CHAPTER IVIsidore’s Relation to Education
Isidore’s Relation to Education
Thequestion of perpetuating the pagan range of educational subjects presented a great difficulty to the leaders of patristic and early medieval thought, so great a difficulty that some of them were almost more ready to discard education than to try to separate it from its heathen entanglements. In both the Greek and Roman worlds formal education had been late in developing; as a consequence its tone was wholly secular. Its object was to put the youth of the ruling classes in touch with the culture and life of the time. The subjects found most serviceable for study were literature, rhetoric, and philosophy. The sciences known to the ancients gradually gained a foot-hold also, and instruction began to be given in a number of them, including geometry, music, arithmetic, astronomy, medicine, and architecture. Finally, the subject-matter of education settled down to the stereotyped list of seven subjects, known as “the seven liberal arts”, from which there was apparently little deviation in later Roman and medieval times.[138]This formal education of the Romans was sowell established and enjoyed such prestige that in spite of Christian hostility it continued to flourish until the increasing disorganization of society in the fifth and sixth centuries made the continuance of secular schools impossible.
Upon their disappearance the whole burden of maintaining education fell upon the church. In the church organization the effective bodies for such an activity were the groups of clergy attached to cathedrals and to monasteries. There was no system established by a central authority and enforced by public opinion to guide the efforts made by these bodies, and it is plain that in each case educational facilities for the training of priests would be provided in accordance with the intelligence and character of the different bishops and abbots. Where the ecclesiastical authorities were ignorant or careless, the training of the priest or monk must have degenerated to a sort of apprenticeship. The evidence which we possess of the illiteracy[139]of the clergy would lead us to infer that in the dark ages education, in any sense worthy of the name, was sporadic, the product of the happy coincidence of opportunity and an ecclesiastic intelligent enough to realize it.[140]
The first comprehensive effort[141]to deal with the educational situation from the Christian standpoint was made by Cassiodorus and was designed expressly to meet the needs of the inmates of a monastery in Southern Italy. Naturally he put forth his main endeavor on the side of what may be called theology, but, in addition, he felt impelled to give very brief and vague accounts of the seven liberal arts, which he was reluctantly forced to consider as an indispensable preparation for the former study.[142]
Cassiodorus’ attitude toward these preliminary studies is a curious one. He believed that their subject-matter was to be found scattered through the Scriptures and that “the teachers of secular learning” had gathered together the disjointed bits of information and organized them into the seven liberal arts. As a consequence he thought that a knowledge of these arts was of assistance when any passage relating to them was met in the reading of the Scriptures. In spite of this, however, it seems to have been his opinion that the less use made of them the better, and that, if ignorance of the liberal arts was a fault, it was certainly one of a minor character and had the advantage of not endangering the Christian’s faith.[143]With Cassiodorus theproblem of education was little more than that of securing a training sufficient to enable one to read and study the Scriptures. The speculation cannot be avoided as to whether, if Christianity had depended, like Druidism, on an oral tradition, Cassiodorus might not have been willing to dispense with education altogether.
Isidore is the second writer to deal comprehensively with the subject-matter of Christian education. Before giving an account, however, of the way in which he met the problems that were presented to him, it is necessary to glance at the educational situation as it then existed in Spain. It appears from the enactments of the councils of Toledo in the sixth and seventh centuries that the clergy as a body were beginning to be concerned for the education of their order.[144]An article of the council of 531 directs that as soon as children destined for the secular clergy are placed under the control of the bishop, “they ought to be educated in the house of the church under the direction of the bishop by a master appointed for the purpose”.[145]Another article[146]says that “those who receive such an education” should not presume to leave their own church and go to another “since it is not fair that a bishop should receive or claim a pupil whom another bishop has freed from boorish stupidity and the untrained state of infancy”. It is further directed that those who were “ignorant of letters” should not become priests. An article of the fourth council of Toledo in 633, at which Isidore probably presided, orders that “whoever among the clergy are youths should remain in one room of the atrium, in order that they may spend the years of the lustful period of their lives not in indulgence but in the discipline of the church, being put in charge of an older man of the highest character as master of their instruction and witness of their life”.[147]These passages all refer to cathedral schools, but there is evidence equally good of the existence of similar schools in the monasteries.[148]Such, then, were the practical conditions, as far as known, which determined the educational activity of Isidore’s time.
The spirit in which Isidore approached the task of furnishing a comprehensive treatment of the secular subject-matter of education was the one proper to his age. He held that its place was a subordinate one. He seems to be expressing his own and not a borrowed view when he says that “grammarians are better than heretics, for heretics persuade men to drink a deadly draught, while the learning of grammarians can avail for life, if only it is turned to better uses”.[149]The same depreciation of the independent value of secular studies is reflected in his statement that the order of the seven liberal arts in the curriculum was one intended to secure a progressive liberation of the mind from earthly matters and “to set it at the task of contemplating things on high”.[150]He evidently believed that it was the function of the seven liberal arts to raise the mind from a lower or material to a higher or spiritual plane of thought.[151]
In theEtymologies, as has been noticed, Isidore has combined the encyclopedia of education, as exemplified in the works of Martianus Capella and Cassiodorus, and the encyclopedia of the whole range of knowledge, of which the works of Varro, Pliny, and Suetonius are leading examples. The first three of the twenty books which are comprised in theEtymologiesare evidently educational texts; the last twelve as evidently belong to the encyclopedia of all knowledge.[152]The question is in which of these divisions the intervening books should be classed. If we look to Isidore’s predecessors for guidance on this point, we find that Capella gives only the seven liberal arts, while Cassiodorus gives not only a comprehensive account of preparatory studies in the form of the seven liberal arts, but adds in hisDe Institutione Divinarum Litteraruma treatment of the higher, or religious, education of the monk. The supposition that Isidore followed the example of Cassiodorus is the more natural one. Their educational purposewas much the same: Cassiodorus had in mind the training of the monk, while Isidore was concerned with the education of the priest. It is, all things considered, more natural to suppose that Isidore is giving in Books I-VIII of hisEtymologiesa comprehensive survey of the education of the secular clergy, than to suppose that his educational texts stopped short at the end of the seven liberal arts.
If this supposition is correct, the outline of this survey is as follows: Grammar (Bk. I), Rhetoric and Dialectic (Bk. II), Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy (Bk. III), Medicine (Bk. IV), Laws and Times (Bk. V), the books and services of the church (Bk. VI), God, the angels, and the orders of the faithful (Bk. VII), the church and the different sects (Bk. VIII). The inclusion of medicine, law, and chronology, which were not in the corresponding plan of Cassiodorus,[153]meant merely an enlargement of his scheme to fit it for the slightly different purpose which Isidore had in mind. The reason for the inclusion of these subjects is the practical one: in the absence of any other educated class priests were obliged to have some slight knowledge of medicine and law, while the intricacy of the church calendar of the time made chronology a professional necessity.
At first sight this plan of educational subjects would seem to be at variance with our accepted idea that the seven liberal arts covered the whole field of preparatory training. A closer examination shows, however, that in form at least Isidore kept them in a class by themselves; andwhen he passes from them to medicine he is careful to specify that it is not one of the liberal arts, but forms a “second philosophy”.[154]By this he means that medicine—and the same may be assumed for laws and times—is placed in the higher and not the preparatory stage of education, and that in this sphere it plays a minor part.
If, then, this view of the subject-matter of the first eight books of theEtymologiesis correct, it will be admitted that in Isidore’s organization of education a significant step has been taken. In the education of the Greek and Roman world there was nothing to parallel the medieval and modern university development, which has been characterized until recently by the three professional schools of law, medicine, and theology. In Isidore’s plan we have, for the first time, as professional studies, first, what corresponds to the later theology, and, in subordination to this, the subjects of law, medicine and chronology. It is evident, therefore, that we have here in embryo, as it were, the organization of the medieval university; law and medicine have only to be secularized and freed from their subordination to theology, and the medieval university in its complete form appears.