The Carolingian Renaissance (I)
We saw in the last lecture how secular studies, which had so drastically declined by the end of the seventh century, began to take an upward turn thanks to the Benedictines, stimulated by the example and the competition of the Irish monks. But these early stages of educational advance, no matter how real they may have been, took place in a way which was, as it were, deaf and dumb because it was unconscious. It was like a slow invasion which stops nowhere but continues steadily at an even pace, and is extended ever further without its ever becoming clear from what precise point it originally emanated. The instruction, for all the rudimen-tariness which it still retained, which the monks brought with them came to cover ever increasingly extensive territories without either having or establishing any major centre from which it could derive nourishment. The intellectual powers at the disposal of the Order were scattered in every direction throughout Europe and never concentrated themselves in a single specific place or places where they would have been able mutually to reinforce each other as a result of being associated together. The first concentration of this type which we encounter in the history of education is that which we associate with the name of Charlemagne.
The Carolingian Empire has sometimes been presented as the personal achievement of a man of genius. Charles is somehow supposed to have created it out of nothing through sole power of his own will. But such an explanation, in my view, misses both its significance and its influence. It involves reducing an event which exercised so vast an influence on the whole of subsequent history to the fortuitous appearance of a single individual. Besides, to imagine the European state could emerge from nothing in this way, solely as a result of the appeal of an individual, entails the postula-tion of a miracle in an historical explanation. Such a gigantic society could never have been formed, and been formed in such a way as to last for a significant period of time, except in as far as it responded to certain sociological facts. And indeed it had its deepest roots in nothing other than the condition of Europe at that time and it was the consequence of this condition; this fact is of crucial importance if we are to understand what follows.
We do not need to judge what the various peoples of Europe were like according to the criteria of what they are like today; in other words, we must not see them as having collective characters powerfully constituted and sharply differentiated from one another, with a vivid awareness of their own existence, distinguishing themselves from, and even conflicting with one another in the same clear way which applies to individual persons. For several centuries Europe had been rather like a kaleidoscope ceaselessly in flux and appearing quite different from one period to another. The different peoples successively formed the greatest variety of combinations and, with the greatest ease, passed from the hands of one state into that of another, and from domination by one set of people to that of another. Under these conditions how could they be expected to retain a homogeneous character? In the shuffle which invariably followed the great swarm of invasions they inevitably lost a large part of their distinctive features in the ensuing clashes. The frontiers which separated them were more or less obliterated under the feet of conquerors. On the other hand, as Christianity developed all these groups, which on their own lacked stability and durability, became constituent elements of a much larger society which enveloped them all and which possessed or at least increasingly acquired this moral unity and this stability which they lacked; this society was the Church. Increasingly Christianity became the sole civilisation where all these societies which lacked any civilisation of their own came to communicate with one another. In one sense then, Europe was morally more unified than today since there was, so to speak, no national civilisation to be set over against that civilisation which was common to all the peoples of Europe. It is this which explains the remarkably substantial role played by monasticism in the moral and intellectual formation of Europe. The monk, in fact, belongs to no particular country and no particular society other than the great society of Christendom. This is what gave him his great mobility, travelling from one country to another, moving like a veritable nomad from one extremity of Europe to the other. Wherever he went he carried his own homeland within him. Thus he became the schoolmaster of Europe. Does this entail that there was a very substantial degree of European cosmopolitanism since education in Europe was international?
Here we need to make the reservation that European society was still something latent, lacking in self-awareness because it lacked organisation. All the peoples of Christendom had a vague feeling of belonging to a single whole, without this feeling generating any specific institution to express it. Certainly there was the Papacy, but this lacked the material strength necessary for transforming a vast political agglomeration into a genuine political society. It was Charlemagne who, for a time, was to provide Christendom with this central institution which it lacked. In him and through him European Christendom became a state. This idea of the unity of Christendom, which had been slumbering in a state of semi-consciousness, was given substance by him and became a historical reality. That was his achievement. He did not create this unity out of nothing by some sort of magic artifice. Rather he expressed it and organised it; but this fact of organisation itself was a novelty which entailed others, particularly with regard to the intellectual life.
The fact is that living creatures increase in self-awareness the better organised they are. An animal which lacks a central nervous system is only aware in a confused kind of way of what is going on in the further reaches of his body. Human beings, by contrast, or the higher animals, thanks to their central nervous system, are at every instant alerted to any goings-on of importance taking place within them. So it is with societies. When a society has a central institution in which the whole of its life both internal and external culminates, then it knows itself better. It has a greater awareness of what it is experiencing, of what affects it, of the sufferings it endures and of their causes, of the needs under which it labours. We have seen that in the nature of things Christianity had need of education; that it could not do without it. The monks of St Benedict were trying to satisfy this obscure need with their teachings, however rudimentary these may have been. In the person of Charlemagne, representing Christendom, this need surfaced into full consciousness. Now it was no longer merely a vague feeling, but an idea which has been clearly apprehended. And at the same time it was intensified; for consciousness, while adding clarity to the tendencies which it illuminates, also strengthens them. Our desires are more vital and more vigorous when we clearly know what it is that we desire. Additionally, a large organised society has need of greater consciousness and more reflection, and consequently of more education and knowledge; for the mechanism which it constitutes, being more complex, cannot function purely automatically. For all these reasons the creation of the Carolingian Empire was inevitably to bring about important educational reforms.
As the product of a movement of concentration designed to gather together in a single hand and beneath a single law the whole Christian world, the new state was naturally inclined to concentrate all the intellectual forces which it contained in such a way as to form a cultural and intellectual centre, capable of influencing the whole Empire. This centre was the Ecole du Palais. Much discussion has ranged round the question of whether the Ecole du Palais was founded by Charlemagne or whether it did not already exist before his accession. We shall not pause long to examine this purely academic controversy. It is infinitely probable that the Ecole du Palais was not born one fine day without anything having prepared for it. We know that the Merovingians summoned to their court the sons of their principal lords, and had them brought up there in such a way as to bind them to themselves with stronger ties, whilst at the same time guaranteeing them in return substantial advantages; this meant, in effect, that the most important positions in the state were reserved for them. This group of young people brought up communally already formed a kind of privileged school. In any case, under Pepin le Bref, it is fairly certain that an education was already being given at the court which, if we believe the biographer D’Adalard, a cousin of Charlemagne, drew on all fields of human knowledge (omnis mundi prudentia). But what is certain is that with Charlemagne the Ecole du Palais took on an importance which it had not had until then, and developed accordingly. Not, of course, that we should picture it as we would a modern school. Thus the question which has been raised about which part of the Empire it resided in is patently futile. It moved around with the court of which it formed an integral part, and consequently followed the emperor on all his frequent journeys. It was a nomadic school but it was no longer the preserve of the sons of noble lords; it was open to young clerics who were recruited from all ranks of society, as is proved by the famous incident reported by the monk from Saint-Gall. Moreover, it placed in charge of the education teachers chosen from amongst the most eminent scholars which Europe then possessed. Such were the grammarian Pierre de Pise, the Greek scholar Paul Warnefrid, or Paul Diacre, and Clement d’Irlande.
Amongst these teachers there was one who eclipsed them all by the importance of his role and by the influence which he exercised over Charles; this was Alcuin. Alcuin was precisely one of the faithful of that Anglo-Saxon Church of which we have already spoken, and which distinguished itself from the other Christian Churches by its pronounced and avaricious taste for matters intellectual. He had been brought up in the very famous school of York; he had there received an education palpably superior to that which was then being given in the schools on the Continent. The tastes and the knowledge which he had there acquired he brought to the Ecole du Palais, whose director he became in 782; and the outstandingly important role that he played in the entourage of Charlemagne allowed him to make his influence felt beyond the court and throughout the rest of the kingdom.
But Charles did not stop at the creation of this model school, this central institution; he prodded his bishops into multiplying within their dioceses institutions of the same type. Even before meeting Alcuin he was writing to Lull, archbishop of Mayence: ‘ You are working with God’s help to win over souls and yet I cannot but be astounded that you are not the slightest bit bothered about teaching literature to your clergy. All around you you see those who have frequently plunged themselves into the darkness of ignorance; and at a time when you could enable them to share the light of your knowledge you leave them buried in the darkness of their blindness...So teach your sons the liberal arts in order to satisfy our wishes in a matter which concerns us most particularly.’ But it is above all in a letter written in 787, addressed to Bangulfe, the Abbot of Fulva, that we find the best exposition of his plans together with the reasons which seem to him to justify them. ‘We have adjudged it useful,’ he writes, ‘that in the bishoprics and the monasteries whose government Christ in his goodness has entrusted to us there should be, in addition to the observance of a regular life and the practices of holy religion, literary studies (litterarum meditationes); and that those who through a gift of God are able to teach should consecrate, each according to his ability, their mission to teaching.’ These studies are necessary first of all in order to give ‘ regularity and beauty to the language’. Not that Charles was sensible of the aesthetic value of style; what concerned him was the influence of words on ideas, and the fact that one cannot think clearly and distinctly as long as one cannot express clearly and distinctly one’s thoughts: ‘The Soul understands that much better what it wants to do in proportion as the tongue is not glibly uttering falsehoods.’ In the second place, it is necessary to be initiated into all the secrets of language in order to be able to understand the Holy Scriptures: ‘ We exhort you not only not to neglect the study of letters but also to apply yourselves zealously and with a perseverance which is full of humility and pleasing unto God, in order that you may be able to penetrate more easily and more accurately the mysteries of the Holy Scriptures. Since these contain images, tropes, and other similar figures, no one can doubt that the reader will not elevate himself all the more quickly to the spiritual meaning in proportion as he is steeped in a grammatical understanding of the text.’ Here we have a mystical conception of the Bible, the Bible being treated as a cabbalistic book. According to Cassin this mystical meaning reveals itself only to the saint who has reached, through the practice of asceticism, to the highest degree of illumination. Alcuin and Charles had a more rationalistic conception of it. According to them, in order to understand these allegorical mysteries it was enough to have the mind sharpened and exercised by a scholarly training. But this training was indispensable. Moreover, these two reasons by which Charlemagne justifies his recommendations led to a third, which was more political in nature and which summarises and contains in itself the first two. It was essential above all that the clergy should have in the eyes of the people a prestige which would assure its authority. For this was the necessary condition for the maintenance of faith, and with it that of the unity of the Church and the Empire. Now, in order that the people believe in its priests it is not enough that the priests should entertain in the depth of their hearts interior sentiments of piety. They must be intellectually superior to their flock, and these latter must feel that authority. ‘We wish that, as is fitting for soldiers of the Church, you be animated by an internal devoutness and that externally you appear scholarly...eloquent in your words, so that whoever for the love of God and in search of holy conversation, may desire to see you shall be edified by your appearance and instructed by your learning.’
In response to these appeals, repeated in successive capitularies, new schools were founded near the cathedrals, the abbeys and the monasteries, and distinguished teachers arrived from Italy and Ireland in order to provide in them a broader education than that which was customary. The bishops in their turn followed up the policy of the day and everywhere founded under the auspices of simple parish churches more modest schools where an elementary education could be received. We have a letter by Theodulse Bishop of Orleans, urging the priests of the boroughs and villages to give free instruction to the children of their parishioners. Thus there was established a whole scholastic hierarchy with three stages. At the bottom there was the parish school, where the most elementary matters were taught; above that there were the cathedral schools and those of the large monasteries; finally right at the top there was the model school reserved for the elite the Ecole du Palais. In his capacity as Director of this school Alcuin was like some sort of special minister, responsible to the administration for the oversight of this public education which was in its infancy and just beginning to find its feet.
This organisation was not only more complex and more learned than the one which had preceded it; it was also distinctive on account of the more marked element of secularity which it possessed. Of course, education remained in the hands of the priests; but it was a layman who provided its intellectual driving force. It was temporal power which had generated this educational renewal, and consequently the temporal preoccupations of education found a place which they had never hitherto had. It is quite true that for Charles the interests of faith and the interests of the state were intermingled. It remains nevertheless true that it was the interests of the state which became the goal to which everything else was to be subordinated. No longer did one teach only that which was indispensable for the practice of religion: one was chiefly concerned with that which could be of service to the Empire. This is why Charles had the idea of arranging for the teaching of Greek, solely in order to facilitate his relations with the East. Even the way in which the Ecole du Palais was made up was not without influence from this point of view; it included amongst its pupils not only young people but also adults; and amongst these adults there were not only clerics but also courtiers, men of the world who would not be satisfied with an education which was purely ecclesiastical. One fact shows beyond all doubt how far the nature of this environment influenced the education which was given within it. The time came when Alcuin left the court of Charlemagne and withdrew to the monastery at Tours. Immediately he became, as we would say today, a reactionary as far as education was concerned. His former liberalism vanished. The reading of pagan authors was almost entirely forbidden to his pupils. Finally there was another important change in that cathedral schools which, in the preceding period, had been overshadowed by the monastic schools now began from the time of Charlemagne to take precedence. The cathedrals and their clergy stood in a much closer relationship with the outside world than the monasteries and the abbeys; they were more exposed to secular interests, they had more contact with lay situations. We shall have occasion shortly to see this again, since it was from the cathedral schools that the universities emerged.
Having now examined what this new educational system consisted in and how it became established, let us now look at the content of the education which was given within it. From the container let us move on to the contents; from the organ to its function. We shall inevitably say nothing about the parochial school, about which in any case we know very little, in order to concentrate on the cathedral schools, in particular the Ecole du Palais which was their paradigm example; for only these schools are connected with the secondary education whose history we are seeking to trace. We know a great deal about the Ecole du Palais, for we still possess the works in which Alcuin summarised his educational theory (Didascalica, Reg., 191). And since the cathedral schools merely reproduced with variations of detail what was happening in the Palace school we shall be describing the entire educational system of the time.
The first characteristic feature of this education is that it was or strove to be encyclopaedic. Its goal was not to instruct the pupil in a certain number of branches of knowledge, but in the totality of human learning. As soon as the Church began to become established (that is, from the beginning of the sixth century), we see the appearance of writers all of whom set themselves the task of collecting together into a sort of synthesis, and of condensing into the smallest volume possible, all the results of ancient science. Already this had been tried by Boethius (died 525), but Boethius was first and foremost a dialectician, so he did not exert his full influence until the time when dialectic studies were fully in vogue, namely during the Scholastic period. Until that time Boethius was known mainly through the works of Cassiodorus (562), whose treatise De septem artibus embraces the whole of contemporary learning. But work which reveals more fully this encyclopaedic character is that of a seventh-century writer who died in 636, Isidore of Seville. His treatise De originibus, under the pretext of researching into the origins of words, is in fact a summary of all the knowledge which classical antiquity possessed. From words he moves on to things and thus surveys, on the pretext of doing etymology, all the branches of learning, all the human disciplines from the most humble onwards; from grammar to medicine, jurisprudence, natural history and theology. It is these works, particularly the last two, which were the classics of the whole mediaeval period. Education in the Middle Ages never ceased to make use of them, to comment upon them and to paraphrase them. Right up to the fifteenth century they had all sorts of imitators, but these did nothing other than reproduce the original models. The teacher confined himself to borrowing from one or another of these basic books certain ready-made expositions of a subject, without even altering the language. Monnier has compared whole passages from the didactic works of Alcuin with the corresponding part of the De originibus; they are often literally identical. They were so unfamiliar with the concept of originality that these plagiarists felt no scruples. They saw in these works, as it were, a fund of common wisdom like a collective treasure which was not the property of anyone in particular, and which everyone could freely make use of.
A no less general and persistent tendency must clearly be connected with something about the essential character of Christian thought. One might wonder, first of all, if it does not result from the vivid if by no means lucid attitude that Christianity instinctively adopted with respect to the unity of both science and the truth. For Christianity the truth is not an abstract name given to a plurality or a totality of particular truths. The truth is essentially a unity; for it is the word of God, and God is one. Just as moral truth is entirely contained in a single book, the Holy Scriptures, it must have appeared entirely natural to the Christian thinker that temporal truths, scientific truths, must also have the same unity and find their expression in a single book, in a breviary which would function in the domain of the profane as an equivalent to the Holy Scriptures in the domain of the sacred.
In addition to this awareness there is another cause which must have contributed significantly to the phenomenon which we are seeking to understand. We have seen that for Christianity education has as its object not the development of this or that particular skill but rather the shaping of the mind in its entirety. In exactly the same way science as a whole is needed in order to shape the mind as a whole. An education which is incomplete can only form an intellect which is incomplete, and cannot touch the fundamentals of human thought. Educative action can only really be effective on condition that it is not purely parochial, that it does not set its sights on certain particular points but rather envelops the intelligence in its entirety, without leaving out anything at all. In a word, teaching, according to Christianity, must be educative; and it cannot be educative unless it is encyclopaedic. This idea, which we come across in modern educational writers, was in reality present throughout the evolution of our educational ideas from their earliest origins. I am certainly not claiming that modern authors have done nothing other than to restore an age-old conception; far from it. If this idea has been present since that time it was then so in a very confused, very obscure, very unconscious form. We will have occasion to follow the way in which it has developed, been rendered specific and transformed; we shall also have to take note of the eclipses which it has undergone. But it is very important to establish that it was immanent in all the educational developments which were to succeed it. We shall see shortly how the universities gave it reality in a new form.
But this encyclopaedic education, what did it consist of? How was it organised ?
The whole of human knowledge was divided into seven branches or seven fundamental disciplines; these are the septem artes liberales, which name was used as a title for the great works of Cassiodorus. This division into seven reaches back to the latter days of classical antiquity; we find it for the first time in Martianus Capella, at the beginning of the sixth century. But in the Middle Ages it was no longer the transitory view of a single individual; it became a veritable institution. For centuries it was to remain as the basis of education. In this way it took on in the eyes of the people of the time a kind of mystical character. The seven arts were compared with the seven pillars of wisdom, with the seven planets, with the seven virtues. The number seven itself was deemed to have a mystical meaning.
The seven arts did not all enjoy equal status; they were divided into two groups whose educational significance was very different, and which the Middle Ages always distinguished from one another with the greatest care.
First of all there were three disciplines, grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, which formed what was called the ‘trivium’. Here is the origin of the word which has had such a varied fate. In Rome they called trivialis scientia the elementary subject-matter which was taught by a teacher of letters. It was common knowledge, plebeian, such as would be available to the man in the street. Perhaps also it was an allusion to the fact that these primary schools usually were sited in triviis, at the crossroads. But when the word ‘trivium’ had entered common usage its origins were forgotten; it was thought that it referred exclusively to the tripartite division of primary education and simply meant an education which included three branches of learning, three paths. The result was that in order to designate the four arts which were not included in the trivium the expression ‘quadrivium’ was used. The quadrivium included geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music.
These two cycles were not only distinguished by the number of disciplines which they included. There was also a profound difference in the nature of the disciplines which were taught within the two cycles. The trivium was intended to instruct the mind about the mind itself, that is to say the laws which it obeys when it thinks and when it expresses itself, and the rules which it ought to follow in order to think and express itself correctly. These are in effect the goals of grammar, of rhetoric and of dialectic. The triple curriculum is thus entirely formal. It deals exclusively with general forms of reasoning, with abstractions made from their application to things, or perhaps with what is even more formal than thought, namely language. Thus the arts of the trivium were called artes sermonicinales or logica. The quadrivium, by contrast, consisted of a set of branches of learning related to things. Its role was to generate understanding of external realities and the laws which govern them, the laws of number, the laws of space, the laws concerning the stars, and those which govern sounds. For this reason the arts which it included were called artes reales or physica. The trivium and the quadrivium were thus oriented in two quite different directions: the one towards the human mind, the other towards things in the real world. The function of the first was to shape the intelligence in a general way, to expose it in its normal state and stance; the goal of the second was to furnish it and to nourish it. It will be readily seen that we have already here that opposition between the two great branches of learning which we shall encounter again later fighting for pre-eminence; on the one hand we have the humanities which relate to truth about man; on the other hand we have the natural sciences. Here we have classical education and the education of the Realschulen, also called specialist education. Thus these words ‘trivium’ and ‘quadrivium’ which at first sight seem so archaic, so remote from ourselves, are found in fact to connote ideas which in a way are still with us today, questions which we still ask. How fascinating it is to find them in their ancient state! For as a result of this alone, we are less likely to attach undue prestige to the contingent and transitory guise in which we find them today, and which very often actually disguises from us the realities to which they give expression.
Now that we have characterised these two fundamental cycles, we need to ascertain the respective places which they were accorded in education.
Despite the fact that respect for religion was the object of the seven arts, despite the unity which they were felt to possess, it is far from true that the trivium and the quadrivium played roles of equal importance in academic life. The quadrivium was a kind of de luxe, supererogatory curriculum, reserved for a small elite of specialists and initiates. How this position came about is easily explained with reference to the way in which the four constituent disciplines were understood and practised. They were still conceived of in part as mystical arts analogous to those of the magician. For example, the goal of arithmetic was to discover the mystical properties of numbers. Thus we find that Alcuin, amongst others, following the example of Isidore of Seville, attached allegorical significance to them. Some were a portent of evil, others were good omens. The numbers three and six were the key to all the secrets of nature; they would yield perfect knowledge to anyone who could penetrate their occult significance. This science was the one which fascinated Alcuin the most: ‘He only spoke of it in whispers; but he spoke of it all the time.’ He had even taught something of it to King Charles, who was quite astounded by it. Exactly the same was true in the case of astrology, which Alcuin again defined as the study of the stars, of their nature, and of their power. Thus he still admitted that the stars have an influence on human events. Comets were thought of as bearded stars which proclaimed events of outstanding importance: new dynasties, plague, and so on. Finally, one of the reasons why the men of the Middle Ages were fascinated by the scientific study of music was that it opened up to their imaginations vast mystical horizons. The laws of harmony, they thought, must explain the harmony of the universe, of the seasons, of the different parts of the human soul, or that which results from its unity with the body. Such studies, surrounded as they were with so much mystery, were clearly not suitable for being brought out into the open in the schools; they could not form the subject-matter of a common curriculum, but could only be treated by a handful of initiates.
Thus it was the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) which exclusively constituted what one might call the normal course of studies of the period, the substance of what was taught in the cathedral and abbey schools. Now, as we have seen, the sciences of the trivium were wholly formal in character; they looked exclusively towards man. From this it follows that if education had at that time a tendency to be encyclopaedic, its encyclopaedic nature turned out in reality to consist in a variety of systems of purely formal studies. It is not difficult to gain an insight into what it was that gave rise to this formalism. The object of education as it was henceforth understood was to train the mind in large generalities, about essential and fundamental principles, irrespective of the many and various ways in which these might be concretely applied. It seemed that the only way of achieving this goal was to get humanity to reflect upon its own nature, to understand itself and to be conscious of itself. It was not that the natural sciences could not have served this same goal. But, for reasons which we shall be investigating, it was only very slowly that people came to realise the services which the natural sciences could render in this connection. For centuries it seemed self-evident that only studies relating to human beings could really serve to shape human beings. Thus we reach the important conclusion that there was a logical necessity in the process which led to education’s being at first wholly formal. One can readily imagine what difficulty it subsequently had in order to get rid of this congenital formalism. Indeed, we shall see it passing from one sort of formalism to another (for there are different sorts of formalism) without managing to escape from it, sometimes even exacerbating, under the pressure of circumstances, this initial tendency, so much so that the question still remains an open one today.