The early Church and education (I)
It is widely believed that anyone who concerns himself with practical matters should cease to contemplate the past in order to concentrate his entire attention upon the present. Since the past no longer exists and there is nothing we can do about it, it seems that it can be of interest to us only as a curiosity. It belongs, people think, to the realm of scholarship. What we need to know about is not what was once the case but what is now the case, and — better still — what is likely to become the case: this latter is what we must strive to foresee in order to be able to satisfy the demands which our present circumstances make on us. In the last lecture I concentrated on trying to show the extent to which this method is unfruitful. For the truth is that the present, to which we are invited to restrict our attention, is by itself nothing: it is no more than an extrapolation of the past, from which it cannot be severed without losing the greater part of its significance. The present is composed of an infinite number of elements which are so closely intertwined that it is difficult for us to see clearly where one begins and another ends, what each of the elements is by itself and what are the relationships which hold between them. By direct scrutiny we can only arrive at a very crude and confused conception. The only way in which we can distinguish and analyse these elements, and consequently succeed in shedding some light on all this confusion, is by carrying out historical research into the manner whereby they have progressively come to cluster together, to combine and to form organic relationships. Just as we instinctively regard matter as homogeneously extended until scientific analysis has disclosed to us the principle of intellectual categorisation whereby we order our perceptions, so our immediate awareness of the present inhibits us from realising its complexity until this has been revealed to us by historical analysis. But what is perhaps more dangerous still is the exaggerated importance which such an attitude inclines us to attribute to the aspirations of the present moment when these have ceased to be subject to any critical checking procedures. For it is precisely by their topicality that they hypnotise us, absorb us, and cripple our ability to be aware of anything other than they themselves. Our awareness of what we lack is always very intense; consequently it tends to occupy an exaggerated position in our consciousness by refusing to take cognisance of everything else, which it casts into the shadows. As the exclusive object of our desires it appears to us to be the sole supreme value, the ideal to which everything else in existence ought to be subordinated. However, the truth is that what we lack according to this criterion is either no more essential or is even less essential than what we already have; and so it is that, in the interests of our transient and relatively unimportant needs, we are tempted to sacrifice genuinely essential and vital necessities. Rousseau was aware that in his time education left too little room for the spontaneity of the child; he therefore makes a systematically negative methodology the one essential feature of any sound educational theory. Solely on the basis of the fact that children are not sufficiently involved with natural phenomena, he virtually makes education through contact with natural phenomena the exclusive basis of any education whatsoever. If we are to resist the prestigious influence of our present preoccupations (both inevitable and one-sided, as they are) we must let them be counterbalanced by a knowledge of all those other human needs to which we must be no less alive; and this knowledge can only be acquired by a study of history; for this shows us how to complete our understanding of the present by linking it to the past whose continuation it is.
The arguments I have advanced to show that a historical study of education is of practical value are, however, not the only ones. Not only does this method enable us to guard against possible future mistakes, but also we may anticipate that it will furnish us with the means of correcting certain mistakes which have been committed in the past and from whose consequences we are still suffering. Indeed the development of educational theory, like all human development, has not always been regular. In the course of the struggles that have been waged between the different views which historically have succeeded one another, there are several sound ideas which have been killed off whereas, judged by the criterion of their intrinsic value, they ought to have survived. Here as elsewhere the struggle for survival yields only very crude results. As a general rule it is the fittest, the best endowed who survive; but as against that, how many unworthy successes have there been, how many lamentable deaths and defeats due to some accidental combination of circumstances. In the history of ideas, there is one cause which is more efficacious than all others in producing this effect. When new ideas come into being, whether they are educational, moral, religious, or political, they quite naturally possess the aggressive fire and vitality of contemporary youth in any culture: they come to display themselves as violently hostile to the older ideas which they seek to replace. They therefore reject them in toto. The champions of new ideas, carried away by the heat of battle, are only too ready to believe that there is nothing worth preserving in the older ideas against which they are fighting. They make war on them totally and mercilessly; and yet the truth is that here as elsewhere the present is the progeny of the past from which it derives and whose continuation it constitutes. Between any new historical situation and the one which preceded it there is no great gulf fixed but rather a close familiar relationship since, in a certain sense, the former is the offspring of the latter. But men do not realise the existence of this relationship: they feel only the antagonism which separates them from their predecessors, and they are blind to what they both have in common. They believe that there are no limits to the destruction which they are justified in wreaking upon a tradition to which they are opposed and which resists them. This has resulted in deplorable acts of destruction; features of the past disappear when they ought to have become features of the future. The Renaissance succeeds Scholasticism: the men of the Renaissance immediately took it as self-evident that there was nothing worth preserving in the system of the Scholastics. We shall have to ask whether this revolutionary approach did not produce certain gaps in our educational ideology which have been handed on down to our own times; thus by studying education historically we shall be enabled not only to understand the present better, but also we shall have the chance of revising the past itself and of bringing to light mistakes which it is important for us to recognise, since it is we who have inherited them.
However, in addition to its practical relevance, which I have been at pains to emphasise at the outset because it is most frequently misunderstood, the enquiry on which we are about to embark is also of considerable theoretical and scientific importance. At first glance, the history of secondary education in France might appear to be a highly specialised study of interest only to a narrow circle of school-teachers. However, as the result of something peculiar to France, it happens that throughout the major part of our history secondary education has provided the focus for the whole of our academic life. Higher education, after having given birth to secondary education, very soon became extinct and was only reborn in the aftermath of the 1870 war. Primary education appears only very late in our history and only really got off the ground after the Revolution. Thus, throughout a large period of our national existence the entire educational scene is dominated by secondary education. The consequence of this is, first, that we cannot write the history of secondary education without at the same time writing a general history of education and educational theory in France. What we are going to try and chart is the development of all the most essential features of the French educational ideal, by scrutinising the doctrines in which it has from time to time sought to articulate itself self-consciously as well as the academic institutions whose function it was to realise it. Moreover, since the most important intellectual forces of the nation were, from the fourteenth or fifteenth century onwards, formed in our secondary schools, we shall, as we progress, be driven to what almost amounts to writing a history of the French intellectual. It is additionally true that this disproportionate role played by secondary education in the totality of that social life which is peculiar to our nation and which is not to be found anywhere else to the same extent, will, as we can be sure in advance, derive from some personally distinctive characteristic, some idiosyncrasy in our national temperament which we shall come to uncover simply because we shall be seeking the causes of this peculiarity in the history of our educational thought. The history of educational thought and the study of social mores are indeed closely linked.
Having thus specified how we understand the subject-matter with which we shall be dealing and the manifold ways in which it is of interest, we now set about tackling it. But where to begin? At what moment of time should we begin this history of secondary education?
In order fully to understand the development of any living phenomenon, in order to explain the different forms which it assumes at successive moments in its history, we should need to begin by discovering the composition of the initial germ which stands at the origin of its entire evolution. Of course, nobody would any longer claim today that a living being exists in perfected embryonic form in the egg from which it issues. We know that the effect of the environment, of all manner of external circumstances, is indeed considerable. It is nevertheless still true that the egg exerts substantial influence over the whole of what it eventually becomes. The moment when the first living cell is constituted is a moment of unique and absolutely radical significance whose effect is felt throughout the whole of the rest of life. What is true of living beings is equally true of social institutions, whatever they may be. Their future, the direction in which they develop, their vigour at various stages in their subsequent existence, all these depend crucially upon the nature of the first germ from which they originate. Thus, in order to understand the way in which the educational system which we are to study has developed, in order to understand what it has become, we must not shrink from tracing it to its most remote origins. We must go back beyond the Renaissance and even beyond the time of the Scholastics. We must go on backwards until we have reached the first nucleus of educational ideas and the first embryo of an academic institution which are to be discovered in the history of modern societies. As soon as we have carried out this study we shall see clearly that retrospective research of this kind is by no means useless, and that certain essential peculiarities in our modern convictions still bear the stamp of these very remote influences.
But this nucleus, this original germinative cell, where is it to be found?
The entire substance of our early intellectual culture came to us from Rome. It is therefore reasonable to expect that our educational thought, the fundamental principles of our educational system, came to us from the same source, since education itself is only a digest of adult intellectual culture. But by what path and in what manner was this transmission effected? The Germanic peoples (i.e., the Franks) — if not all of them, at least those who gave their name to our country — were barbarians quite unable to appreciate any of the refinements of civilisation. They attached no value at all to literature, the arts or philosophy: we know that even the buildings and sculpture of the Romans inspired in them only hatred and contempt. There was thus a veritable moral gulf fixed between them and the Romans which, it appears, rendered impossible between these two peoples any kind of communication or mutual influence. Since these two civilisations were so intensely alien one to another they were apparently only able to reject one another. Fortunately, however, there appeared — not of course immediately but still very quickly — a flank on which these two societies, who were so antagonistic to one another on all other fronts and whose relations were those of mutual hostility and exclusion, were able to find something in common, which drew them closer to one another and enabled them to communicate with one another. At a very early period one of the most essential institutions of the Roman Empire took root in French society and expanded and developed there without, however, undergoing any change in its nature: this was the Church. And it was the Church which served as a mediator between heterogeneous peoples, it was the channel along which the intellectual life of Rome gradually flowed into the new societies which were in their formative stages. And it was precisely by means of education that this transfusion was effected.
At first sight, admittedly, it may seem surprising that the Church, without in any way losing its unique identity, was able to take root and flourish equally in such radically different social milieux. The most essential characteristic feature of the Church and of the morality which it introduced to the world was contempt for the joys of this world, for material and psychological luxury; it undertook to substitute for the joys of living the more astringent joys of renunciation. It was entirely natural that such a doctrine should suit the Roman Empire, weary as it was after long centuries of over-civilisation. All it did was to translate and consecrate the feeling of satiety and disgust which had for a long time gnawed at Roman society and to which both Epicureanism and Stoicism had, in their own ways, given expression. All the pleasure which can be extracted from the refinements of culture had been exhausted; people were thus quite ready to welcome as the means of salvation a religion which claimed to reveal to men a quite different source of felicity. But how could this religion, which had been born in the midst of an aging and decaying society, effect such easy acceptance in young nations, which, far from having over-indulged in the delights of this world, had not yet even tasted them and which, far from being weary of life, were only just embarking upon it?
How could such robust, vigorous societies, overflowing with vitality, subject themselves so spontaneously to a depressing rule of life which ordered them above all to practise continence, self-privation and renunciation? How could fiery appetites which bridled at all moderation and all restraint reconcile themselves to a doctrine which prescribed above all else moderation and self-restraint? The contract is so striking that Paulsen, in his Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts, goes so far as to claim that the whole civilisation of the Middle Ages contained, as a result, an internal contradiction in the principle of its development and constituted a living antinomy. According to him, the content and the container, the substance and the form of this civilisation, were mutually contradictory and incompatible. The content was the real life of the Germanic peoples with their violent untamed passions, their thirst for life and for pleasure, and the container was the Christian ethic with its notions of sacrifice and renunciation and its powerful inclination towards a life of restraint and discipline. However, if mediaeval civilisation had indeed nurtured in its bosom a contradiction so flagrant, an antinomy so irreconcilable, it would not have lasted. The substance would have shattered the form which was so ill-adapted to it; the content would have burst through the container; the needs felt by human beings would have rapidly overwhelmed the rigid ethic which sought to suppress them.
The fact is that there was one aspect of the Christian doctrine which harmonised perfectly with the aspirations and the state of mind of the Germanic societies. For Christianity was supremely the religion of those who were not great, of the humble, of the poor, the poor whose poverty was both material and cultural. It exalted the virtues of humility, of unpretentiousness in both material and intellectual matters. It extolled simple hearts and simple minds. Now the Germanic peoples, because they were still in their infancy, were themselves simple and humble. It would be a mistake to imagine that they led a life of passionate abandon. Rather was their existence made up of involuntary fasting, forced privations and heavy toil which was only interrupted when the opportunity arose by violent but spasmodic debauches. Peoples which had only recently been nomadic could not but live in conditions of harsh poverty with simple customs, so that they quite naturally welcomed with joy a doctrine which glorifies poverty and which extols a simple manner of life. This pagan civilisation which the Church was fighting was no less odious to the Germans themselves than it was to the Church, Christians and Germans alike shared a common enemy in the Romans, and this common feeling of antagonism and hatred created close bonds between them because they both found themselves confronted by the same enemy. Thus the Church in its infancy gladly placed the barbarians above the Gentiles and gave evidence of a genuine preference for the former: ‘The barbarians,’ says Salvien to the Romans, ‘the barbarians are better than you.’
There was thus a powerful affinity and a secret sympathy between the Church and the barbarians; and it is this which explains how the Church was able to implant and establish itself so firmly amongst them. It was because it answered their needs and their aspirations; because it offered them a moral consolation which they could not find elsewhere. On the other hand, its origins were Greco-Latin and it could not but remain more or less faithful to its origins. It had acquired its form and organisation in the Roman world, the Latin language was its language, it was thoroughly impregnated with Roman civilisation. Consequently in implanting itself in barbarian environments it at the same time introduced the very civilisation of which it could not rid itself, whatever the circumstances, and thus became the natural tutor of the peoples which it converted. Of the new religion these peoples asked only a faith, a moral framework; but at the same time they found a culture which was the corollary of this faith. At all events, if the Church really did play this role it was at the cost of a contradiction against which it has fought for centuries without ever achieving a resolution. For the fact was that in the literary and artistic monuments of antiquity there lived and breathed the very same pagan spirit which the Church had set itself the task of destroying, to say nothing of the more general fact that art, literature and science cannot but inspire profane ideas in the minds of the faithful and distract them from the only thought to which they should be giving their entire attention: the thought of their salvation. The Church could not therefore provide a place for the writings of the ancients without scruple and anxiety. Hence the insistence of the early fathers on the dangers to which the Christian is exposed when he gives himself immoderately over to profane studies. They multiply their proscriptions in order to reduce such studies to the minimum. On the other hand, they could not do without them altogether. In spite of themselves they were forced not to proscribe them, as is evidenced by the rule enunciated by Minucius Felix: Si quando cogimur litterarum secularium recordari et aliquid ex his discere, non nostrae sit voluntatis sed, ut ita dicam, gravissimae necessitatis (If ever we are compelled to bring to mind secular literature and to learn something from it, let it not be at our desire, but, I would say, under the gravest necessity). First of all, circumstances demanded that Latin be the language of the Church, the sacred language in which the canons of the faith were composed. Now where can Latin be learned unless in the monuments of Latin literature? These could indeed be chosen with discrimination and only a very small number permitted, but one way or another it was necessary constantly to return to them. In addition to this, whereas paganism was above all a system of ritual practices backed up no doubt with a mythology, but vague, inconsistent and without any expressly obligatory authority, Christianity by contrast was an idealistic religion, a system of ideas and a body of doctrines. To be a Christian was not a matter of carrying out certain material operations according to the traditional prescriptions, it was rather a question of adhering to certain articles of faith, of sharing certain beliefs, of accepting certain ideas.
In order to inculcate a particular practice, a simple method of training is an effective and perhaps even the only effective method; but ideas and feelings cannot be communicated except by means of education, whether this education is addressed to the emotions or to the reason or to both at the same time. And this is why from the moment of the foundation of Christianity, preaching (which was quite unknown in antiquity) immediately began to play a crucially important part, for to preach is to teach. Now, teaching presupposes a culture, and at that time there was no culture other than pagan culture. It was therefore necessary for the Church to appropriate it. Teaching and preaching presuppose in him who is teaching or preaching certain linguistic skills, a certain capacity for dialectic, and a certain familiarity with man and with history. All this knowledge was only to be found in the works of the ancients. The single fact that Christian doctrine is complexly involved in books, that it expresses itself daily in prayers which are said by each of the faithful and which are required to be known not only in the letter but also in the spirit, rendered it necessary not only for the priest but also even for the layman to acquire a certain amount of culture. This is strikingly demonstrated by St Augustine in his De doctrina Christiana. He explains that, truly to understand Holy Scripture, one must have knowledge in depth of the language and of the things themselves which are expressed by the words. For how many are the symbols and the figures of speech which are unintelligible so long as we have no notion of the things which appear in these symbols or figures of speech? History is indispensable for chronological studies. Rhetoric itself is a weapon which the defender of the faith cannot afford to be without, for why should he remain feeble and unequipped when confronted by the error which it is his duty to combat?
Such then were the higher necessities which forced the Church to open schools and to create a place in these schools for pagan culture. The first schools of this type were those which opened in the environs of the cathedrals. The pupils, for the most part, were young people preparing for the priesthood, but simple laymen were also accepted who had not yet decided to embrace the sacred ministry. In them the pupils lived together in convicts, which were a very new and very special sort of scholastic establishment, the significance of which we shall have an opportunity of reverting to later. In particular we know that St Augustine founded at Hippo a convict of this type which, according to Possidius who wrote the saint’s biography, produced ten bishops renowned for their learning and who in their turn founded in their own bishoprics similar establishments. Quite naturally, under the pressure of circumstances, the institution spread to the West; its fortunes we shall be describing later.
The secular clergy, however, was not alone in creating schools. As soon as the religious orders appeared, they played the same role; the educational influence of monasticism was no less great than that of the episcopacy.
We know well the way in which during the first centuries of Christianity the doctrine of renunciation gave birth to the monastic institution. Was not the best way of escaping from the corruption of the age to leave it altogether? Thus from the third and fourth centuries onwards we see communities of men and women multiplying everywhere from the East to as far as Gaul. The resulting invasions and upheavals of every kind accelerated the movement. It seemed as if the world was going to end: orbis ruit, the world is crumbling away in every quarter; and multitudes of people were taking refuge in deserted places. But Christian monasticism distinguished itself at the outset from, for example, Hindu monasticism, in that it was never purely contemplative. What the Christian is charged to watch over is not only his personal salvation but also the salvation of humanity. His role is to prepare for the reign of truth, the reign of Christ; not only in his own inner life but also in the world. The truth which he possesses is not to be piously or jealously guarded by himself alone for his own benefit, but rather actively propagated all around him. He must open blind eyes so that they see the light, he must carry the gospel to those who have misunderstood it or who have not heard it. He must recruit new soldiers for Christ. To achieve this it is essential that he does not shut himself up in egoistical isolation; he must, even while he shuns the world, retain a relationship with it.
The monk’s life was consequently not one of simple solitary meditation but rather one which involved the active propagation of the faith: he was a preacher, a proselytiser, a missionary. This is also why alongside the majority of monasteries there arose schools to which not only candidates for the monastic life but also children from all sorts of different backgrounds and with all sorts of different vocations came, to receive an education which was at once religious and secular.
Cathedral schools and cloister schools, very humble and very modest as they were, were the kind from which our whole system of education emerged. Elementary schools, universities, colleges; all these derived from there; and that is why it is here that we have had to make our starting-point. Moreover because it was from this primitive cell that the whole of our academic organisation in all its complexity originated, this and this alone does and can explain certain essential features which our education has exhibited in the course of its history, or which it has retained right down to our own times.
In the first place, we can now see why education remained for so long in our society, and indeed in that of all the peoples of Europe, a Church affair and, as it were, an annex of religion; why, even after the time when teachers had ceased to be priests, they nevertheless retained for a very long time indeed something of the priestly physiognomy and even priestly duties (notably the duty to remain celibate). When we notice at a slightly later date the total absorption of education by the Church, we might be tempted to attribute it to political prudence. One might think that the Church seized the schools in order to be able to block any culture which tended by its nature to embarrass the faith. In truth, however, this relationship results quite simply from the fact that the schools began by being the work of the Church; it is the Church which called them into existence, with the result that they found themselves from the moment of their birth, one might even say from the moment of their conception, stamped with an ecclesiastical character which they subsequently had so much difficulty in erasing. And if the Church played this role, it is because the Church alone could perform it successfully. It alone could serve as the tutor of the barbarian peoples and initiate them into the only culture which then existed, namely classical culture. For since it was linked both with Roman society and with the Germanic societies; since, to some extent, it had two faces and two aspects; since, although it retained its links with the past, it was nevertheless orientated towards the future, it was able and it alone was able to serve as a bridge between these two such disparate worlds.
But at the same time we have seen that this embryo of education contained within itself a sort of contradiction. It was composed of two elements, which no doubt, in some sense, complememted and completed one another but which were at the same time mutually exclusive. There was on the one hand the religious element, the Christian doctrine; on the other, there was classical civilisation and all the borrowings which the Church was obliged to make from it, that is to say the profane element. In order to defend and propagate itself the Church, as we have seen, was forced to rely on a culture and this culture could not but be pagan since there wasn’t any other. But the ideas which emerged from it patently conflicted with those which were at the basis of Christianity. Between the one and the other there stretched the whole of that abyss which separates the sacred from the profane, the secular from the religious. This enables us to explain a phenomenon which dominates the whole of our academic and educational development: this is that if schools began by being essentially religious, from another point of view as soon as they had been constituted they tended of their own accord to take on an increasingly secular character. This is because from the moment that they appeared in history they contained within themselves a principle of circularity. This principle was not something which they acquired (we know not how) from outside in the course of their evolution: it was innate in them. Feeble and rudimentary to begin with, it grew and developed; from being in the background it passed gradually into the foreground, but it existed from the very beginning. From their origins the schools carried within themselves the germ of that great struggle between the sacred and profane, the secular and the religious, whose history we shall have to retrace.
But the outward organisation of this nascent form of education already reveals an essential peculiarity which characterises the whole system which followed it.
In antiquity the pupil received instruction from different teachers who had no connection with one another. He went to a teacher of grammar or letters in order to learn grammar, to the teacher of either to learn music, to the rhetorician to learn rhetoric, and to the other teachers for other subjects. All these different forms of teaching met together inside him but outwardly they were isolated. It was a mosaic of different types of teaching, which were only formally connected. We saw that exactly the opposite is the case in the first Christian schools. All the teaching which took place in them was given in one and the same place and was consequently subjected to one and the same influence, tended in one and the same moral direction. This was that which emanated from Christian doctrine, that which shaped men’s souls. Whereas formerly teaching had been dispersed, it now acquired a unity. The contact between the pupils and the teacher was continuous ; it is indeed this permanence in the relationship which is characteristic of the convict, the earliest type of boarding school. Now, this concentration of teaching in one place constitutes an innovation of crucial importance and bears witness to a profound change which had come about in man’s conception of the nature and role of intellectual culture.