§ 243. The Romish Church negated the abstract substantiality of the
Greeks through the practical aim which she in her sanctity in works
founded, and by means of which she raised up German individuality to the
idealism of chivalry, i.e. a free military service in behalf of
Christendom.
§ 244. It is evident that the system of monkish education was taken up
into this epoch as one of its elements, being modified to conform to it:
e.g. the Benedictines were accustomed to labor in agriculture and in the
transcribing of books, and this contradicted the idea of monachism,
since that in and for itself tends to an absolute forgetfulness of the
world and a perfect absence of all activity in the individual. The
begging orders were public preachers, and made popular the idea of love
and unselfish devotion to others. They labored toward self-education,
especially by means of the ideal of the life of Christ; e.g. in Tauler's
classical book on the Imitation of Jesus, and in the work of
Thomas-à-Kempis which resembles it. Through a fixed contemplative
communion with the conception of the Christ who suffered and died for
Love, they sought to find content in divine rest and self-abandonment.
§ 245. German chivalry sprang from Feudalism. The education of those
pledged to military duty had become confined to practice in the use of
arms. The education of the chivalric vassals pursued the same course,
refining it gradually through the influence of court society and through
poetry, which devoted itself either to the relating of graceful tales
which were really works of art, or to the glorification of woman. Girls
were brought up without especial care. The boy until he was seven years
old remained in the hands of women; then he became a lad (a young
gentleman), and learned the manner of offensive and defensive warfare,
on foot and on horseback; between his sixteenth and eighteenth year,
through a formal ceremony (the laying on of the sword), he was duly
authorized to bear arms. But whatever besides this he might wish to
learn was left to his own caprice.
§ 246. In contradistinction to the monkish education, Chivalry placed an
infinite value on individuality, and this it expressed in its extreme
sensibility to the feeling of honor. Education, on this account,
endeavored to foster this reflection of the self upon itself by means of
the social isolation in which it placed knighthood. The knight did not
delight himself with common possessions, but he sought for him who had
been wronged, since with him he could find enjoyment as a conqueror. He
did not live in simple marriage, but strove for the piquant pleasure of
making the wife of another the lady of his heart, and this often led to
moral and physical infidelity. And, finally, the knight did not obey
alone the general laws of knightly honor, but he strove, besides, to
discover for himself strange things, which he should undertake with his
sword, in defiance of all criticism, simply because it pleased his
caprice so to do. He _sought adventures_.
§ 247. The reaction against the innumerable number of fantastic
extravagancies arising from chivalry was the idea of the spiritual
chivalry which was to unite the cloister and the town, abstract
self-denial and military life, separation from the world and the
sovereignty of the world--an undeniable advance, but an untenable
synthesis which could not prevent the dissolution of chivalry--this
chivalry, which, as the rule of the stronger, induced for a long time
the destruction of all regular culture founded on principles, and
brought a period of absence of all education. In this perversion of
chivalry to a grand vagabondism, and even to robbery, noble souls often
rushed into ridiculous excesses. This decline of chivalry found its
truth in Citizenship, whose education, however, did not, like the
[Greek: polis] and the _civitas_ of the ancients, limit itself to
itself, but, through the presence of the principle of Christianity,
accepted the whole circle of humanity as the aim of its culture.