two schools were in
any high degree successful, and the reasons were that they were too
purely intellectual, that they made no striking revolt against political
life, and that they called for a type of man not easy to find. But,
shortly after the death of Aristotle, there arose, almost
contemporaneously, two other schools, which exerted an influence, deep
and wide, for over six hundred years. These were the Epicurean and the
Stoic. Widely as these differed in respect to means, they sought the
same end, namely, personal independence, and they sought it by
conformity to laws imposed by no human legislator, but by nature. The
former took the law of the senses, the latter the law of the spirit, for
its guide; and, by a strange contradiction, while the former championed
free will, the latter professed fatalism. These four schools were the
only ones that ever met with extensive patronage in Athens, and with the
exception of the Academic, they never diverged far from the principles
of their founders. In the time of Marcus Aurelius, after Athens had been
for ages a mere Roman university, they were placed under State
patronage, and supported by public funds, and there is no record to show
that this was discontinued until they were finally closed by the Emperor
Justinian in A. D. 529.
Not long after the death of Aristotle, Athens was supplanted by
Alexandria, as the centre of Greek influence. Here the rhetorical and
philosophic schools established themselves, and could soon boast a
numerous discipleship. This, however, was no longer exclusively, or even
mainly, Greek, but was recruited from all the nations of the known
world, more especially those of the East. Phoenicians, Syrians, Jews,
Persians, etc. , not to speak of Egyptians, now became students of Greek
philosophy, and members of philosophic sects, whose members not only
studied together, but often, to a large extent, lived together in
communities. About the year B. C. 300 were founded the famous Museum and
Library of Alexandria--the first university and the first public library
in the world. Round these the various sects gathered, to study, to
discuss, and to exchange opinions. Nor was it Greek thought alone that
engaged their attention. The opinions and beliefs of Egypt and the East
came in for a share, and, in the end, for the largest share. Nor is this
wonderful, when we consider the direction that thought and life were
then taking.
We have already seen that, as Greek civic life lost the conditions of
its existence, the thoughtful portion of the people came more and more
to seek for life-principles in the supersensible world of intellect. The
nature of this world Plato and Aristotle had done their best to reveal.
But the event proved that neither an ordered host of ideas commanded by
the Good, nor a Supreme Intelligence served by a host of lower
intelligences, could yield the principles which the life of the time
demanded; and thus we find the philosophers of Alexandria striving to
people their intelligible world with forms drawn from all the religions
of the East, including Judaism. Thus there grew up the various forms of
Alexandrine philosophy, compounds of Greek thought and Oriental
religion. On the basis of these again were organized, at the same time,
various forms of social life, all tending more or less to religious
communism. Hence came the Essenes (see p. 59), the Therapeuts, the
Neopythagoreans, and the Neoplatonists, all of whom, notwithstanding
certain shortcomings, did much to purify life, and to pave the way for a
higher civilization.
In B. C. 146, Greece, and, in B. C. 30, Egypt, fell into the hands of the
Romans and thenceforth formed provinces of their empire. Athens and
Alexandria were now Roman university-towns, while Rome became more and
more the diffusing centre of Greek and Oriental influence. It would be
impossible, in a work like the present, to give even a sketch of the
forms which education assumed in these three great centres, or in the
world that revolved round them, in the six hundred and more years that
passed between the loss of Greek autonomy and the triumph of
Christianity. We shall merely endeavor to give a general notion of its
two chief tendencies, which, as we saw, were towards rhetoric and
philosophy; and we shall do this in connection with the names of two
men, who may be regarded as respectively typical of the two tendencies,
Quintilian the rhetorician, and Plotinus the philosopher. By doing so we
shall pave the way for the consideration of the Rise of the Christian
Schools.
CHAPTER II
QUINTILIAN AND RHETORICAL EDUCATION
Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both have for their
subjects those things which, in a certain way, are matters of common
knowledge, and belong to no definite science. Hence everybody, in
some degree, is gifted with them; for everybody, to some extent,
tries to examine and sustain an argument, to defend himself, and to
accuse others. --Aristotle.
There is a certain political theory which is made up of many great
things. A large and important part of it is artificial eloquence,
which they call rhetoric. --Cicero.
Every duty which tends to preserve human relations and human society
must be assigned a higher place than any that stops short with
knowledge and science. --_Id. _
Zeno, having pressed his fingers together and closed his fist, said
that was like Dialectic; having spread them out and opened his hand,
he said Eloquence was like his palm there. --_Id. _
To act considerately is of more moment than to think wisely. --_Id. _
I pass to the pleasure of oratorical eloquence, the delight of which
one enjoys not at any one moment, but almost every day and every
hour. --Tacitus.
Grammar is an experimental knowledge of the usages of language as
generally current among poets and prose writers. It is divided into
six parts, (1) trained reading with due regard to prosody [_i. e. _
aspiration, accentuation, quantity, emphasis, metre, etc. ], (2)
exposition according to poetic figures [literary criticism], (3)
ready statement of dialectical peculiarities and allusions
[philology, geography, history, mythology], (4) discovery of
etymologies, (5) accurate account of analogies [accidence and
syntax], (6) criticism of poetical productions, which is the noblest
part of the grammatic art [ethics, politics, strategy,
etc. ]. --Dionysius Thrax.
Reading is the rendering of poetic or prose productions without
stumbling or hesitancy. It must be done with due regard to
expression, prosody, and pauses. From the expression we learn the
merit of the piece, from the prosody the art of the reader, and from
the pauses the meaning intended to be conveyed. In this way we read
tragedy heroically, comedy conversationally, elegiacs thrillingly,
epics sustainedly, lyrics musically, and dirges softly and
plaintively. Any reading done without due observance of these rules
degrades the merits of the poets and makes the habits of readers
ridiculous. --_Id. _
Some arts are common, others liberal. . . . The liberal arts, which
some call the logical arts, are astronomy, geometry, music,
philosophy, medicine, grammar, rhetoric. --_Scholia to Dionysius
Thrax. _
It is obvious that man excels the other animals in worth and speech:
Why may we not hold that his worth consists as much in eloquence as
in reason? --Quintilian.
The civil man, and he who is truly wise, who does not devote himself
to idle disputes, but to the administration of the commonwealth
(from which those folks who are called philosophers have farthest
withdrawn themselves), will be glad to employ every available
oratorical means to reach his ends, having previously settled in his
own mind what ends are honorable. --_Id. _
If we count over all the epochs of life, we shall find its pains far
more numerous than its pleasures. . . . The first, that of babyhood, is
trying. The baby is hungry; the nurse sends it to sleep: it is
thirsty; she washes it: it wants to go to sleep; she takes a rattle
and makes a noise. When the child has escaped from the nurse, it is
taken hold of by the pedagogue, the physical trainer, the
grammar-master, the music-master, the drawing-master. In process of
time, there are added the arithmetic-master, the geometer, the
horse-breaker; he rises early; he has no chance for leisure. He
becomes a cadet; again he has to fear the drill-master, the physical
trainer, the fencing-master, the gymnasiarch. By all these he is
whipt, watched, throttled. He graduates from the cadets at twenty;
again he dreads and watches captain and general, etc. --Teles the
Stoic (B. C. 260).
The palmy period in the history of Rome is the period when she had
no literature. It was only when the Roman nationality began to
break up, and cosmopolitan Greek tendencies to lay hold upon the
people, that a literature began to appear. For this reason, Roman
literature from its very inception is, from absolute necessity,
filled with the Greek spirit, and stands in the most direct
opposition to the national spirit of the people. --Mommsen.
Quintiliane, vagae moderator summe juventae,
Gloria Romanae, Quintiliane, togae. --Martial.
Up to the time when Rome began to decline, the school education of her
youth was meagre in the extreme, consisting of reading, writing, and a
little law. All later education that was more than this was borrowed
from the Greeks. It was about the year 200 B. C. , at the close of the
Second Punic War, that their influence began clearly to show itself. The
severe Cato, who so cordially despised rhetoricians and philosophers,
learnt Greek in his old age and wrote, for the use of his son, a series
of manuals on ethics, rhetoric, medicine, military science, farming, and
law. At the same time Scipio Africanus spent his leisure hours in
practising gymnastics. From this time on, and just in proportion as Rome
lost her national character and became cosmopolitan, she more and more
adopted Greek manners, Greek religion (or irreligion), and Greek
education. When, finally, in B. C. 146, Greece became a Roman dependency,
it was strictly true that "Captive Greece took captive her rude
conqueror. " Thousands of Greek schoolmasters, rhetoricians,
philosophers, etc. , flocked to Rome, and, though attempts were made to
expel or suppress them, they held their place, for the simple reason
that the education they offered was a necessity of the time. Rome, the
mistress of the world, had either to become cosmopolitan or perish, and
she preferred the former alternative. She now, for the first time, began
to have a literature and to cultivate her own language. The studies
which she specially affected were (1) grammar, that is, literature, (2)
rhetoric, (3) philosophy, which corresponded to school, college, and
university education. The last, like music and geometry, was, for the
most part, an elegant accomplishment, rather than a serious study. The
physical sciences found little favor.
So long as Roman education was in the hands of Greeks, it was conducted
in the Greek language, and the authors read and discussed were Greek.
But the Romans, though willing enough to borrow Greek culture, were
unwilling to remain permanently in intellectual dependence upon a
conquered people, which in many respects they despised. Strong efforts,
therefore, were made to develop a national literature and a national
education. About the year B. C. 100, Lucius AElius Praeconinus Stilo, a
worthy and conservative Roman knight, opened a private class in Latin
grammar and rhetoric for young men of the upper classes, and from this
time on the direct influence of the Greeks, except in philosophy,
declined. Greek, indeed, continued to be spoken by all persons making
any pretensions to culture; but Latin became the language of Roman
literature. Among the pupils of Stilo were Varro and Cicero, who, along
with Julius Caesar, may be called the parents of the classical Latin
language, literature, and eloquence. Both Varro and Caesar wrote works on
grammar. A certain Cornificius (generally known as _Auctor ad
Herennium_) about this time wrote the first Latin treatise on Rhetoric;
but the great authority on the subject, in practice as well as theory,
was Cicero, who wrote no fewer than seven works on it. With Cicero's
death, and the transformation of the republic into an empire, eloquence
lost its noblest use, the defence of liberty. Rhetoric, nevertheless,
continued to be cultivated as a fine art and for forensic use, and,
indeed, was made to cover the whole of the higher education of youth. Of
this art the most celebrated teacher was Quintilian, "the supreme
director of giddy youth, the glory of the Roman toga" (_i. e. _ civil
manhood).
Quintilian was born about A. D. 35 in the Spanish city of Calagurris
(Calahorra), where, later, St. Dominic first saw the light. He was
educated in Rome, but afterwards returned to his native place and
established himself as a teacher of rhetoric. About A. D. 68, he was
invited by the Emperor Galba to settle in Rome, which he did, giving
instruction in rhetoric with unparalleled success for twenty years, and
drawing a salary from the government. At the end of that time, he
retired, rich and honored, into private life. It was after this that he
wrote the work which carried his fame down to posterity, his _Institutio
Oratorica_, or Education of the Orator. In the first book of this he
draws out a scheme of preparatory education for the family and the
school; the succeeding ten are devoted to rhetoric, and the last to the
character of the orator, whom he regards as identical with the
cultivated gentleman. It is only the first book that concerns the modern
student of education, and of this I shall now give a brief summary.
The first care of the parent, after the birth of a child, should be to
procure for it a nurse of good moral character and of cultivated speech.
A child that early learns bad habits in acting and speaking, rarely, if
ever, gets cured of them afterwards. Great care ought to be taken with
regard to the child's youthful companions, and to his pedagogue, who
ought to be of good character and well-informed. Its first language
ought to be Greek; but Latin ought to be begun early, and both to be
carefully cultivated. There is no need to follow the ordinary custom of
not allowing the child to learn to read or write before the close of its
seventh year. Much can very profitably be done by play long before that.
It is a mistake to teach children to repeat the alphabet before they
know the forms of the letters. These they may learn from tablets or
blocks. As soon as the letters are recognized, they ought to be written.
Following with a pen the forms of letters engraved on ivory tablets is a
good thing. After letters, syllables must be learnt--all the possible
syllables in both languages. After syllables come words, and after
words, sentences. In all this process, it is of the utmost importance to
secure thoroughness by avoiding haste. The child must not attempt words
till he can read and write all the syllables, nor sentences till he is
perfectly familiar with words. In reading sentences, he must learn to
run ahead, so that, while he is pronouncing one word with his lips, he
is recognizing others with his eye. The writing lesson should be
utilized in order to make the child acquainted with rare words and good
poetry. At this stage, his memory ought to be well exercised, and made
to lay up large stores of good literature for future use. At the same
time, his organs of speech should be well trained, by being made to
pronounce rapidly verses containing difficult combinations of sound. [5]
As soon as he is able, the child should go to school. Home education is
objectionable on many accounts, especially for boys intended for
orators. These, above all others, must learn sociability, tact, and
_esprit de corps_, and form school-friendships. Many moral lessons can
be learnt, and many motives employed, in the school, that are not
possible in the family. Among the latter is ambition, which "though
itself a vice, is the parent of many virtues," and therefore ought to be
freely used. Hardly any motive is so powerful.
When a boy is sent to school, his teacher's first business is to
investigate his character and capacity. The chief marks of ability are
memory and power of imitation. Imitation is not mimicry, which is always
a sign of low nature. Slowness, though objectionable, is better than
precocity, which should be discouraged in every way. Different treatment
is required for different boys: some need the bit, some the spur. The
best boy is the one "whom praise excites, whom glory pleases, who cries
when he is beaten.
Such a one may be nourished with emulation; reproach
will sting him; honor will rouse him. " Boys ought to have seasons of
rest and play, neither too short to afford recreation, nor too long to
encourage idleness. Games of question and answer are good for
sharpening the wits. In play an excellent opportunity is offered to the
teacher for learning the character of his pupils. Corporal punishment is
altogether to be deprecated, and, indeed, is unneeded when the teacher
does his duty.
What boys learn in school is grammar; but this must be supplemented by
music and astronomy. Without the former it will be impossible to scan
verse; without the latter, to understand certain allusions and modes of
fixing dates in the poets. A little philosophy is necessary for the sake
of understanding such poets as Empedocles and Lucretius; geometry, in
order to give practice in apodictic reasoning, as well as for practical
uses. Thus the curriculum of school education will consist of Grammar,
Music, Astronomy, Philosophy, and Geometry.
Grammar consists of two parts, (1) _Methodics_, or the art of correct
speaking, (2) _Historics_ (German _Realien_), the interpretation of
poets, historians, philosophers, etc. _Methodics_--grammar in the modern
sense--should aim at enabling a boy to speak and write with correctness,
clearness, and elegance. All barbarisms (_i. e. _ foreign words and
idioms), solecisms, affectations, and careless pronunciations are to be
avoided. In the use of language, four things are to be taken into
account, (1) reason, (2) antiquity, (3) authority, (4) custom. In
reading, the boy must be taught "where to draw his breath, where to
divide a verse, where the sense is complete, where it begins, where the
voice is to be raised, where lowered, what inflections to use, what is
to be uttered slowly, what rapidly, what forcibly, what gently. " "That
he may be able to do all this, he must _understand_. Reading must above
all be manly and grave, with a certain sweetness. " Poetry must not be
read either as prose, nor yet in a sing-song way. All theatrical
personification, and all gesticulation smacking of the comedian, are to
be avoided.
For _Histories_ the teacher must be very careful in his selection of
texts. Homer and Virgil are best to begin with. Though their full import
cannot be understood by youth, they awake enthusiasm for what is noble
and spirited, and will often be read in later life. "Tragedies are
useful. There is nourishment in the lyric poets"; but they must be used
with caution and in selections, from which everything relating to love
must be excluded. Even Horace must be expurgated. Satire and comedy,
though of the utmost value for the orator, must be deferred till the
moral character is sufficiently established not to be injured by them.
Passages from the poets ought to be committed to memory. In all reading,
the utmost care ought to be taken to promote purity and manliness
(_sanctitas et virilitas_).
After reading a piece of poetry, boys must be made to analyze and scan
it, to point out peculiarities of language and rhythm, to enumerate the
different meanings of words, to name and explain the various figures of
speech. But far more important than all this it is, that the teacher
should impress on their minds the importance of systematic arrangement
and propriety of description, "showing what is suitable for each role,
what is commendable in thought, what in expression, where diffuseness
is proper, and where brevity. " In giving collateral information, whether
in history, mythology, or geography, he should keep within bounds,
giving only what is necessary and rests on respectable authority. "It is
one of the virtues of a schoolmaster to be ignorant of some things. "
As regards lessons in composition, the teacher should begin by making
his pupils write out from memory the _Fables_ of AEsop, in pure, simple,
direct, and unadorned language. He should then call upon them to turn
poetry into prose, and to paraphrase it, either briefly or diffusely. He
should then make them write out proverbs, apophthegms, aphorisms, short,
brilliant anecdotes, etc. Famous stories related by the poets may be
used as subjects for composition, but chiefly for the sake of
information. Beyond this the schoolmaster should not go in the matter of
composition. The rest should be left to the rhetorician.
It is of great importance in youthful education that several subjects
should be studied at the same time. Boys like and need variety, and,
when they get it, it is truly astonishing how much they can accomplish.
"There is not the slightest reason for fearing that boys will shrink
from the labor of study. No age is less easily fatigued. " . . . "Boys are
naturally more inclined to hard work than young men. "
Such, in brief, is Quintilian's school-programme. It has no place for
physical science (except Astronomy), for manual training, or for
physical exercise. Play is, indeed, permitted as a necessary recreation,
and gymnastics and physical training (? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ) are recommended in
so far as they are necessary to enable the budding orator to move and
to gesticulate gracefully; but that is all. "Nothing can please that is
not becoming. "
As soon as he is ready, the young aspirant for oratorical fame passes
into the hands of the rhetorician, under whom he learns all the arts,
and acquires all that knowledge, necessary to fit him for his
profession. No kind of knowledge, and no moral excellence ought to be
foreign to the orator. Quintilian is very severe upon the philosophers
for claiming, in their title, to be, in an exceptional way, lovers of
wisdom, and maintains that the true orator is the truly wise and good
man. He is surely superior to the philosopher, who turns his back upon
the world and manifests no interest in human affairs. Moreover,
"philosophy may be simulated; eloquence cannot. "
The closing chapter of the last book of Quintilian's work treats of the
orator after his retirement from public life. He is to devote himself to
writing and to the study of art, science, and philosophy. The picture is
charming; but it ends with death, and there is nothing beyond. God may
be defined for oratorical purposes; but his existence is a matter of
conjecture.
In Quintilian we have the highest type of the civic man living under a
cosmopolitan despotism. His defects--his pedantry, his servility, his
externality, his worldliness--are only such as are natural to a good man
placed in this position, without any outlook upon a higher existence.
CHAPTER III
PLOTINUS AND PHILOSOPHIC EDUCATION
The material body, which is subject to motion, change, dissolution,
and division, requires an immaterial principle to hold and bind it
together in unity. This principle of unity is the soul. If it were
material, it would require another principle of unity, and so on _ad
infinitum_, till an immaterial first were reached, which would then
be the true soul. --Ammonius Saccas.
Intelligible things, when they are united with other things, are not
changed, as corporeal things are when they are united with each
other, but remain as they are, and what they are. Soul and body are
intimately united, but not mixed. The soul can separate and withdraw
itself from the body, not only in sleep, but also in thought. As the
sun illuminates and yet remains itself a separate light, so is the
soul in its relation to the body. It is not in the body as in place;
rather the body is in it and of it. --_Id. _
One's duty is to become first man, then God. --Hierocles.
Neither Schelling nor Baader nor Hegel has refuted Plotinus: in many
ways he soars above them. --Arthur Richter.
What is loved by us here is mortal and hurtful. Our love is love for
an image, that often turns into its opposite, because what we loved
was not truly worthy of love, nor the good which we sought. God
alone is the true object of our love. --Plotinus.
The practical and the contemplative lives, which Plato and Aristotle had
labored so hard to combine and correlate, in order to save human worth
and Greek civilization, fell asunder, despite all their
efforts--greatly, of course, to the detriment of both. In the terrible
picture which Quintilian draws of Roman life in the first century of
our era, we see one side of the result of this divorce: in the cruel
satires of Lucian, written less than a century later, we may find
depicted the other. But, just as, in the midst of the moral corruption
and brutality, there arose from time to time worthy men like Quintilian
and Tacitus, so amid the philosophical charlatanry and pretence, there
still survived a few earnest thinkers, who aspired with all the power
that was in them to divine truth, and strove to find in the eternal
world that reality which was so miserably wanting in this. By far the
greater number of these men were neither Greeks nor Romans, but
Orientals, men whose thinking combined Greek philosophy with some
earnest form of Eastern mysticism. To such men this life was merely an
opportunity of preparing for a higher, in which lay all beauty, all
good, and all blessedness. It is not difficult to see what sort of
education would follow from this view of life. It may best be
characterized by the one word "ascetic. " It no longer seeks to train
harmoniously all the faculties of body and mind with a view to a worthy
social life, but to enable the soul to die to the body and to social
life, and so rise to union and consubstantiality with God. In no sect
was this tendency more marked than in the Neoplatonic, or, as it might
equally well be called, the Neoaristotelian or Neopythagorean, the
greatest name in which is Plotinus.
Plotinus was born in Egypt about A. D. 205. His nationality is unknown.
He received his education in Alexandria--grammar, rhetoric, and
philosophy,--and adopted the teaching of the last as a profession. He
sought in vain, however, for a system that could satisfy him, till he
met with Ammonius "the Sack-bearer," whom he at once recognized as his
master. This Ammonius had been reared as a Christian, but had
apostatized on becoming acquainted with philosophy. His Christian
education, however, had not been altogether lost on him; for he had
carried over into philosophy a religious spirit, and not a few of the
esoteric ideas then current in certain Christian sects. It was this,
apparently, that enabled him to give a new direction to philosophy, and
to found a new school, whose influence upon subsequent, even Christian,
thought, it would be difficult to overestimate. His school was the
Neoplatonic, which, more than any other, united profound thought with
mystic theosophy (? ? ? ? ? ? ).
Plotinus listened to Ammonius for eleven years, and, on the death of the
latter, paid a visit to Persia, with the view of studying the religion
of that country. He shortly returned, however, and, after a brief
sojourn at Antioch, betook himself, in his fortieth year (A. D. 244), to
Rome, where he spent the remainder of his life as a teacher of
philosophy. His saintly character and his deep, religious thought drew
round him a considerable number of earnest men and women, including even
members of the imperial family. He made some attempt to found in
Campania a Platonopolis, so that his principles might be realized in a
social life, in a theosophic community; but this was never carried out.
He died in A. D. 270. Plotinus was the only truly great, original ancient
thinker after Aristotle.
While Plato and Aristotle had sought to rise to the intelligible world
from, and by means of, the sensible, Plotinus, believing that he has
attained a direct, intuitional knowledge of the former, sets out from it
and thence tries to reach the other. At the summit of being he finds the
supreme Platonic principle, the One or the Good, absolutely transcendent
and self-sufficient; next below this, the supreme Aristotelian
principle, Intelligence or Absolute Knowing, the _locus_ of all ideas;
and third, the supreme principle of the Stoics, Soul, Life, or Zeus, the
animating principle of the world. Good, Intelligence, Life--these are
Plotinus' divine trinity, evolved by a process of abstraction from the
_Nous_ of Aristotle (see p. 161). The members of this trinity are
neither personal, conscious, nor equal. Each lower is caused by, but
does not emanate from, the next above it; and this causation is due, not
to any act of free will, but to an inner necessity. Thus the trinity of
Plotinus is a mere energy, acting according to necessary laws. The third
member of it turns toward matter, which is mere poverty and hunger for
being, and, in so doing, produces a world of gods, daemons, and mundane
beings, the highest of which last is man. All that has matter has
multiplicity.
It is easy enough to see what kind of ethics and education will spring
from such a system as this. Inasmuch as the good means self-sufficiency,
freedom from multiplicity and matter, evil means dependence,
multiplicity, materiality. Whatever evil there is in man is due to his
connection with matter, for which he is in no sense responsible. His
sole business, if he desires blessedness, is to free himself from
matter and multiplicity, and return to the unity of the Supreme Good.
The steps by which this may be accomplished are, (1) Music or Art, (2)
Love, (3) Philosophy or Dialectic: through all these he rises above
multiplicity into unity. In all this there is, obviously, neither moral
evil nor moral good, and, indeed, the world of Plotinus contains no
moral element, for the simple reason that it contains nothing personal,
either in God or man. Evil is the product of necessity, and
consciousness, implying as it does, multiplicity, is part of it. The
unethical character of Plotinus' teaching comes out very clearly in his
reversal of the positions of instruction and purgation in the scheme of
education. According to the old view, purgation was a mere medical
process, preparatory to ethical training (see p. 7). According to the
Neoplatonic view, ethical training and the "political virtues" are a
mere preparation for purgation and the intellectual virtues. And this is
perfectly logical; for evil, being physical, must be cured by physical
means. And the means which Plotinus recommends are magical, rather than
moral; rites and prayers, rather than heroic deeds; the suppression of
the will, rather than its exercise.
Plotinus is too much of a Greek to accept, or even see, all the
consequences of his own theory, which makes moral life consist in an
attempt to escape from the world and to quench consciousness and
personality. Accordingly, though he has a poor opinion of civic life (a
thing excusable enough in those days), he believes that the civic
virtues ought to be cultivated, as a means toward the higher, and has
apparently nothing to say against the ordinary grammatical, rhetorical,
and musical education of his time. He has a good deal to say in favor of
Mathematics, as a preparation for what to him is the supreme branch of
education, Dialectics. But the tendency of his teaching is only too
obvious, and the conclusions which he did not draw, time and succeeding
generations drew for him. The effect of Neoplatonism was, in the long
run, to make the super-civic part of man the whole man, to discredit
political life and political effort, and to pave the way for the mystic,
the ascetic, and the hermit. Nor were the tendencies of the other
philosophical schools in any marked degree different. Thus philosophy,
instead of contributing to harmonize man and society, and to restore
moral life, came to be one of the strongest agencies in bringing about
confusion and dissolution, by ignoring moral life altogether, embracing
superstition, and turning man into a mere plaything of blind necessity
and magical forces. And thus ancient civilization fell to pieces,
because man himself had fallen to pieces, and each piece tried to set
itself up for the whole. The civic fragment finds its highest expression
in Quintilian, the super-civic in Plotinus. Ere the fragments can be
united into a truly moral being, a member of a truly moral society, a
new combining force, unknown to either rhetorician or philosopher, must
arise.
CHAPTER IV
CONCLUSION
Truly it was an old world, and even Caesar's patriotic genius was not
enough to make it young again. The dawn does not return till the
night has fully set in. --Mommsen.
My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,
saith the Lord. --Isaiah.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all
thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first
commandment. And a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself. --Jesus.
Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things
that are God's. --_Id. _
Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings? and not one of them is
forgotten in the sight of God. But the very hairs of your head are
all numbered. --_Id. _
We love because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and
hateth his brother, he is a liar. --John.
By one intelligible form, which is the divine Essence, and one
conscious intention, which is the divine Word, things may be known
in their multiplicity by God. --Thomas Aquinas.
If God acts in all things, and such action in no way derogates from
his dignity, but even belongs to his universal and supreme power, he
cannot consider it below him, nor does it stain his dignity, if he
extend his providence to the individual things of this world. --_Id. _
Une immense esperance a passe sur la terre. --Alfred de Musset.
We have seen that the Greek ideal of life rested upon the complete
identification of the man with the citizen. We have seen also how this
ideal was paralyzed by the growth of individualism; how the wisest men
thought to render this innocuous and even beneficent, by providing for
it a sphere of contemplation, superior to that of practice, but
organically related to it, and, finally how, with the failure of this
attempt, the two sides of human nature, divorced from each other,
degenerated, the one into selfish worldliness, the other into equally
selfish other-worldliness, both conditions equally destitute of moral
significance.
This sad result was mainly due to three causes, (1) that the remedies
proposed for individualism were not sufficient, (2) that the best remedy
was set aside, (3) that the conditions for which the remedies were
offered soon ceased to exist. Both Plato and Aristotle wrote for the
small Greek polities, which lost their autonomy through the Macedonian
conquest. If it may be doubted whether even the proposals of the latter
would have redeemed these polities, had they continued free, it is
certain that they would have been ineffective under the changed
circumstances. At all events, they were never adopted, and even for the
super-civic man the teaching of Plato was preferred to his.
As the new cosmopolitanism deepened the gulf between the citizen and the
individual, and immeasurably widened the sphere of the latter, in the
same proportion did the teaching of Plato fail to bridge over that gulf,
and provide activity for that sphere. To tell the super-civic man now
that his function was to contemplate divine things and oracularly
deliver laws for the guidance of the world, would have argued an absence
of humor not common in those days. Besides, those persons who claimed
to have contemplated divine things showed no such fitness for
legislation as to induce practical men to accept their guidance. The
sober fact was, that the contemplation of divine things, which more and
more absorbed the energy of Greek thought, was, except for Aristotle, a
mere vague asperation without moral value, and became ever more a sort
of mystic ecstasy, in which the individual, instead of acquiring insight
and power to live worthily and beneficently in the world, was thrown
back upon himself, with his will paralyzed. Nor could this be otherwise,
seeing the nature of the divine things, the contemplation of which was
reckoned so important. Instead of being personal attributes, or a person
imposing a moral law seen to be binding, they were mere abstractions,
increasing in emptiness the higher they were in the series, the highest
being absolute vacancy. In vain had Aristotle protested that all reality
is individual: the Platonic theory, that all knowledge is of ideas or
universals, prevailed, with the result that the highest knowledge was
held to be knowledge of that which is absolutely universal, viz.
indeterminate being or, as Plotinus held, something lacking even the
determination of being--the Supreme Good. That the super-civic man
should find satisfaction in gazing into vacancy, or be any more valuable
in the world after he had done so, no matter how spotless his life and
ecstatic his look, is inconceivable.
But while, in the Greek world, the sphere of activity of the super-civic
man was vanishing into nothingness, among a small and obscure band of
restored exiles of Semitic race, that sphere had come to claim the
entire man and all his relations, practical and spiritual. Isaiah's
little band of faithful followers (see p. 133) had grown into a nation,
living by no law save that of Jehovah, a very real, very awful, and very
holy personality, whom the heaven of heavens could not contain, but who
yet watched the rising up and the sitting down of every son of man.
last two thousand years is but a commentary on this text. From the day
when the master-mind of the Greek world credited man's nature with a
divine element having a supreme activity of its own, European thought
and life have been agitated by three questions, and largely shaped by
the answers given to them: (1) What is the nature of the divine element
in man? (2) In what form or institution shall that element find
expression and realization? (3) How shall that institution relate itself
to the State? And they have not yet been definitely answered.
Principles that are to move the world are never the result of mere
abstract thought, but always of a crisis or epoch in human affairs. And
so it was in the present case. The separation between the man and the
citizen was accomplished in fact, before it was formulated in theory. On
the other hand, the theory received emphasis from the events which
accompanied and followed its promulgation. The battle of Chaeronea, which
took place sixteen years before Aristotle's death, by putting an end
forever to the free civic life of Greece, removed the very conditions
under which the old ideal could realize itself, and forced men to seek
a sphere of activity, and to form associations, outside of the State.
The State, indeed, still maintained a semblance of life, and the old
education, with its literature, gymnastics, and music still continued;
but the spirit of both was gone. The State was gradually replaced by the
philosophic schools, while intellectual training tended more and more to
concentrate itself upon rhetoric, that art which enables the individual
to shine before his fellows, and to gain wealth or public preferment.
From this time on, the spiritual life of Greece found expression in the
pretentious, empty individualism of the rhetorician, the lineal
descendant of the sophists, and in the philosophical sects, which
embodied the spirit of Socrates, their opponent.
The founder of the rhetorical schools may be said to have been
Isocrates, who, after being a pupil of Socrates', turned against the
philosophic tendency, and championed elegant philistinism. The aim of
these schools was to turn out clever men of the world, thoroughly
acquainted with popular opinions and motives, and capable of expressing
themselves glibly, sententiously, and persuasively on any and every
subject. They usually made no profession of imparting profound learning
or eliciting philosophic thought: indeed, they despised both; but they
did seek to impart such an amount of ordinary knowledge as to place
their pupils in the chief current of the popular thought of their time.
They thus became the bearers of practical education among a people who,
having lost their political life without finding any higher, sought to
obtain satisfaction in social intercourse. For hundreds of years they
exerted an enormous influence, and, indeed, at certain times and places
were formidable rivals of the philosophic schools.
The first man of Greek race who attempted to found a sect or school
outside the State was Pythagoras, and there can be no doubt that all
subsequent schools were in some degree modelled upon his. It is true
that the Pythagorean school had been broken up and dispersed long before
the days of Plato and Aristotle (see p. 54); nevertheless, his
followers, scattered over Greece, had carried with them the ideas and
principles of their master, and now that Athens had fallen into the
condition against which the Pythagorean discipline had been a protest,
these ideas found a ready response in the hearts of those men whom the
social life of the time could not satisfy. Hence the schools of Plato
and Aristotle, which had originally been mere educational institutions,
turned, even during the lifetime of the latter, into sects (? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ,
heresies, as they were called later on), with definite sets of
non-political principles, in accordance with which their members tried
to shape their lives. It cannot be said that these two schools were in
any high degree successful, and the reasons were that they were too
purely intellectual, that they made no striking revolt against political
life, and that they called for a type of man not easy to find. But,
shortly after the death of Aristotle, there arose, almost
contemporaneously, two other schools, which exerted an influence, deep
and wide, for over six hundred years. These were the Epicurean and the
Stoic. Widely as these differed in respect to means, they sought the
same end, namely, personal independence, and they sought it by
conformity to laws imposed by no human legislator, but by nature. The
former took the law of the senses, the latter the law of the spirit, for
its guide; and, by a strange contradiction, while the former championed
free will, the latter professed fatalism. These four schools were the
only ones that ever met with extensive patronage in Athens, and with the
exception of the Academic, they never diverged far from the principles
of their founders. In the time of Marcus Aurelius, after Athens had been
for ages a mere Roman university, they were placed under State
patronage, and supported by public funds, and there is no record to show
that this was discontinued until they were finally closed by the Emperor
Justinian in A. D. 529.
Not long after the death of Aristotle, Athens was supplanted by
Alexandria, as the centre of Greek influence. Here the rhetorical and
philosophic schools established themselves, and could soon boast a
numerous discipleship. This, however, was no longer exclusively, or even
mainly, Greek, but was recruited from all the nations of the known
world, more especially those of the East. Phoenicians, Syrians, Jews,
Persians, etc. , not to speak of Egyptians, now became students of Greek
philosophy, and members of philosophic sects, whose members not only
studied together, but often, to a large extent, lived together in
communities. About the year B. C. 300 were founded the famous Museum and
Library of Alexandria--the first university and the first public library
in the world. Round these the various sects gathered, to study, to
discuss, and to exchange opinions. Nor was it Greek thought alone that
engaged their attention. The opinions and beliefs of Egypt and the East
came in for a share, and, in the end, for the largest share. Nor is this
wonderful, when we consider the direction that thought and life were
then taking.
We have already seen that, as Greek civic life lost the conditions of
its existence, the thoughtful portion of the people came more and more
to seek for life-principles in the supersensible world of intellect. The
nature of this world Plato and Aristotle had done their best to reveal.
But the event proved that neither an ordered host of ideas commanded by
the Good, nor a Supreme Intelligence served by a host of lower
intelligences, could yield the principles which the life of the time
demanded; and thus we find the philosophers of Alexandria striving to
people their intelligible world with forms drawn from all the religions
of the East, including Judaism. Thus there grew up the various forms of
Alexandrine philosophy, compounds of Greek thought and Oriental
religion. On the basis of these again were organized, at the same time,
various forms of social life, all tending more or less to religious
communism. Hence came the Essenes (see p. 59), the Therapeuts, the
Neopythagoreans, and the Neoplatonists, all of whom, notwithstanding
certain shortcomings, did much to purify life, and to pave the way for a
higher civilization.
In B. C. 146, Greece, and, in B. C. 30, Egypt, fell into the hands of the
Romans and thenceforth formed provinces of their empire. Athens and
Alexandria were now Roman university-towns, while Rome became more and
more the diffusing centre of Greek and Oriental influence. It would be
impossible, in a work like the present, to give even a sketch of the
forms which education assumed in these three great centres, or in the
world that revolved round them, in the six hundred and more years that
passed between the loss of Greek autonomy and the triumph of
Christianity. We shall merely endeavor to give a general notion of its
two chief tendencies, which, as we saw, were towards rhetoric and
philosophy; and we shall do this in connection with the names of two
men, who may be regarded as respectively typical of the two tendencies,
Quintilian the rhetorician, and Plotinus the philosopher. By doing so we
shall pave the way for the consideration of the Rise of the Christian
Schools.
CHAPTER II
QUINTILIAN AND RHETORICAL EDUCATION
Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both have for their
subjects those things which, in a certain way, are matters of common
knowledge, and belong to no definite science. Hence everybody, in
some degree, is gifted with them; for everybody, to some extent,
tries to examine and sustain an argument, to defend himself, and to
accuse others. --Aristotle.
There is a certain political theory which is made up of many great
things. A large and important part of it is artificial eloquence,
which they call rhetoric. --Cicero.
Every duty which tends to preserve human relations and human society
must be assigned a higher place than any that stops short with
knowledge and science. --_Id. _
Zeno, having pressed his fingers together and closed his fist, said
that was like Dialectic; having spread them out and opened his hand,
he said Eloquence was like his palm there. --_Id. _
To act considerately is of more moment than to think wisely. --_Id. _
I pass to the pleasure of oratorical eloquence, the delight of which
one enjoys not at any one moment, but almost every day and every
hour. --Tacitus.
Grammar is an experimental knowledge of the usages of language as
generally current among poets and prose writers. It is divided into
six parts, (1) trained reading with due regard to prosody [_i. e. _
aspiration, accentuation, quantity, emphasis, metre, etc. ], (2)
exposition according to poetic figures [literary criticism], (3)
ready statement of dialectical peculiarities and allusions
[philology, geography, history, mythology], (4) discovery of
etymologies, (5) accurate account of analogies [accidence and
syntax], (6) criticism of poetical productions, which is the noblest
part of the grammatic art [ethics, politics, strategy,
etc. ]. --Dionysius Thrax.
Reading is the rendering of poetic or prose productions without
stumbling or hesitancy. It must be done with due regard to
expression, prosody, and pauses. From the expression we learn the
merit of the piece, from the prosody the art of the reader, and from
the pauses the meaning intended to be conveyed. In this way we read
tragedy heroically, comedy conversationally, elegiacs thrillingly,
epics sustainedly, lyrics musically, and dirges softly and
plaintively. Any reading done without due observance of these rules
degrades the merits of the poets and makes the habits of readers
ridiculous. --_Id. _
Some arts are common, others liberal. . . . The liberal arts, which
some call the logical arts, are astronomy, geometry, music,
philosophy, medicine, grammar, rhetoric. --_Scholia to Dionysius
Thrax. _
It is obvious that man excels the other animals in worth and speech:
Why may we not hold that his worth consists as much in eloquence as
in reason? --Quintilian.
The civil man, and he who is truly wise, who does not devote himself
to idle disputes, but to the administration of the commonwealth
(from which those folks who are called philosophers have farthest
withdrawn themselves), will be glad to employ every available
oratorical means to reach his ends, having previously settled in his
own mind what ends are honorable. --_Id. _
If we count over all the epochs of life, we shall find its pains far
more numerous than its pleasures. . . . The first, that of babyhood, is
trying. The baby is hungry; the nurse sends it to sleep: it is
thirsty; she washes it: it wants to go to sleep; she takes a rattle
and makes a noise. When the child has escaped from the nurse, it is
taken hold of by the pedagogue, the physical trainer, the
grammar-master, the music-master, the drawing-master. In process of
time, there are added the arithmetic-master, the geometer, the
horse-breaker; he rises early; he has no chance for leisure. He
becomes a cadet; again he has to fear the drill-master, the physical
trainer, the fencing-master, the gymnasiarch. By all these he is
whipt, watched, throttled. He graduates from the cadets at twenty;
again he dreads and watches captain and general, etc. --Teles the
Stoic (B. C. 260).
The palmy period in the history of Rome is the period when she had
no literature. It was only when the Roman nationality began to
break up, and cosmopolitan Greek tendencies to lay hold upon the
people, that a literature began to appear. For this reason, Roman
literature from its very inception is, from absolute necessity,
filled with the Greek spirit, and stands in the most direct
opposition to the national spirit of the people. --Mommsen.
Quintiliane, vagae moderator summe juventae,
Gloria Romanae, Quintiliane, togae. --Martial.
Up to the time when Rome began to decline, the school education of her
youth was meagre in the extreme, consisting of reading, writing, and a
little law. All later education that was more than this was borrowed
from the Greeks. It was about the year 200 B. C. , at the close of the
Second Punic War, that their influence began clearly to show itself. The
severe Cato, who so cordially despised rhetoricians and philosophers,
learnt Greek in his old age and wrote, for the use of his son, a series
of manuals on ethics, rhetoric, medicine, military science, farming, and
law. At the same time Scipio Africanus spent his leisure hours in
practising gymnastics. From this time on, and just in proportion as Rome
lost her national character and became cosmopolitan, she more and more
adopted Greek manners, Greek religion (or irreligion), and Greek
education. When, finally, in B. C. 146, Greece became a Roman dependency,
it was strictly true that "Captive Greece took captive her rude
conqueror. " Thousands of Greek schoolmasters, rhetoricians,
philosophers, etc. , flocked to Rome, and, though attempts were made to
expel or suppress them, they held their place, for the simple reason
that the education they offered was a necessity of the time. Rome, the
mistress of the world, had either to become cosmopolitan or perish, and
she preferred the former alternative. She now, for the first time, began
to have a literature and to cultivate her own language. The studies
which she specially affected were (1) grammar, that is, literature, (2)
rhetoric, (3) philosophy, which corresponded to school, college, and
university education. The last, like music and geometry, was, for the
most part, an elegant accomplishment, rather than a serious study. The
physical sciences found little favor.
So long as Roman education was in the hands of Greeks, it was conducted
in the Greek language, and the authors read and discussed were Greek.
But the Romans, though willing enough to borrow Greek culture, were
unwilling to remain permanently in intellectual dependence upon a
conquered people, which in many respects they despised. Strong efforts,
therefore, were made to develop a national literature and a national
education. About the year B. C. 100, Lucius AElius Praeconinus Stilo, a
worthy and conservative Roman knight, opened a private class in Latin
grammar and rhetoric for young men of the upper classes, and from this
time on the direct influence of the Greeks, except in philosophy,
declined. Greek, indeed, continued to be spoken by all persons making
any pretensions to culture; but Latin became the language of Roman
literature. Among the pupils of Stilo were Varro and Cicero, who, along
with Julius Caesar, may be called the parents of the classical Latin
language, literature, and eloquence. Both Varro and Caesar wrote works on
grammar. A certain Cornificius (generally known as _Auctor ad
Herennium_) about this time wrote the first Latin treatise on Rhetoric;
but the great authority on the subject, in practice as well as theory,
was Cicero, who wrote no fewer than seven works on it. With Cicero's
death, and the transformation of the republic into an empire, eloquence
lost its noblest use, the defence of liberty. Rhetoric, nevertheless,
continued to be cultivated as a fine art and for forensic use, and,
indeed, was made to cover the whole of the higher education of youth. Of
this art the most celebrated teacher was Quintilian, "the supreme
director of giddy youth, the glory of the Roman toga" (_i. e. _ civil
manhood).
Quintilian was born about A. D. 35 in the Spanish city of Calagurris
(Calahorra), where, later, St. Dominic first saw the light. He was
educated in Rome, but afterwards returned to his native place and
established himself as a teacher of rhetoric. About A. D. 68, he was
invited by the Emperor Galba to settle in Rome, which he did, giving
instruction in rhetoric with unparalleled success for twenty years, and
drawing a salary from the government. At the end of that time, he
retired, rich and honored, into private life. It was after this that he
wrote the work which carried his fame down to posterity, his _Institutio
Oratorica_, or Education of the Orator. In the first book of this he
draws out a scheme of preparatory education for the family and the
school; the succeeding ten are devoted to rhetoric, and the last to the
character of the orator, whom he regards as identical with the
cultivated gentleman. It is only the first book that concerns the modern
student of education, and of this I shall now give a brief summary.
The first care of the parent, after the birth of a child, should be to
procure for it a nurse of good moral character and of cultivated speech.
A child that early learns bad habits in acting and speaking, rarely, if
ever, gets cured of them afterwards. Great care ought to be taken with
regard to the child's youthful companions, and to his pedagogue, who
ought to be of good character and well-informed. Its first language
ought to be Greek; but Latin ought to be begun early, and both to be
carefully cultivated. There is no need to follow the ordinary custom of
not allowing the child to learn to read or write before the close of its
seventh year. Much can very profitably be done by play long before that.
It is a mistake to teach children to repeat the alphabet before they
know the forms of the letters. These they may learn from tablets or
blocks. As soon as the letters are recognized, they ought to be written.
Following with a pen the forms of letters engraved on ivory tablets is a
good thing. After letters, syllables must be learnt--all the possible
syllables in both languages. After syllables come words, and after
words, sentences. In all this process, it is of the utmost importance to
secure thoroughness by avoiding haste. The child must not attempt words
till he can read and write all the syllables, nor sentences till he is
perfectly familiar with words. In reading sentences, he must learn to
run ahead, so that, while he is pronouncing one word with his lips, he
is recognizing others with his eye. The writing lesson should be
utilized in order to make the child acquainted with rare words and good
poetry. At this stage, his memory ought to be well exercised, and made
to lay up large stores of good literature for future use. At the same
time, his organs of speech should be well trained, by being made to
pronounce rapidly verses containing difficult combinations of sound. [5]
As soon as he is able, the child should go to school. Home education is
objectionable on many accounts, especially for boys intended for
orators. These, above all others, must learn sociability, tact, and
_esprit de corps_, and form school-friendships. Many moral lessons can
be learnt, and many motives employed, in the school, that are not
possible in the family. Among the latter is ambition, which "though
itself a vice, is the parent of many virtues," and therefore ought to be
freely used. Hardly any motive is so powerful.
When a boy is sent to school, his teacher's first business is to
investigate his character and capacity. The chief marks of ability are
memory and power of imitation. Imitation is not mimicry, which is always
a sign of low nature. Slowness, though objectionable, is better than
precocity, which should be discouraged in every way. Different treatment
is required for different boys: some need the bit, some the spur. The
best boy is the one "whom praise excites, whom glory pleases, who cries
when he is beaten.
Such a one may be nourished with emulation; reproach
will sting him; honor will rouse him. " Boys ought to have seasons of
rest and play, neither too short to afford recreation, nor too long to
encourage idleness. Games of question and answer are good for
sharpening the wits. In play an excellent opportunity is offered to the
teacher for learning the character of his pupils. Corporal punishment is
altogether to be deprecated, and, indeed, is unneeded when the teacher
does his duty.
What boys learn in school is grammar; but this must be supplemented by
music and astronomy. Without the former it will be impossible to scan
verse; without the latter, to understand certain allusions and modes of
fixing dates in the poets. A little philosophy is necessary for the sake
of understanding such poets as Empedocles and Lucretius; geometry, in
order to give practice in apodictic reasoning, as well as for practical
uses. Thus the curriculum of school education will consist of Grammar,
Music, Astronomy, Philosophy, and Geometry.
Grammar consists of two parts, (1) _Methodics_, or the art of correct
speaking, (2) _Historics_ (German _Realien_), the interpretation of
poets, historians, philosophers, etc. _Methodics_--grammar in the modern
sense--should aim at enabling a boy to speak and write with correctness,
clearness, and elegance. All barbarisms (_i. e. _ foreign words and
idioms), solecisms, affectations, and careless pronunciations are to be
avoided. In the use of language, four things are to be taken into
account, (1) reason, (2) antiquity, (3) authority, (4) custom. In
reading, the boy must be taught "where to draw his breath, where to
divide a verse, where the sense is complete, where it begins, where the
voice is to be raised, where lowered, what inflections to use, what is
to be uttered slowly, what rapidly, what forcibly, what gently. " "That
he may be able to do all this, he must _understand_. Reading must above
all be manly and grave, with a certain sweetness. " Poetry must not be
read either as prose, nor yet in a sing-song way. All theatrical
personification, and all gesticulation smacking of the comedian, are to
be avoided.
For _Histories_ the teacher must be very careful in his selection of
texts. Homer and Virgil are best to begin with. Though their full import
cannot be understood by youth, they awake enthusiasm for what is noble
and spirited, and will often be read in later life. "Tragedies are
useful. There is nourishment in the lyric poets"; but they must be used
with caution and in selections, from which everything relating to love
must be excluded. Even Horace must be expurgated. Satire and comedy,
though of the utmost value for the orator, must be deferred till the
moral character is sufficiently established not to be injured by them.
Passages from the poets ought to be committed to memory. In all reading,
the utmost care ought to be taken to promote purity and manliness
(_sanctitas et virilitas_).
After reading a piece of poetry, boys must be made to analyze and scan
it, to point out peculiarities of language and rhythm, to enumerate the
different meanings of words, to name and explain the various figures of
speech. But far more important than all this it is, that the teacher
should impress on their minds the importance of systematic arrangement
and propriety of description, "showing what is suitable for each role,
what is commendable in thought, what in expression, where diffuseness
is proper, and where brevity. " In giving collateral information, whether
in history, mythology, or geography, he should keep within bounds,
giving only what is necessary and rests on respectable authority. "It is
one of the virtues of a schoolmaster to be ignorant of some things. "
As regards lessons in composition, the teacher should begin by making
his pupils write out from memory the _Fables_ of AEsop, in pure, simple,
direct, and unadorned language. He should then call upon them to turn
poetry into prose, and to paraphrase it, either briefly or diffusely. He
should then make them write out proverbs, apophthegms, aphorisms, short,
brilliant anecdotes, etc. Famous stories related by the poets may be
used as subjects for composition, but chiefly for the sake of
information. Beyond this the schoolmaster should not go in the matter of
composition. The rest should be left to the rhetorician.
It is of great importance in youthful education that several subjects
should be studied at the same time. Boys like and need variety, and,
when they get it, it is truly astonishing how much they can accomplish.
"There is not the slightest reason for fearing that boys will shrink
from the labor of study. No age is less easily fatigued. " . . . "Boys are
naturally more inclined to hard work than young men. "
Such, in brief, is Quintilian's school-programme. It has no place for
physical science (except Astronomy), for manual training, or for
physical exercise. Play is, indeed, permitted as a necessary recreation,
and gymnastics and physical training (? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ) are recommended in
so far as they are necessary to enable the budding orator to move and
to gesticulate gracefully; but that is all. "Nothing can please that is
not becoming. "
As soon as he is ready, the young aspirant for oratorical fame passes
into the hands of the rhetorician, under whom he learns all the arts,
and acquires all that knowledge, necessary to fit him for his
profession. No kind of knowledge, and no moral excellence ought to be
foreign to the orator. Quintilian is very severe upon the philosophers
for claiming, in their title, to be, in an exceptional way, lovers of
wisdom, and maintains that the true orator is the truly wise and good
man. He is surely superior to the philosopher, who turns his back upon
the world and manifests no interest in human affairs. Moreover,
"philosophy may be simulated; eloquence cannot. "
The closing chapter of the last book of Quintilian's work treats of the
orator after his retirement from public life. He is to devote himself to
writing and to the study of art, science, and philosophy. The picture is
charming; but it ends with death, and there is nothing beyond. God may
be defined for oratorical purposes; but his existence is a matter of
conjecture.
In Quintilian we have the highest type of the civic man living under a
cosmopolitan despotism. His defects--his pedantry, his servility, his
externality, his worldliness--are only such as are natural to a good man
placed in this position, without any outlook upon a higher existence.
CHAPTER III
PLOTINUS AND PHILOSOPHIC EDUCATION
The material body, which is subject to motion, change, dissolution,
and division, requires an immaterial principle to hold and bind it
together in unity. This principle of unity is the soul. If it were
material, it would require another principle of unity, and so on _ad
infinitum_, till an immaterial first were reached, which would then
be the true soul. --Ammonius Saccas.
Intelligible things, when they are united with other things, are not
changed, as corporeal things are when they are united with each
other, but remain as they are, and what they are. Soul and body are
intimately united, but not mixed. The soul can separate and withdraw
itself from the body, not only in sleep, but also in thought. As the
sun illuminates and yet remains itself a separate light, so is the
soul in its relation to the body. It is not in the body as in place;
rather the body is in it and of it. --_Id. _
One's duty is to become first man, then God. --Hierocles.
Neither Schelling nor Baader nor Hegel has refuted Plotinus: in many
ways he soars above them. --Arthur Richter.
What is loved by us here is mortal and hurtful. Our love is love for
an image, that often turns into its opposite, because what we loved
was not truly worthy of love, nor the good which we sought. God
alone is the true object of our love. --Plotinus.
The practical and the contemplative lives, which Plato and Aristotle had
labored so hard to combine and correlate, in order to save human worth
and Greek civilization, fell asunder, despite all their
efforts--greatly, of course, to the detriment of both. In the terrible
picture which Quintilian draws of Roman life in the first century of
our era, we see one side of the result of this divorce: in the cruel
satires of Lucian, written less than a century later, we may find
depicted the other. But, just as, in the midst of the moral corruption
and brutality, there arose from time to time worthy men like Quintilian
and Tacitus, so amid the philosophical charlatanry and pretence, there
still survived a few earnest thinkers, who aspired with all the power
that was in them to divine truth, and strove to find in the eternal
world that reality which was so miserably wanting in this. By far the
greater number of these men were neither Greeks nor Romans, but
Orientals, men whose thinking combined Greek philosophy with some
earnest form of Eastern mysticism. To such men this life was merely an
opportunity of preparing for a higher, in which lay all beauty, all
good, and all blessedness. It is not difficult to see what sort of
education would follow from this view of life. It may best be
characterized by the one word "ascetic. " It no longer seeks to train
harmoniously all the faculties of body and mind with a view to a worthy
social life, but to enable the soul to die to the body and to social
life, and so rise to union and consubstantiality with God. In no sect
was this tendency more marked than in the Neoplatonic, or, as it might
equally well be called, the Neoaristotelian or Neopythagorean, the
greatest name in which is Plotinus.
Plotinus was born in Egypt about A. D. 205. His nationality is unknown.
He received his education in Alexandria--grammar, rhetoric, and
philosophy,--and adopted the teaching of the last as a profession. He
sought in vain, however, for a system that could satisfy him, till he
met with Ammonius "the Sack-bearer," whom he at once recognized as his
master. This Ammonius had been reared as a Christian, but had
apostatized on becoming acquainted with philosophy. His Christian
education, however, had not been altogether lost on him; for he had
carried over into philosophy a religious spirit, and not a few of the
esoteric ideas then current in certain Christian sects. It was this,
apparently, that enabled him to give a new direction to philosophy, and
to found a new school, whose influence upon subsequent, even Christian,
thought, it would be difficult to overestimate. His school was the
Neoplatonic, which, more than any other, united profound thought with
mystic theosophy (? ? ? ? ? ? ).
Plotinus listened to Ammonius for eleven years, and, on the death of the
latter, paid a visit to Persia, with the view of studying the religion
of that country. He shortly returned, however, and, after a brief
sojourn at Antioch, betook himself, in his fortieth year (A. D. 244), to
Rome, where he spent the remainder of his life as a teacher of
philosophy. His saintly character and his deep, religious thought drew
round him a considerable number of earnest men and women, including even
members of the imperial family. He made some attempt to found in
Campania a Platonopolis, so that his principles might be realized in a
social life, in a theosophic community; but this was never carried out.
He died in A. D. 270. Plotinus was the only truly great, original ancient
thinker after Aristotle.
While Plato and Aristotle had sought to rise to the intelligible world
from, and by means of, the sensible, Plotinus, believing that he has
attained a direct, intuitional knowledge of the former, sets out from it
and thence tries to reach the other. At the summit of being he finds the
supreme Platonic principle, the One or the Good, absolutely transcendent
and self-sufficient; next below this, the supreme Aristotelian
principle, Intelligence or Absolute Knowing, the _locus_ of all ideas;
and third, the supreme principle of the Stoics, Soul, Life, or Zeus, the
animating principle of the world. Good, Intelligence, Life--these are
Plotinus' divine trinity, evolved by a process of abstraction from the
_Nous_ of Aristotle (see p. 161). The members of this trinity are
neither personal, conscious, nor equal. Each lower is caused by, but
does not emanate from, the next above it; and this causation is due, not
to any act of free will, but to an inner necessity. Thus the trinity of
Plotinus is a mere energy, acting according to necessary laws. The third
member of it turns toward matter, which is mere poverty and hunger for
being, and, in so doing, produces a world of gods, daemons, and mundane
beings, the highest of which last is man. All that has matter has
multiplicity.
It is easy enough to see what kind of ethics and education will spring
from such a system as this. Inasmuch as the good means self-sufficiency,
freedom from multiplicity and matter, evil means dependence,
multiplicity, materiality. Whatever evil there is in man is due to his
connection with matter, for which he is in no sense responsible. His
sole business, if he desires blessedness, is to free himself from
matter and multiplicity, and return to the unity of the Supreme Good.
The steps by which this may be accomplished are, (1) Music or Art, (2)
Love, (3) Philosophy or Dialectic: through all these he rises above
multiplicity into unity. In all this there is, obviously, neither moral
evil nor moral good, and, indeed, the world of Plotinus contains no
moral element, for the simple reason that it contains nothing personal,
either in God or man. Evil is the product of necessity, and
consciousness, implying as it does, multiplicity, is part of it. The
unethical character of Plotinus' teaching comes out very clearly in his
reversal of the positions of instruction and purgation in the scheme of
education. According to the old view, purgation was a mere medical
process, preparatory to ethical training (see p. 7). According to the
Neoplatonic view, ethical training and the "political virtues" are a
mere preparation for purgation and the intellectual virtues. And this is
perfectly logical; for evil, being physical, must be cured by physical
means. And the means which Plotinus recommends are magical, rather than
moral; rites and prayers, rather than heroic deeds; the suppression of
the will, rather than its exercise.
Plotinus is too much of a Greek to accept, or even see, all the
consequences of his own theory, which makes moral life consist in an
attempt to escape from the world and to quench consciousness and
personality. Accordingly, though he has a poor opinion of civic life (a
thing excusable enough in those days), he believes that the civic
virtues ought to be cultivated, as a means toward the higher, and has
apparently nothing to say against the ordinary grammatical, rhetorical,
and musical education of his time. He has a good deal to say in favor of
Mathematics, as a preparation for what to him is the supreme branch of
education, Dialectics. But the tendency of his teaching is only too
obvious, and the conclusions which he did not draw, time and succeeding
generations drew for him. The effect of Neoplatonism was, in the long
run, to make the super-civic part of man the whole man, to discredit
political life and political effort, and to pave the way for the mystic,
the ascetic, and the hermit. Nor were the tendencies of the other
philosophical schools in any marked degree different. Thus philosophy,
instead of contributing to harmonize man and society, and to restore
moral life, came to be one of the strongest agencies in bringing about
confusion and dissolution, by ignoring moral life altogether, embracing
superstition, and turning man into a mere plaything of blind necessity
and magical forces. And thus ancient civilization fell to pieces,
because man himself had fallen to pieces, and each piece tried to set
itself up for the whole. The civic fragment finds its highest expression
in Quintilian, the super-civic in Plotinus. Ere the fragments can be
united into a truly moral being, a member of a truly moral society, a
new combining force, unknown to either rhetorician or philosopher, must
arise.
CHAPTER IV
CONCLUSION
Truly it was an old world, and even Caesar's patriotic genius was not
enough to make it young again. The dawn does not return till the
night has fully set in. --Mommsen.
My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,
saith the Lord. --Isaiah.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all
thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first
commandment. And a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself. --Jesus.
Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things
that are God's. --_Id. _
Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings? and not one of them is
forgotten in the sight of God. But the very hairs of your head are
all numbered. --_Id. _
We love because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and
hateth his brother, he is a liar. --John.
By one intelligible form, which is the divine Essence, and one
conscious intention, which is the divine Word, things may be known
in their multiplicity by God. --Thomas Aquinas.
If God acts in all things, and such action in no way derogates from
his dignity, but even belongs to his universal and supreme power, he
cannot consider it below him, nor does it stain his dignity, if he
extend his providence to the individual things of this world. --_Id. _
Une immense esperance a passe sur la terre. --Alfred de Musset.
We have seen that the Greek ideal of life rested upon the complete
identification of the man with the citizen. We have seen also how this
ideal was paralyzed by the growth of individualism; how the wisest men
thought to render this innocuous and even beneficent, by providing for
it a sphere of contemplation, superior to that of practice, but
organically related to it, and, finally how, with the failure of this
attempt, the two sides of human nature, divorced from each other,
degenerated, the one into selfish worldliness, the other into equally
selfish other-worldliness, both conditions equally destitute of moral
significance.
This sad result was mainly due to three causes, (1) that the remedies
proposed for individualism were not sufficient, (2) that the best remedy
was set aside, (3) that the conditions for which the remedies were
offered soon ceased to exist. Both Plato and Aristotle wrote for the
small Greek polities, which lost their autonomy through the Macedonian
conquest. If it may be doubted whether even the proposals of the latter
would have redeemed these polities, had they continued free, it is
certain that they would have been ineffective under the changed
circumstances. At all events, they were never adopted, and even for the
super-civic man the teaching of Plato was preferred to his.
As the new cosmopolitanism deepened the gulf between the citizen and the
individual, and immeasurably widened the sphere of the latter, in the
same proportion did the teaching of Plato fail to bridge over that gulf,
and provide activity for that sphere. To tell the super-civic man now
that his function was to contemplate divine things and oracularly
deliver laws for the guidance of the world, would have argued an absence
of humor not common in those days. Besides, those persons who claimed
to have contemplated divine things showed no such fitness for
legislation as to induce practical men to accept their guidance. The
sober fact was, that the contemplation of divine things, which more and
more absorbed the energy of Greek thought, was, except for Aristotle, a
mere vague asperation without moral value, and became ever more a sort
of mystic ecstasy, in which the individual, instead of acquiring insight
and power to live worthily and beneficently in the world, was thrown
back upon himself, with his will paralyzed. Nor could this be otherwise,
seeing the nature of the divine things, the contemplation of which was
reckoned so important. Instead of being personal attributes, or a person
imposing a moral law seen to be binding, they were mere abstractions,
increasing in emptiness the higher they were in the series, the highest
being absolute vacancy. In vain had Aristotle protested that all reality
is individual: the Platonic theory, that all knowledge is of ideas or
universals, prevailed, with the result that the highest knowledge was
held to be knowledge of that which is absolutely universal, viz.
indeterminate being or, as Plotinus held, something lacking even the
determination of being--the Supreme Good. That the super-civic man
should find satisfaction in gazing into vacancy, or be any more valuable
in the world after he had done so, no matter how spotless his life and
ecstatic his look, is inconceivable.
But while, in the Greek world, the sphere of activity of the super-civic
man was vanishing into nothingness, among a small and obscure band of
restored exiles of Semitic race, that sphere had come to claim the
entire man and all his relations, practical and spiritual. Isaiah's
little band of faithful followers (see p. 133) had grown into a nation,
living by no law save that of Jehovah, a very real, very awful, and very
holy personality, whom the heaven of heavens could not contain, but who
yet watched the rising up and the sitting down of every son of man.
