Medieval civilization proved the Bible’s power to incorporate all the tales of the pagans. It was never the goal of Augustine, Jerome, and their successors to save classical literature, although that resulted from their efforts. What they wanted to know was Christ in the Scriptures.
Despite the current enthusiasm over classical education, there is little agreement as to what books should be read at a classical school. The question of the classical canon has been largely framed by the Great Books movement of the late nineteenth century. Its most famous advocate, Mortimer Adler, proposed an answer with his Great Books of the Western World. The series originally contained fifty-four volumes of books ranging from Homer to Freud—with notable omissions of Cicero and the Bible—that Adler and his team deemed most important to “The Great Conversation.” Despite Adler’s continued popularity in the classical school movement, no institution adopts Adler’s list as the definitive answer to what students should be reading.
The question of what to read is an old one. Augustine and Jerome faced it at the turn of the fifth century. Their answer was simple: we should be reading the Bible. This answer was so compelling that it set the course for a thousand years of education. From the collapse of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance, an entire culture was built around a single book. The liberal arts and the pagans classics were made to serve the Bible, to help one better understand its mysteries. Books that were not useful to that end were to be discarded.
Augustine and Jerome were among the best educated of their day, but as Christians they became skeptical about the value of their pagan learning. Jerome writes that in his monastic vocation it was easier for him to give up home, gourmet food, even family than it was to give up his pagan library. Then one day, when an illness had brought him near death, he had a vision in which God rebuked him, saying: “thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian.” Jerome, for whom “knowledge of Scripture is knowledge of Christ,” thereafter gave up the possession of secular books. Augustine credits Cicero for his initial interest in Christianity, but Cicero also became a stumbling block to his conversion. When Augustine first turned to the Bible as an adult, he found it crude and uncompelling compared to the eloquence of Cicero, and years elapsed before he returned to the Bible and was converted by reading Paul’s letter to the Romans. He later reflected upon his education and lamented that as a boy he wept so many tears over Dido’s death, saying he had “sinned, then, when as a boy I preferred those empty studies to those more profitable.”
Augustine and Jerome knew the Bible was a demanding text. The study of Scripture required not only faith but a focused intellect and thorough knowledge of the natural world. To that end, pagan literature proved useful. Augustine composed a short book entitled On Christian Teaching which remained popular throughout the medieval period. The book is a manual of biblical interpretation that encompasses all learning, religious and secular. Augustine explains how history, natural science, rhetoric, and other branches of learning can aid biblical exegesis. He compares pagan learning to the spoils of the Egyptians, the gold and silver appropriated—at God’s command—by the Israelites as they left Egypt. Yet while some of those spoils were used to build the Lord’s Tabernacle, the temptation always remained to make of them a golden calf.
In On Christian Teaching, Augustine bequeathed to the Middle Ages a vision of education wherein all learning culminated in studying the Bible. Jerome, an eminently practical man, provided the tools that enabled the realization of this vision. Foremost was his Latin translation of the Bible which became the version studied throughout Europe for a thousand years. Since Latin eventually ceased to be anyone’s native tongue, every medieval scholar spent much of his boyhood in grammar class. Jerome also produced and translated a number of reference works, notably his Book of Hebrew Names and Questions on the Book of Genesis, which compiled pagan or Jewish scholarship on geography, linguistics, history, and anything else that could be a help in studying the Bible. More than any other, Jerome can be credited with cultivating the medieval love for etymologies and encyclopedias.
Within a century the centers of education began their retreat to the haven of monasteries and cathedrals. Thus, at the end of the sixth century we find Cassiodorus, a Roman statesman and successor of Boethius, spending the final decades of his life overseeing a monastery in Calabria. He wrote a book, Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, which provides an early and formative description of the medieval trivium and quadrivium. The book is written to monks who, Cassiodorus says, should study secular letters because “to a considerable degree it is by this that our minds are equipped to understand Sacred Scripture.”
The same conviction is alive and well in Ermenric, a ninth-century Benedictine monk and later bishop of Passau: “The sayings of the pagan poets, as abominable as they are on account of their untruth, are nonetheless useful when it comes to comprehending divine eloquence.” A few centuries later, Peter of Celle enlists secular literature as an aid to understanding the Bible:
In this way grammar, dialectic, geometry, and astronomy are seasoned by the savory salt of Divine Scripture. The taste of these disciplines used to bring death in its train … [but] when flour, which signifies grace, was mixed in with them, they began to provide a healthy and refreshing nourishment … seeing as people, after they have been thoroughly grounded in secular literature, read divine literature more earnestly and have a keener understanding of it.
Peter was writing in the twelfth century as the center of education was again moving, this time to the universities. In this new home theology—which meant the study of the Bible—continued her reign as Queen of the Sciences. The Bible had captivated the imagination of Europe. Incredible amounts of time and wealth were invested in beautiful manuscript copies of the Bible. The most talented artisans constructed gothic cathedrals adorned with sculptures and stained-glass windows of biblical scenes, a visual Bible for the poor. An illiterate cowherd could recite the Lord’s Prayer in Jerome’s Latin. The brightest lawyers of Italy found in Genesis a rationale for the presumption of innocence, and in Susanna the separate examination of witnesses. English students read the histories of William of Malmesbury to discover how their kings descended—via the Trojans—from the sons of Noah. In the Divine Comedy, Dante imaginatively presented the heroes of Greek myth alongside biblical characters. Peter Comestor could tell unironically how Prometheus and Ceres fit within the chronology of Genesis. The Bible had a wide embrace indeed!
Medieval civilization proved the Bible’s power to incorporate all the tales of the pagans. It was never the goal of Augustine, Jerome, and their successors to save classical literature, although that resulted from their efforts. What they wanted to know was Christ in the Scriptures. As Augustine counseled in On Christian Doctrine:
We ought not to refuse to learn letters because they say Mercury discovered them… Nay, but let every good and true Christian understand that wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master.
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The featured image is “The Prohibited Reading” (1876) by Karel Ooms, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.