and Rhetoric, a teaching of Philosophy. It was the highest element in
the education of the average Greek of the period. Logic, in the form
of Dialectic, was common to Philosophy and Rhetoric. Every one learnt
to argue: a large number learnt, in addition, the technical terms of
Philosophy and the outlines of its history. Lucian[23] tells a tale of a
country gentleman of the old school, whose nephew went home from lecture
night after night, and regaled his mother and himself with fallacies
and dilemmas, talking about “relations” and “comprehensions” and “mental
presentations,” and jargon of that sort; nay, worse than that, saying,
“that God does not live in heaven, but goes about among stocks and stones
and such-like.” As far as Logic was concerned, it was almost natural
to a Greek mind: Dialectic was but the conversation of a sharp-witted
people conducted under recognized rules. But it was a comparatively new
phase of Philosophy that it should have a literary side. It had shared
in the common degeneracy. It had come to take wisdom at second-hand.
It was not the evolution of a man’s own thoughts, but an acquaintance
with the recorded thoughts of others. It was divorced from practice. It
was degraded to a system of lectures and disputations. It was taught
in the same general way as the studies which preceded it. But lectures
had a more important place. Sometimes the professor read a passage from
a philosopher, and gave his interpretation of it; sometimes he gave a
discourse of his own. Sometimes a student read an essay of his own, or
interpreted a passage of a philosopher, in the presence of the professor,
and the professor afterwards pronounced his opinion upon the correctness
of the reasoning or the interpretation.[24] The Discourses of Epictetus
have a singular interest in this respect, apart from their contents; for
they are in great measure notes of such lectures, and form, as it were,
a photograph of a philosopher’s lecture-room.
Against this degradation of Philosophy, not only the Cynics, but almost
all the more serious philosophers protested. Though Epictetus himself was
a professor, and though he followed the current usages of professorial
teaching, his life and teaching alike were in rebellion against it. “If
I study Philosophy,” he says, “with a view only to its literature, I am
not a philosopher, but a _littérateur_; the only difference is, that I
interpret Chrysippus instead of Homer.”[25] They sometimes protested not
only against the degradation of Philosophy, but also against the whole
conception of literary education. “There are two kinds of education,”
says Dio Chrysostom,[26] “the one divine, the other human; the divine is
great and powerful and easy; the human is mean and weak, and has many
dangers and no small deceitfulness. The mass of people call it education
(παιδείαν), as being, I suppose, an amusement (παιδίαν), and think
that a man who knows most literature—Persian and Greek and Syrian and
Phœenician—is the wisest and best-educated man; and then, on the other
hand, when they find a man of this sort to be vicious and cowardly and
fond of money, they think the education to be as worthless as the man
himself. The other kind they call sometimes education, and sometimes
manliness and high-mindedness. It was thus that the men of old used to
call those who had this good kind of education—men with manly souls, and
educated as Herakles was—sons of God.” And not less significant as an
indication not only of the reaction against this kind of education but
also of its prevalence, is the deprecation of it by Marcus Aurelius: “I
owe it to Rusticus,” he says,[27] “that I formed the idea of the need
of moral reformation, and that I was not diverted to literary ambition,
or to write treatises on philosophical subjects, or to make rhetorical
exhortations ... and that I kept away from rhetoric and poetry and
foppery of speech.”
II. I pass from the forms of education to its extent. The general
diffusion of it, and the hold which it had upon the mass of men, are
shown by many kinds of evidence.
1. They are shown by the large amount of literary evidence as to scholars
and the modes of obtaining education. The exclusiveness of the old
aristocracy had broken down. Education was no longer in the hands of
“private tutors” in the houses of the great families. It entered public
life, and in doing so left a record behind it. It may be inferred from
the extant evidence that there were grammar-schools in almost every town.
At these all youths received the first part of their education. But it
became a common practice for youths to supplement this by attending the
lectures of an eminent professor elsewhere. They went, as we might say,
from school to a University.[28] The students who so went away from
home were drawn from all classes of the community. Some of them were
very poor, and, like the “bettelstudenten” of the mediæval Universities,
had sometimes to beg their bread.[29] “You are a miserable race,” says
Epictetus[30] to some students of this kind; “when you have eaten your
fill to-day, you sit down whining about to-morrow, where to-morrow’s
dinner will come from.” Some of them went because it was the fashion.
The young sybarites of Rome or Athens complained bitterly that at
Nicopolis, where they had gone to listen to Epictetus, lodgings were bad,
and the baths were bad, and the gymnasium was bad, and “society” hardly
existed.[31] Then, as now, there were home-sick students, and mothers
weeping over their absence, and letters that were looked for but never
came, and letters that brought bad news; and young men of promise who
were expected to return home as living encyclopædias, but who only raised
doubts when they did return home whether their education had done them
any good.[32] Then, as now, they went from the lecture-room to athletic
sports or the theatre; “and the consequence is,” says Epictetus,[33]
“that you don’t get out of your old habits or make moral progress.” Then,
as now, some students went, not for the sake of learning, but in order to
be able to show off. Epictetus draws a picture of one who looked forward
to airing his logic at a city dinner, astonishing the “alderman” who sat
next to him with the puzzles of hypothetical syllogisms.[34] And then,
as now, those who had followed the fashion by attending lectures showed
by their manner that they were there against their will. “You should sit
upright,” says Plutarch,[35] in his advice to hearers in general, “not
lolling, or whispering, or smiling, or yawning as if you were asleep, or
fixing your eyes on the ground instead of on the speaker.” In a similar
way Philo,[36] also speaking of hearers in general, says: “Many persons
who come to a lecture do not bring their minds inside with them, but go
wandering about outside, thinking ten thousand things about ten thousand
different subjects—family affairs, other people’s affairs, private
affairs, ... and the professor talks to an audience, as it were, not of
men but of statues, which have ears but hear not.”
2. A second indication of the hold which education had upon the age
is the fact that teaching had come to be a recognized and lucrative
profession. This is shown not so much by the instances of individual
teachers,[37] who might be regarded as exceptional, as by the fact of
the recognition of teachers by the State and by municipalities.
The recognition by the State took the double form of endowment and of
immunities from public burdens.
(_a_) Endowments probably began with Vespasian, who endowed teachers
of Rhetoric at Rome with an annual grant of 100,000 sesterces from the
imperial treasury. Hadrian founded an Athenæum or University at Rome,
like the Museum or University at Alexandria, with an adequate income,
and with a building of sufficient importance to be sometimes used as a
Senate-house. He also gave large sums to the professors at Athens: in
this he was followed by Antoninus Pius: but the first permanent endowment
at Athens seems to have been that of Marcus Aurelius, who founded two
chairs in each of the four great philosophical schools of Athens, the
Academic, the Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic, and added
one of the new or literary Rhetoric, and one of the old or forensic
Rhetoric.[38]
(_b_) The immunities of the teaching classes began with Julius Cæsar,
and appear to have been so amply recognized in the early empire that
Antoninus Pius placed them upon a footing which at once established and
limited them. He enacted that small cities might place upon the free list
five physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature;
that assize towns might so place seven physicians, three teachers of
rhetoric, and three of literature; and that metropolitan cities might so
place ten physicians, five teachers of rhetoric, and five of literature;
but that these numbers should not be exceeded. These immunities were a
form of indirect endowment.[39] They exempted those whom they affected
from all the burdens which tended in the later empire to impoverish the
middle and upper classes. They were consequently equivalent to the gift
from the municipality of a considerable annual income.
3. A third indication of the hold of education upon contemporary society
is the place which its professors held in social intercourse. They were
not only a recognized class; they also mingled largely, by virtue of
their profession, with ordinary life. If a dinner of any pretensions
were given, the professor of Belles Lettres must be there to recite
and expound passages of poetry, the professor of Rhetoric to speak
upon any theme which might be proposed to him, and the professor of
Philosophy to read a discourse upon morals. A “sermonette” from one of
these professional philosophers after dinner was as much in fashion
as a piece of vocal or instrumental music is with us.[40] All three
kinds of professors were sometimes part of the permanent retinue of a
great household. But the philosophers were even more in fashion than
their brother professors. They were petted by great ladies. They became
“domestic chaplains.”[41] They were sometimes, indeed, singularly like
the chaplains of whom we read in novels of the last century. Lucian, in
his essay “On Persons who give their Society for Pay,” has some amusing
vignettes of their life. One is of a philosopher who has to accompany
his patroness on a tour: he is put into a waggon with the cook and the
lady’s-maid, and there is but a scanty allowance of leaves thrown in
to ease his limbs against the jolting.[42] Another is of a philosopher
who is summoned by his lady and complimented, and asked as an especial
favour, “You are so very kind and careful: will you take my lapdog
into the waggon with you, and see that the poor creature does not want
for anything?”[43] Another is of a philosopher who has to discourse on
temperance while his lady is having her hair braided: her maid comes in
with a _billet-doux_, and the discourse on temperance is suspended until
she has written an answer to her lover.[44] Another is of a philosopher
who only gets his pay in doles of two or three pence at a time, and
is thought a bore if he asks for it, and whose tailor or shoemaker is
meanwhile waiting to be paid, so that even when the money comes it seems
to do him no good.[45] It is natural to find that Philosophy, which had
thus become a profession, had also become degenerate. It afforded an easy
means of livelihood. It was natural that some of those who adopted it
should be a disgrace to their profession. And although it would be unsafe
to take every description of the great satirist literally, yet it is
difficult to believe that there is not a substantial foundation of truth
in his frequent caricatures. The fact of their frequency, and also the
fact that such men as he describes could exist, strengthen the inference
which other facts enable us to draw, as to the large place which the
professional philosophers occupied in contemporary society. The following
is his picture of Thrasycles:[46]
“He comes along with his beard spread out and his eyebrows
raised, talking solemnly to himself, with a Titan-like look in
his eyes, with his hair thrown back from his forehead, the very
picture of Boreas or Triton, as Zeuxis painted them. This is
the man who in the morning dresses himself simply, and walks
sedately, and wears a sober gown, and preaches long sermons
about virtue, and inveighs against the votaries of pleasure:
then he has his bath and goes to dinner, and the butler offers
him a large goblet of wine, and he drinks it down with as much
gusto as if it were the water of Lethe: and he behaves in
exactly the opposite way to his sermons of the morning, for he
snatches all the tit-bits like a hawk, and elbows his neighbour
out of the way, and he peers into the dishes with as keen an
eye as if he were likely to find Virtue herself in them; and he
goes on preaching all the time about temperance and moderation,
until he is so dead-drunk that the servants have to carry him
out. Nay, besides this, there is not a man to beat him in the
way of lying and braggadocio and avarice: he is the first of
flatterers and the readiest of perjurers: chicanery leads the
way, and impudence follows after: in fact, he is clever all
round, doing to perfection whatever he touches.”
4. But nothing could more conclusively prove the great hold which these
forms of education had upon their time than the fact of their persistent
survival. It might be maintained that the prominence which is given to
them in literature, their endowment by the State, and their social
influence, represented only a superficial and passing phase. But when
the product of one generation spreads its branches far and wide into
the generations that succeed, its roots must be deep and firm in the
generation from which it springs. No lasting element of civilization
grows upon the surface. Greek education has been almost as permanent as
Christianity itself, and for similar reasons. It passed from Greece into
Africa and the West. It had an especial hold first on the Roman and then
upon the Celtic and Teutonic populations of Gaul; and from the Gallican
schools it has come, probably by direct descent, to our own country and
our own time.
Two things especially have come:
(i.) The place which literature holds in general education. We educate
our sons in grammar, and in doing so we feed them upon ancient rather
than upon English literature, by simple continuation of the first branch
of the mediæval _trivium_, which was itself a continuation of the Greek
habit which has been described above.
(ii.) The other point, though less important in itself, is even more
important as indicating the strength of the Greek educational system. It
is that we retain still its technical terms and many of its scholastic
usages, either in their original Greek form or as translated into Latin
and modified by Latin habits, in the schools of the West.
The designation “professor” comes to us from the Greek sophists, who drew
their pupils by promises: to “profess” was to “promise,” and to promise
was the characteristic of the class of teachers with whom in the fourth
century B.C. Greek education began. The title lost its original force,
and became the general designation of a public teacher, superseding the
special titles, “philosopher,” “sophist,” “rhetorician,” “grammarian,”
and ending by being the synonym of “doctor.”[47]
The practice of lecturing, that is of giving instruction by reading
an ancient author, with longer or shorter comments upon his meaning,
comes to us from the schools in which a passage of Homer or Plato or
Chrysippus was read and explained. The “lecture” was probably in the
first instance a student’s exercise: the function of the teacher was to
make remarks or to give his judgment upon the explanation that was given:
it was not so much _legere_ as _prælegere_, whence the existing title of
“prælector.”[48]
The use of the word “chair” to designate the teacher’s office, and of the
word “faculty” to denote the branch of knowledge which he teaches, are
similar survivals of Greek terms.[49]
The use of academical designations as titles is also Greek: it was
written upon a man’s tombstone that he was “philosopher” or “sophist,”
“grammarian” or “rhetorician,” as in later times he would be designated
M.A. or D.D.[50] The most interesting of these designations is that of
“sophist.” The long academical history of the word only ceased at Oxford
a few years ago, when the clauses relating to “sophistæ generales” were
erased as obsolete from the statute-book.
The restriction of the right to teach, and the mode of testing a man’s
qualifications to teach, have come to us from the same source. The former
is probably a result of the fact which has been mentioned above, that
the teachers of liberal arts were privileged and endowed. The State
guarded against the abuse of the privilege, as in subsequent times for
similar reasons it put limitations upon the appointment of the Christian
clergy. In the case of some of the professors at Athens who were endowed
from the imperial chest, the Emperors seem to have exercised a certain
right of nomination, as in our own country the Crown nominates a “Regius
Professor;”[51] but in the case of others of those professors, the
nomination was in the hands of “the best and oldest and wisest in the
city,” that is, either the Areopagus, or the City Council, or, as some
have thought, a special Board.[52] Elsewhere, and apparently without
exception in later times, the right of approval of a teacher was in the
hands of the City Council, the ordinary body for the administration of
municipal affairs.[53] The authority which conferred the right might also
take it away: a teacher who proved incompetent might have his licence
withdrawn.[54] The testing of qualifications preceded the admission to
office. It was sometimes superseded by a sort of _congé d’élire_ from the
Emperor;[55] but in ordinary cases it consisted in the candidate’s giving
a lecture or taking part in a discussion before either the Emperor’s
representative or the City Council.[56] It was the small beginning of
that system of “examination” which in our own country and time has grown
to enormous proportions. The successful candidate was sometimes escorted
to his house, as a mark of honour, by the proconsul and the “examiners,”
just as in Oxford, until the present generation, a “grand compounder”
might claim to be escorted home by the Vice-chancellor and Proctors.[57]
In the fourth century appear to have come restrictions not only upon
teaching, but also upon studying: a student might probably go to a
lecture, but he might not formally announce his devotion to learning by
putting on the student’s gown without the leave of the professors, as in
a modern University a student must be formally enrolled before he can
assume the academical dress.[58]
The survival of these terms and usages, as indicating the strength
of the system to which they originally belonged, is emphasized by the
fact that for a long interval of time there are few, if any, traces of
them.[59] They are found in full force in Gaul in the fifth and sixth
centuries: they are found again when education began to revive on a large
scale in the tenth century; they then appear, not as new creations, but
as terms and usages which had lasted all through what has been called
“the Benedictine era,”[60] without special nurture and without literary
expression, by the sheer persistency of their original roots.
* * * * *
This is the feature of the Greek life into which Christianity came to
which I first invite your attention. There was a complex system of
education, the main elements in which were the knowledge of literature,
the cultivation of literary expression, and a general acquaintance with
the rules of argument. This education was widely diffused, and had a
great hold upon society. It had been at work in its main outlines for
several centuries. Its effect in the second century of our era had been
to create a certain habit of mind. When Christianity came into contact
with the society in which that habit of mind existed, it modified, it
reformed, it elevated, the ideas which it contained and the motives
which stimulated it to action; but in its turn it was itself profoundly
modified by the habit of mind of those who accepted it. It was impossible
for Greeks, educated as they were with an education which penetrated
their whole nature, to receive or to retain Christianity in its primitive
simplicity. Their own life had become complex and artificial: it had
its fixed ideas and its permanent categories: it necessarily gave to
Christianity something of its own form. The world of the time was a
world, I will not say like our own world, which has already burst its
bonds, but like the world from which we are beginning to be emancipated—a
world which had created an artificial type of life, and which was
too artificial to be able to recognize its own artificiality—a world
whose schools, instead of being the laboratories of the knowledge
of the future, were forges in which the chains of the present were
fashioned from the knowledge of the past. And if, on the one hand, it
incorporated Christianity with the larger humanity from which it had at
first been isolated, yet, on the other hand, by crushing uncultivated
earnestness, and by laying more stress on the expression of ideas than
upon ideas themselves, it tended to stem the very forces which had given
Christianity its place, and to change the rushing torrent of the river of
God into a broad but feeble stream.
LECTURE III.
GREEK AND CHRISTIAN EXEGESIS.
Two thousand years ago, the Greek world was nearer than we are now to
the first wonder of the invention of writing. The mystery of it still
seemed divine. The fact that certain signs, of little or no meaning in
themselves, could communicate what a man felt or thought, not only to
the generation of his fellows, but also to the generations that came
afterwards, threw a kind of glamour over written words. It gave them
an importance and an impressiveness which did not attach to any spoken
words. They came in time to have, as it were, an existence of their own.
Their precise relation to the person who first uttered them, and their
literal meaning at the time of their utterance, tended to be overlooked
or obscured.
In the case of the ancient poets, especially Homer, this glamour of
written words was accompanied, and perhaps had been preceded, by two
other feelings.
The one was the reverence for antiquity. The voice of the past sounded
with a fuller note than that of the present. It came from the age of the
heroes who had become divinities. It expressed the national legends and
the current mythology, the primitive types of noble life and the simple
maxims of awakening reflection, the “wisdom of the ancients,” which has
sometimes itself taken the place of religion. The other was the belief
in inspiration. With the glamour of writing was blended the glamour of
rhythm and melody. When the gods spoke, they spoke in verse.[61] The
poets sang under the impulse of a divine enthusiasm. It was a god who
gave the words: the poet was but the interpreter.[62] The belief was not
merely popular, but was found in the best minds of the imperial age.
“Whatever wise and true words were spoken in the world about God and the
universe, came into the souls of men not without the Divine will and
intervention through the agency of divine and prophetic men.”[63] “To
the poets sometimes, I mean the very ancient poets, there came a brief
utterance from the Muses, a kind of inspiration of the divine nature and
truth, like a flash of light from an unseen fire.”[64]
The combination of these three feelings, the mystery of writing, the
reverence for antiquity, the belief in inspiration, tended to give the
writings of the ancient poets a unique value. It lifted them above
the common limitations of place and time and circumstance. The verses
of Homer were not simply the utterances of a particular person with a
particular meaning for a particular time. They had a universal validity.
They were the voice of an undying wisdom. They were the Bible of the
Greek races.[65]