THE attempt to use religious education in order to enforce a rigid standard of religious practice in the midst of a secular culture only results in increasing the problem of “leakage.” And thus we get a situation in which the Catholics who both practise and understand their religion are the minority of a minority, and the majority of the population are neither fully Christian nor consciously atheist, but non-practising Catholics, half-Christians and well-meaning people who are devoid of any positive religious knowledge at all.
Hence it is not enough for Catholics to confine their efforts to the education of the Catholic minority. If they want to preserve Catholic education in a secularized society, they have got to do something about non-Catholic education also. The future of civilization depends of the fate of the majority, and so long as nothing is done to counteract the present trend of modern education the mind of the masses must become increasingly alienated from the whole tradition of Christian culture.
But this is not inevitable. It need never have happened if Christians had not been so absorbed in their internal conflicts that they adopted a negative defensive attitude towards the problem of national education as a whole. In England, at any rate, there has never been a time when public policy in education has been actively or consciously anti-Christian. Indeed some of the leading representatives of the Board of Education, like Matthew Arnold, were more fully aware of the dangers of secularization and the cultural importance of religious education than were the religious leaders themselves.
The situation has, of course, deteriorated considerably since Arnold’s day, especially in the higher studies. Theology, which once dominated the university, has now been pushed from the center to the circumference and has become a specialism among an increasing number of specialisms, while the study of divinity as an integral part of the general curriculum of studies, which still survived in a vestigial form before World War I, has disappeared entirely. I do not suggest that it is possible, or perhaps even desirable, to restore it. What I do believe very strongly is that the time has come to consider the possibility of introducing the study of Christian culture as an objective historical reality into the curriculum of university studies.
Until a man acquires some knowledge of another culture, he cannot be said to be educated, since his whole outlook is so conditioned by his own social environment that he does not realize its limitations. He is a provincial in time, if not in place, and he almost inevitably tends to accept the standards and values of his own society as absolute. The widening of the intellectual horizon by initiation into a different world of culture was indeed the most valuable part of the old classical education.
The study of Christian culture would, I believe, provide a really effective substitute. It would initiate the student into a world that was unknown or at best half known, and at the same time it would deepen his knowledge of modern culture by showing its genetic relation to the culture of the past. No one denies the existence of a Christian literature, a Christian philosophy and a Christian institutional order, but at present these are never studied as an organic whole. Yet without this integrated study it is impossible to understand even the development of the modern vernacular literature.
But how does this affect the question of Christian education? Obviously the academic study of Christian culture as an historical phenomenon is no substitute for religious education in the ordinary sense. What it might do, however, is to help remove the preliminary prejudice against the Christian view of things which plays so large a part in the secularization of culture. The fact is that the average educated person is not only ignorant of Christian theology, he is no less ignorant of Christian philosophy, Christian history and Christian literature, and in short of Christian culture in general. And he is not ashamed of his ignorance, because Christianity has come to be one of the things that educated people don’t talk about. This is quite a recent prejudice which arose among the half-educated and gradually spread upwards and downwards. It did not exist among civilized people in the nineteenth century, whatever their personal beliefs were. Men like Lord Melbourne and Macaulay could talk as intelligently about religious subjects as Gladstone and Acton. It was only at the very end of the century that Christianity ceased to be intellectually respectable and it was due not only to the secularization of culture but also to the general lowering of cultural standards that characterized the age.
Today there are signs of improvement in this respect. Religion has come back into poetry and fiction, and there is once more a civilized interest in religious discussion. But this cannot go far unless religion is brought back into higher education, and this can only be achieved by giving the systematic study of Christian culture a recognized place in university studies.
A reform of this kind on the level of higher studies would inevitably penetrate the lower levels of secondary and primary teaching and by degrees affect the whole tone of public education. It is obviously difficult to improve the situation in the schools if the teachers have no knowledge of Christian culture and if the standard set by the university is a secular one. However, it is for the universities and the other centers of higher education to take the first step; and if they do, there is little doubt that they would find plenty of support elsewhere, and that their initiation of the study of Christian culture would be most fruitful in results.
~Christopher Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education. Excerpt from Chap. 8: "Education and the State." (1961)
WE have seen how, during the Dark Ages, the Western Mediterranean had been separated from Christian Europe and had been the centre of a brilliant cultural development derived from the Islamic East. And it was here, rather than in the crusading state of Syria and the Latin Empire of Constantinople, that the East and West came into contact with one another, and the vital process of cultural transmission and adaptation took place.
The process began in Southern Italy, where in the second half of the eleventh century an African monk of Monte Cassino, Constantine, initiated the work of translation, and the school of Salerno became a meeting-place of reek, Arabic and Jewish influences, at least in medical studies. But it was in Spain that the main work of translation took place, above all at Toledo, where the Archbishop, Raymond of Sauvetat (1126-51) established a school of translators which continued its activity through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so that Toledo for a time became equal to Paris and Bologna as a factor in medieval culture. The scholars of Toledo not only translated into Latin the whole Aristotelian corpus in its Arabic form, they also produced versions of the principal works of the great Moslem and Jewish philosophers and men of science: Al Kindi, Al Farabi, Al Battani, Avicenna Ibn Gebirol and Al Ghazali. Finally there were the original thinkers, like Domingo Gonzalez, the Archdeacon of Segovia, who first attempted to make a new synthesis between the philosophy of Avicenna (itself a synthesis of the Aristotelian and Neo-platonic traditions), with the Augustinian tradition of Latin Christianity.
The most striking thing about this movement was its cosmopolitan character. Jews and Arabs and Greeks co-operated with Spaniards and Italians and Englishmen. Already at the beginning of the twelfth century an English scholar, Adelard of Bath, who had been educated in the cathedral schools of Northern France, was travelling in Spain, Southern Italy and the Near East and translating the works of Euclid and the ninth-century mathematicians and astronomers of Central Asia such as Al Khwarizmi and Abu Ma’shar of Balkh. To Adelard and his successors—the Italians Plato of Tivoli and Gerard of Cremona, and the Englishmen Robert of Chester, Daniel of Morley and Alfred of Sereschel—this was like the discovery of a new world, and they called on their compatriots to leave their elementary studies and their barren arguments, and set themselves to school with the Arabs and the ancient Greeks who alone possessed the genuine tradition of scientific and philosophic knowledge.
One might well have supposed that the Mohammedan and pagan origins of the new learning would have prevented its acceptance by Western Christendom, but in spite of the opposition of conservatives and the suspicions of the guardians of orthodoxy the new teaching made its way with remarkable rapidity into the rising universities, so that by the middle of the thirteenth century the works of Aristotle were being studied and commented and discussed at Paris and Oxford and Toulouse and Cologne.
At Paris the main effort of the numerous summas and commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard was directed to the interpretation of theology in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics and their mutual integration. At Oxford, on the other hand, under the influence of Robert Grosseteste and the Franciscan school, it was the scientific and mathematical aspects of the new learning that were most studied and gave the school at Oxford its original character.
Finally, the Aristotelian tradition was represented in its purest and most uncompromising form by the teaching of the Spanish Moslem Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 11-26-98), whose works were translated after 1217 by Michael Scot (d. 1232), the court astrologer of Frederick II, and found enthusiastic disciples in Siger of Brabant and his followers in the university of Paris from 1270 to 1280, and at Bologna and Padua in the fourteenth century.
The result if this great influx of new knowledge and new ideas was to provide the universities and the international society of scholars and teachers who frequented them with the materials from which to construct a new intellectual synthesis. The dialecticians were no longer compelled to masticate and remasticate the old scholastic commonplaces. They had at last something solid to get their teeth into. And for a hundred years there was, in consequence, such a development of philosophical studies as the world had not seen since the great age of ancient Greece. The effect on the general culture may be seen in a unique form in the Divina Commedia of Dante, the great literary achievement of the Middle Ages, in which every aspect of life and every facet of personal and historic experience is illuminated by a metaphysical vision of the universe as an intelligible unity. And behind the Divina Commedia there is the work of St. Thomas and St. Albert and a hundred lesser men, all of them devoted to the building up of a great structure of thought in which every aspect of knowledge is co-ordinated and subordinated to the divine science—Theologia—the final transcendent end of every created intelligence.
The great interest in this synthesis is not its logical completeness, for that was to be found already in a rudimentary form in the traditional curriculum of the earlier medieval schools, but rather the way in which the mind of Western Christendom reconquered the lost world of Hellenic science and annexed the alien world of the Moslem thought without losing its spiritual continuity or its specifically religious values. No doubt all this was questioned by later critics of scholasticism, like Luther and his contemporaries who maintained that medieval philosophy had abandoned evangelical truth to follow Aristotle and the vain deceits of human wisdom. But in order to maintain this view they were compelled to push their condemnation further, and to condemn the whole traditions of Western Catholicism right back to the age of the Fathers.
But if we look at the development of Western Christendom as a whole, it is clear that the intellectual synthesis if the thirteenth century was not a contradiction but the crown and completion of centuries of continuous effort to achieve an integration of the religious doctrine of the Christian Church with the intellectual tradition of ancient culture. This aim was already set out in a rudimentary form by the encyclopaedists of the sixth and seventh centuries like Cassiodorus and Boethius and Isidore of Seville, but it was not completely achieved until the thirteenth century with the recovery of the full inheritance of Greek philosophy and science, with the creation of the new intellectual organs of Christendom—the university corporations and the Orders of Friars.
~Christopher Dawson: Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Chap. X. ‘The Medieval City: School and University.’
