The Tension Between the Early Christian Church and Pagan Learning
During its first three centuries, the Christian faith gathered strength slowly. Its most dramatic breakthrough came in the year 330 of the Common Era when Emperor Constantine, head of the Roman Empire, officially adopted it and proclaimed it the official religion of his realm.
The old pagan culture was still quite vigorous however, and the Church was not able to compete with it in its areas of strength. Christianity ascendent won new adherents, but often they were men who had been educated in the pagan learning. Christians were still a minority, and the elites, in particular, were pagan.
Christianity has always been deeply non-intellectual and even anti-intellectual. A Christian does not need learning to live according to his faith, or even to excel in his life according to Christian teachings. [This is common to many faiths but is in marked contrast to Judaism.] The requirements of faith and piety, and even the recommendations for outstanding achievement, do not involve any significant intellectual requirement. This is not to say that Christian leaders did not appreciate what intellectual skills could accomplish; they knew that writing and speaking, for example, could be powerful tools, and that these require training and development. But they viewed their utility as spreading their religion, not as part of its practice.
Christians with intellectual ability felt a strong desire to develop their powers, and the only known way to do this was with pagan learning. Many intellectuals converted to Christianity only as mature adults, after they were already steeped in pagan learning. Quite a few of these were unwilling or found it difficult to turn their backs completely on their past accomplishments, and/or felt that knowledge and skills transmitted within the pagan traditions could be useful in the service of Christian ends.
So early Church leaders had a knotty problem: there was much that was attractive in the Greek and Roman authors, and much that could be useful in promoting the Christian faith. Yet all of this intellectual wealth was under the control of pagans. The Church, with good reason, distrusted the pagan learning, but it could not come up with any alternative. What to do?
Tertullian, one of the early converts to Christianity in the west, is a good example. He was born to a pagan family about 160 c.e. and only converted when he was already around 37 years old. Though he had quite a thorough education, after he converted to Christianity he called the philosophers "blockheads" and said that it was impossible for a Christian to be a teacher. He says that a teacher is legally bound to celebrate the festival of Minerva and to honor the goddess Flora. A teacher must also teach the objectionable stories of mythology and discuss all the gods. Obviously, a good Christian cannot do this.
In spite of all these problems which make it impossible to have a school with a Christian teacher, Tertullian finds it impossible to forbid Christian youth from attending these schools as students. "How otherwise could anyone acquire human wisdom, or learn to direct his thoughts and actions? Is literature not an indispensable instrument for the whole business of life?" (The History of Western Education, by William Boyd and Edmund J. King, 10th edition, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1973. p. 83)
Clearly, the Church did not bring with it a tradition of learning and knowledge. Rather, the intellectual achievements of the West were in the pagan tradition, that later became known as the Greek and Latin classics.
It is also evident that the pagan learning was in those days thoroughly integrated with pagan theology, as Tertullian explained. He does not even consider the option of extracting the valuable parts of the pagan classics. It is clear from the pagan authors themselves that they were believing and practicing pagans (though in some periods Christians tried to allegorize these beliefs beyond recognition). Their gods, their worship and their festivals are a matter-of-fact part of life for them.
Other early Church leaders in subsequent centuries, such as Jerome (c. 347-420) and Augustine (354-430), also were concerned about the conflicts between paganism and Christianity. Both lived after Christianity was made fully legitimate and even dominant by the Emperor Constantine and both were thoroughly grounded in pagan learning before they became Christian. There was a steady "distrust of pagan learning and . . . [an] inability to conceive of any practical alternative." (The History of Western Education, by William Boyd and Edmund J. King, 10th edition, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1973, p. 88)
Jerome was famously torn between classic literature and pious devotion. When he went into isolation in the Syrian deserts he took his pagan books with him, and later, after he renounced his books because of a dream in which he was told that he was not a Christian but a Ciceronian, he condemns the classics — but using a slew of quotations from them. Even when he later founded a school in Beit Lechem, he included pagan authors in the curriculum.
Very striking is the answer given by Paulinus, a nobleman who abandoned his wealth and standing because of Christian mysticism to live the life of a religious recluse, to those who appealed to him to return to cultured society. "Time was when, . . . I could join with thee in summoning the deaf Phoebus from his cave at Delphi. Now another force, a mightier G-d, subdues my soul. He forbids me to give up my time to the vanities of leisure or business, and the literature of fable, that I may obey his laws and see his light, which is darkened by the cunning skill of the sophist, and the figments of the poet who fills the soul with vanity and falsehood and only trains the tongue." (The History of Western Education, by William Boyd and Edmund J. King, 10th edition, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1973, p. 90, from S. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire.)
Christianity Triumphant
Around the 5th century, the Roman Empire crumbled and Christianity took over full leadership of the Western world. The church became the dominant political institution and the pagan learning of the Greek and Roman classics (with some important exceptions) took a back seat — far, far in the back — for roughly a thousand years, until the Renaissance. It was this period that became known as the Dark Ages precisely because the pagan classics were left neglected, and generally there was little advance in learning and culture. On the contrary, much was forgotten.
Although these times were not as dark as the caricatures of the 18th century claimed, there was quite a bit of truth to that unflattering appellation, especially with regard to the Greek and Roman classics that were later to prove so fundamental to Western civilization as we know it. In the Moslem world there was considerable interest in ancient writers, particularly Aristotle and also some scientists. In contrast in the study halls of Europe (mostly in monasteries), the interests that were fostered by the Church in Heavenly things found little of value in virtually all of the production of pagan thinkers.
Copies of many of those works were preserved in church institutions such as the libraries of monasteries, but they lay there unread and virtually forgotten. The church was dominant, it controlled life politically and culturally. It was so strong that it had no need of the persuasive techniques of pagan rhetoric, and its agenda for life included nothing that required the intellectual sophistication and abilities developed by the pagans. It could easily ignore the classic authors since it did not really need what they had to offer.
Part 3
