A History of Western Philosophy of Education in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Kevin H. Gary

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350365896
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350074460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica de la educación

This volume traces the history of Western philosophy of education from the Medieval through the Renaissance period (500-1550). This vast expanse of time includes the rise of Christian monasticism (one of the most enduring and revolutionary models of education in the history of the West), the birth of Islam (with its advances in mathematical, scientific, and philosophical reasoning), the rise of the university (as an emerging force distinct from ecclesiastical and state control), and the dawn of the Enlightenment. It includes chapters on the educational thought of Benedict, Abelard, Heloise, Aquinas, Maimonides, the prophet Mohammaed, Hrosvitha of Ganderscheim, Hildegard of Bingen, among others. It also considers the educational impact of Reformation thinkers like Erasmus and Luther, and Renaissance thinkers such as Montaigne.

About A History of Western Philosophy of Education:

An essential resource for researchers, scholars, and students of education, this five-volume set that traces the development of philosophy of education through Western culture and history. Focusing on philosophers who have theorized education and its implementation, the series constitutes a fresh, dynamic, and developing view of educational philosophy. It expands our educational possibilities by reinvigorating philosophy's vibrant critical tradition, connecting old and new perspectives, and identifying the continuity of critique and reconstruction. It also includes a timeline showing major historical events, including educational initiatives and the publication of noteworthy philosophical works.

CHAPTER ONE

The Monastic Turn: 400–1150

BRETT BERTUCIO

INTRODUCTION

“We are, therefore, about to found a school of the Lord’s service.”¹ Thus ends the Prologue of the Rule of St. Benedict, a sixth-century guide to monastic living and perhaps the most influential document in Western monasticism. Etymologically, if not historically, Benedict’s Rule also marks the foundation of many concepts related to Western schooling that persist into the present. The Latin term schola used here, from which we derive the English “school,” held a variety of meanings. It could signify the monastic choir, a classroom, any room in general, or indeed the entirety of the monastery (Riché 1978: 459). This latter sense of the monastic schola captures Benedict’s intentions most completely. The monks of his Monte Cassino Abbey, their contemporaries throughout the continent, and their successors adhered to a vision of education that encompassed the totality of the monastic experience. The integration of work, study, and prayer within a comprehensive worldview generated a form of human development that was both transformative and demanding. In their devotion to the written word, their insistence on silence, and their reorientation of the purpose of liberal learning, the monks and nuns of the early medieval period introduced a particular genius into the educational history of the West.

Of course, the principles that informed monastic education were not created ex nihilo. In many ways, monastic culture was a synthesis of values adopted from the Roman classical school, the Jewish rabbinical tradition, and the theology of the early Christian Fathers. Still, this synthesis was veritably a turning point, a radix from which Western education has never truly departed. Indeed, many of the issues that preoccupied the monastics still attract the attention of philosophers of education. In this sense, an examination of monastic educational thought is not simply an exercise in nostalgia but an opportunity to recover insights that may illuminate contemporary questions.

This chapter begins with a survey of the historical development of the monastic school. A common trope holds that the monastery preserved fragments of the classical tradition through the “Dark Ages” of the fifth through eighth centuries. It may be better to understand the rise of monasticism less as a feeble attempt to avert cultural collapse and more as a response to human desires born out of dramatic historical change. Following this historical overview, I outline several primary sources from which we can glean an understanding of the monastic philosophy of education. These two preliminary sections prepare the way for an analysis of several key principles of monastic education and their intersection with contemporary concerns in the philosophy of education literature. I conclude by reflecting on the range of possible attitudes toward the traces of monastic culture still present in Western schools, gesturing at possible lines of inquiry that scholars might take up in the future.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MONASTIC SCHOOL

The classical school in the fifth century

Whether they embraced it as an inheritance or rejected it as antithetical to their aims, early Western monastics invariably understood their endeavors vis-à-vis the culture of Rome. It will therefore be helpful to take stock of the state of education in the Roman Empire during its decline in the fifth century. From the second century BCE, Roman education bore a markedly Hellenic flavor. Senatorial and aristocratic families ensured that their sons spoke Greek, and Greek slaves were often employed as tutors. Young men of means would be trained in grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic and were exposed to the Greek philosophical tradition. A system of imperial schools was erected in major cities to provide for the humane training of Rome’s upper classes (Marrou 1956: 325–41).

A young man who aspired to membership in the governing class would embark upon a three-stage process of formal schooling. He was first sent to a local instructor, the primus magister, at the age of six or seven to learn to read and write. After a short period, he would study under a grammarian for a period of several years. Concern with the maintenance of a universal language and culture meant that these Roman “grammar schools” aimed to impart a stylistic form of Latin prose that adhered to rigorous grammatical rules. At this point, the student would also be introduced to classical literature. Although increasingly secondary in focus, classical study served to form the moral sensibilities of the young man, ensuring that he was fit for public service. The elements of poetry would be introduced at this stage as well. This was not only to allow the student to appreciate the aesthetic genius of Virgil. Much of Roman culture was communicated through verse, a tendency that remained true for early Christian monastics. Participating in, contributing to, and passing on the classical tradition therefore required a facility with poetic composition (Marrou 1956: 1–5).

While many students would cease their formal education after leaving the primus or grammarian, those destined for higher office would spend between four and six years under the tutelage of a rhetor. In addition to grammar, which Cassiodorus would later term the first of the seven liberal arts, students would be trained in rhetoric and dialectic to complete the classical trivium (Leclercq 1974: 26). By learning grammar (the structure of language itself), dialectic (the process of using language to structure arguments), and rhetoric (the art of making persuasive arguments), students were prepared to explore any discrete area of knowledge.² They would then undertake study in the four Platonic branches of mathematics—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—which later constituted the quadrivium. The Romans, after the Greeks, adopted this libera studia—the education proper to a free person—with the Platonic conviction that the universe was logically ordered and that human flourishing required understanding this order (Wagner 1983).

Yet, by the end of the fifth century CE, knowledge of Greek had become quite rare. Education had turned toward the practical difficulties of managing a large and increasingly fragile empire. The instability caused by successive Germanic invasions weakened any institution serving the urban leisure class. The senatorial families began to migrate away from urban centers, and the classical studies that had been undertaken in municipal schools were largely abandoned to the domain of private tutors. To survive, Rome merely needed bureaucrats trained in law and politicians trained in rhetoric. Medical education persisted, as well as the more practical elements of astronomy, but the poetic genius of classical antiquity became increasingly the possession of a shrinking and isolated aristocracy (Riché 1978: 44–50, 67–70).

The eventual collapse of the empire, traditionally dated to the late fifth century, did not mark the collapse of the classical school. One reason for this is that the Christian populace that generated the monastic movement inhabited the same culture and patronized the same schools as their pagan neighbors. Theological education occurred primarily in the home or in the church community. Indeed, classical culture was so ingrained in the members of Latin Christianity that the faith was most frequently expressed in verse. Between the second and fifth centuries, the most popular religious texts in the Italian peninsula were translations of the Bible into hexameters and varieties of Christian poetry. Thus, the advent of Christianity in Western Europe did little to reorient the content or pedagogy of the schools (Riché 1978: 81–2).

Further, the conquest of the empire by various Germanic tribes changed little in the way of education and daily life in the sixth century. The princes of the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and Vandals had spent a century intermingling with Roman culture and had adopted its language, laws, and traditions to a great extent. Many even fashioned themselves as heirs to the imperial legacy. To retain the bureaucratic health of their rule, they encouraged the operation of the primus magistri in urban areas. The Ostrogothic kings of the Italian peninsula made public expenditures to retain the grammarians and rhetors through the end of the sixth century. Theodric, who reigned from 475 to 526, famously employed Boethius and Cassiodorus as quastori—royal tutors and educational advisors (Riché 1978: 24–45; Vessey 2004: 13–14). The former composed a program of liberal studies while employed in this capacity, which would only be taken up in the eighth century. The latter established one of the centers of monastic learning after the fall of the Ostrogothic Kingdom in 540. These men were simply the most notable of a succession of prominent tutors available to the aristocracy in major cities. In this manner, the mode of education of classical Rome remained available—although less widespread—throughout the transition from the decline of the empire to the Carolingian renaissance in the eighth century (Riché 1978: 139–54).

The rise of Western monasticism

It is important to note that the Germanic kings were at this point either Orthodox Christians or Arians;³ the monastic movement was therefore not primarily a retreat from a repaganized world. By the end of the fifth century, the former territory of Rome was a thoroughly Christian land, and conversion to this new religion was hardly a countercultural decision. Instead, the choice facing the sixth-century European lay between an ascetic, contemplative life and a life in the world (Vessey 2004: 11–12).

The ascetic option was not itself a Western invention. The Eastern eremitic tradition (the mode of life adopted by hermits) predates the development of Western monasteries by at least two centuries. Many look to Anthony of Egypt (d.356 CE) as the founder of Christian monasticism, although recent historical scholarship suggests that eremitism in early Christianity was perhaps an extension of the way of life practiced by first-century Jewish ascetic groups like the Essenes and the Therapeutae (Goerhing 1992: 236). Regardless, Athanasius of Alexandria’s Life of Anthony, penned the year after the hermit’s death, became a source of inspiration for those who would imitate his life. Influenced by the third-century Platonic theologian Origen, Anthony viewed the soul as originally resting in divine communion and perfection. Ascetic practices—fasting, voluntary poverty, celibacy, and keeping vigils—were necessary to return the soul to its ideal form (Dunn 2000: 2–3).

Anthony’s Egyptian contemporary, Pachomius, undertook a similar life of self-denial but within a loosely arranged community. The cenobites (or “convent-dwellers”) who followed his example would gather in either a single dormitory (or twin houses when a community included men and women) or neighboring hermitages, share food, and practice daily prayer in common. The Pachomian literature appeals to the New Testament term “koinonia”—or spiritual communion—to describe this common life. The rigorous asceticism and inner purification practiced by these Eastern monastics required the mutual spiritual and emotional support of a sizable collective (Dunn 2000: 26–30).

Pachomius’ legacy was innovative not only in its development of cenobitism but also in its consolidation of ascetic principles into a formal, written rule of life. Through the pen of Jerome, the famous fourth-century author of the Latin Vulgate, the various disciplines of the Pachomian communities were consolidated into the Pachomian Rule. Jerome was a native Roman but had traveled throughout the East, eventually settling in Bethlehem and living according to a monastic rule influenced by both Pachomius and Anthony (Dunn 2000: 33; Goerhing 1992: 238). During the same period, Basil of Caesarea developed a similar monastic rule, which gained adherents throughout Asia Minor. Through the Latin translations of Jerome and his contemporaries, these texts became available to the West in the late fourth century (Dunn 2000: 37–42).

FIGURE 1.1 St. Benedict. Woodcut engraving after a painting (1487) by Hans Memling (German painter, c. 1433/40–1494) in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, published in 1881. (via Getty Images).

Benedict of Nursia, widely considered the founder of Western monasticism, was heavily indebted to his Eastern forbears. His decision to leave his aristocratic life in early sixth-century Rome was also influenced by the educational milieu of his day. As mentioned, the Italian peninsula under the Ostrogoths was at least nominally Christian, so Benedict did not abandon a formally pagan culture. Yet the classical schools were in numerical and moral decline. Given over to the practical study of law and government, they had largely discarded the study of philosophy. What remained of the classical tradition was not its humanistic wisdom but the often vulgar poetry and mythology of antiquity. Benedict’s personal conversion and exchange of classical culture for an ascetical life began a pattern that many—including his biographer Gregory the Great—would follow (Leclercq 1974: 1–4; Riché 1978: 87–90).

In view of the decline of Roman educational institutions, Benedict’s “school of the Lord’s service” founded at Monte Cassino in 529 was conceived in direct contrast to the antique schools. Benedict’s Rule, written toward the end of his life around 547, would call monks and nuns to a literary diet composed mostly of Scripture and the Church Fathers. It is safe to say that, at least initially, the Western monastic movement did not embrace the classical course of study, even if many of its members were trained in the classical schools during their early lives (Riché 1978: 97–110). The exception may be Cassiodorus’ twin monastery at Vivarium. Following the Byzantine reconquest of Rome in 540, the former royal minister retired to his estate in Scyllacium and founded a monastic community that from the outset was intended to be a center of classical learning. The monks and nuns of Vivarium were instructed in the seven liberal arts and committed long hours to the production of texts (Vessey 2004: 15–19). But, as Jean Leclercq observes, Cassiodorus was not himself a monk, and his initiative was not representative of the monastic spirit of the age. It would not be until the Carolingian renaissance some two centuries later that monastic schooling would start to resemble his model (Leclercq 1974: 26–9).

Education in the sixth- through eighth-century monasteries was arranged primarily according to the need for entering aspirants to participate fully in the cycle of daily monastic life, much of which turned upon the written word. Benedict’s Rule required the chanting of the Psalms at five periods during the day, the setting aside of periods for personal reading and meditation, and the reading of commentary during meals. An interior school was established in most monasteries to train the illiterate and the young. While the majority of aspirants were adults, it was not uncommon for children as young as six or seven to be admitted to the monastery. Especially in Britain and Ireland, child mortality was remarkably high, and committing a child to the stability of a monastery was a prudent survival strategy. Aristocrats on the continent often offered their children to a monaste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Series Introduction
• General Editors’ Acknowledgments
• Volume Editor’s Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Introduction: Historical Vision and Philosophy of Education in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
• 1 The Monastic Turn: 400–1150
• 2 Religion, Reason, and Educational Thought in the Twelfth Century
• 3 Jewish and Muslim Voices
• 4 Thomas Aquinas and Education
• 5 Humanism and Education
• 6 Women Writers and Education
• 7 Religious Reformers and Education in the Sixteenth Century
• 8 Michel de Montaigne and the Bridge to Enlightenment and Modernity
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Imprint