Aristotle and Ancient Educational Ideals Part 12

As soon as he is ready, the young aspirant for oratorical fame pa.s.ses into the hands of the rhetorician, under whom he learns all the arts, and acquires all that knowledge, necessary to fit him for his profession. No kind of knowledge, and no moral excellence ought to be foreign to the orator. Quintilian is very severe upon the philosophers for claiming, in their t.i.tle, to be, in an exceptional way, lovers of wisdom, and maintains that the true orator is the truly wise and good man. He is surely superior to the philosopher, who turns his back upon the world and manifests no interest in human affairs. Moreover, "philosophy may be simulated; eloquence cannot."

The closing chapter of the last book of Quintilian's work treats of the orator after his retirement from public life. He is to devote himself to writing and to the study of art, science, and philosophy. The picture is charming; but it ends with death, and there is nothing beyond. G.o.d may be defined for oratorical purposes; but his existence is a matter of conjecture.

In Quintilian we have the highest type of the civic man living under a cosmopolitan despotism. His defects--his pedantry, his servility, his externality, his worldliness--are only such as are natural to a good man placed in this position, without any outlook upon a higher existence.

CHAPTER III

PLOTINUS AND PHILOSOPHIC EDUCATION

The material body, which is subject to motion, change, dissolution, and division, requires an immaterial principle to hold and bind it together in unity. This principle of unity is the soul. If it were material, it would require another principle of unity, and so on _ad infinitum_, till an immaterial first were reached, which would then be the true soul.--Ammonius Saccas.

Intelligible things, when they are united with other things, are not changed, as corporeal things are when they are united with each other, but remain as they are, and what they are. Soul and body are intimately united, but not mixed. The soul can separate and withdraw itself from the body, not only in sleep, but also in thought. As the sun illuminates and yet remains itself a separate light, so is the soul in its relation to the body. It is not in the body as in place; rather the body is in it and of it.--_Id._

One's duty is to become first man, then G.o.d.--Hierocles.

Neither Sch.e.l.ling nor Baader nor Hegel has refuted Plotinus: in many ways he soars above them.--Arthur Richter.

What is loved by us here is mortal and hurtful. Our love is love for an image, that often turns into its opposite, because what we loved was not truly worthy of love, nor the good which we sought. G.o.d alone is the true object of our love.--Plotinus.

The practical and the contemplative lives, which Plato and Aristotle had labored so hard to combine and correlate, in order to save human worth and Greek civilization, fell asunder, despite all their efforts--greatly, of course, to the detriment of both. In the terrible picture which Quintilian draws of Roman life in the first century of our era, we see one side of the result of this divorce: in the cruel satires of Lucian, written less than a century later, we may find depicted the other. But, just as, in the midst of the moral corruption and brutality, there arose from time to time worthy men like Quintilian and Tacitus, so amid the philosophical charlatanry and pretence, there still survived a few earnest thinkers, who aspired with all the power that was in them to divine truth, and strove to find in the eternal world that reality which was so miserably wanting in this. By far the greater number of these men were neither Greeks nor Romans, but Orientals, men whose thinking combined Greek philosophy with some earnest form of Eastern mysticism. To such men this life was merely an opportunity of preparing for a higher, in which lay all beauty, all good, and all blessedness. It is not difficult to see what sort of education would follow from this view of life. It may best be characterized by the one word "ascetic." It no longer seeks to train harmoniously all the faculties of body and mind with a view to a worthy social life, but to enable the soul to die to the body and to social life, and so rise to union and consubstantiality with G.o.d. In no sect was this tendency more marked than in the Neoplatonic, or, as it might equally well be called, the Neoaristotelian or Neopythagorean, the greatest name in which is Plotinus.

Plotinus was born in Egypt about A.D. 205. His nationality is unknown.

He received his education in Alexandria--grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy,--and adopted the teaching of the last as a profession. He sought in vain, however, for a system that could satisfy him, till he met with Ammonius "the Sack-bearer," whom he at once recognized as his master. This Ammonius had been reared as a Christian, but had apostatized on becoming acquainted with philosophy. His Christian education, however, had not been altogether lost on him; for he had carried over into philosophy a religious spirit, and not a few of the esoteric ideas then current in certain Christian sects. It was this, apparently, that enabled him to give a new direction to philosophy, and to found a new school, whose influence upon subsequent, even Christian, thought, it would be difficult to overestimate. His school was the Neoplatonic, which, more than any other, united profound thought with mystic theosophy (?e???a).

Plotinus listened to Ammonius for eleven years, and, on the death of the latter, paid a visit to Persia, with the view of studying the religion of that country. He shortly returned, however, and, after a brief sojourn at Antioch, betook himself, in his fortieth year (A.D. 244), to Rome, where he spent the remainder of his life as a teacher of philosophy. His saintly character and his deep, religious thought drew round him a considerable number of earnest men and women, including even members of the imperial family. He made some attempt to found in Campania a Platonopolis, so that his principles might be realized in a social life, in a theosophic community; but this was never carried out.

He died in A.D. 270. Plotinus was the only truly great, original ancient thinker after Aristotle.

While Plato and Aristotle had sought to rise to the intelligible world from, and by means of, the sensible, Plotinus, believing that he has attained a direct, intuitional knowledge of the former, sets out from it and thence tries to reach the other. At the summit of being he finds the supreme Platonic principle, the One or the Good, absolutely transcendent and self-sufficient; next below this, the supreme Aristotelian principle, Intelligence or Absolute Knowing, the _locus_ of all ideas; and third, the supreme principle of the Stoics, Soul, Life, or Zeus, the animating principle of the world. Good, Intelligence, Life--these are Plotinus' divine trinity, evolved by a process of abstraction from the _Nous_ of Aristotle (see p. 161). The members of this trinity are neither personal, conscious, nor equal. Each lower is caused by, but does not emanate from, the next above it; and this causation is due, not to any act of free will, but to an inner necessity. Thus the trinity of Plotinus is a mere energy, acting according to necessary laws. The third member of it turns toward matter, which is mere poverty and hunger for being, and, in so doing, produces a world of G.o.ds, daemons, and mundane beings, the highest of which last is man. All that has matter has multiplicity.

It is easy enough to see what kind of ethics and education will spring from such a system as this. Inasmuch as the good means self-sufficiency, freedom from multiplicity and matter, evil means dependence, multiplicity, materiality. Whatever evil there is in man is due to his connection with matter, for which he is in no sense responsible. His sole business, if he desires blessedness, is to free himself from matter and multiplicity, and return to the unity of the Supreme Good.

The steps by which this may be accomplished are, (1) Music or Art, (2) Love, (3) Philosophy or Dialectic: through all these he rises above multiplicity into unity. In all this there is, obviously, neither moral evil nor moral good, and, indeed, the world of Plotinus contains no moral element, for the simple reason that it contains nothing personal, either in G.o.d or man. Evil is the product of necessity, and consciousness, implying as it does, multiplicity, is part of it. The unethical character of Plotinus' teaching comes out very clearly in his reversal of the positions of instruction and purgation in the scheme of education. According to the old view, purgation was a mere medical process, preparatory to ethical training (see p. 7). According to the Neoplatonic view, ethical training and the "political virtues" are a mere preparation for purgation and the intellectual virtues. And this is perfectly logical; for evil, being physical, must be cured by physical means. And the means which Plotinus recommends are magical, rather than moral; rites and prayers, rather than heroic deeds; the suppression of the will, rather than its exercise.

Plotinus is too much of a Greek to accept, or even see, all the consequences of his own theory, which makes moral life consist in an attempt to escape from the world and to quench consciousness and personality. Accordingly, though he has a poor opinion of civic life (a thing excusable enough in those days), he believes that the civic virtues ought to be cultivated, as a means toward the higher, and has apparently nothing to say against the ordinary grammatical, rhetorical, and musical education of his time. He has a good deal to say in favor of Mathematics, as a preparation for what to him is the supreme branch of education, Dialectics. But the tendency of his teaching is only too obvious, and the conclusions which he did not draw, time and succeeding generations drew for him. The effect of Neoplatonism was, in the long run, to make the super-civic part of man the whole man, to discredit political life and political effort, and to pave the way for the mystic, the ascetic, and the hermit. Nor were the tendencies of the other philosophical schools in any marked degree different. Thus philosophy, instead of contributing to harmonize man and society, and to restore moral life, came to be one of the strongest agencies in bringing about confusion and dissolution, by ignoring moral life altogether, embracing superst.i.tion, and turning man into a mere plaything of blind necessity and magical forces. And thus ancient civilization fell to pieces, because man himself had fallen to pieces, and each piece tried to set itself up for the whole. The civic fragment finds its highest expression in Quintilian, the super-civic in Plotinus. Ere the fragments can be united into a truly moral being, a member of a truly moral society, a new combining force, unknown to either rhetorician or philosopher, must arise.

CHAPTER IV

CONCLUSION

Truly it was an old world, and even Caesar's patriotic genius was not enough to make it young again. The dawn does not return till the night has fully set in.--Mommsen.

My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.--Isaiah.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy G.o.d with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.--Jesus.

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to G.o.d the things that are G.o.d's.--_Id._

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings? and not one of them is forgotten in the sight of G.o.d. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.--_Id._

We love because he first loved us. If a man say, I love G.o.d, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.--John.

By one intelligible form, which is the divine Essence, and one conscious intention, which is the divine Word, things may be known in their multiplicity by G.o.d.--Thomas Aquinas.

If G.o.d acts in all things, and such action in no way derogates from his dignity, but even belongs to his universal and supreme power, he cannot consider it below him, nor does it stain his dignity, if he extend his providence to the individual things of this world.--_Id._

Une immense esperance a pa.s.se sur la terre.--Alfred de Musset.

We have seen that the Greek ideal of life rested upon the complete identification of the man with the citizen. We have seen also how this ideal was paralyzed by the growth of individualism; how the wisest men thought to render this innocuous and even beneficent, by providing for it a sphere of contemplation, superior to that of practice, but organically related to it, and, finally how, with the failure of this attempt, the two sides of human nature, divorced from each other, degenerated, the one into selfish worldliness, the other into equally selfish other-worldliness, both conditions equally dest.i.tute of moral significance.

This sad result was mainly due to three causes, (1) that the remedies proposed for individualism were not sufficient, (2) that the best remedy was set aside, (3) that the conditions for which the remedies were offered soon ceased to exist. Both Plato and Aristotle wrote for the small Greek polities, which lost their autonomy through the Macedonian conquest. If it may be doubted whether even the proposals of the latter would have redeemed these polities, had they continued free, it is certain that they would have been ineffective under the changed circ.u.mstances. At all events, they were never adopted, and even for the super-civic man the teaching of Plato was preferred to his.

As the new cosmopolitanism deepened the gulf between the citizen and the individual, and immeasurably widened the sphere of the latter, in the same proportion did the teaching of Plato fail to bridge over that gulf, and provide activity for that sphere. To tell the super-civic man now that his function was to contemplate divine things and oracularly deliver laws for the guidance of the world, would have argued an absence of humor not common in those days. Besides, those persons who claimed to have contemplated divine things showed no such fitness for legislation as to induce practical men to accept their guidance. The sober fact was, that the contemplation of divine things, which more and more absorbed the energy of Greek thought, was, except for Aristotle, a mere vague asperation without moral value, and became ever more a sort of mystic ecstasy, in which the individual, instead of acquiring insight and power to live worthily and beneficently in the world, was thrown back upon himself, with his will paralyzed. Nor could this be otherwise, seeing the nature of the divine things, the contemplation of which was reckoned so important. Instead of being personal attributes, or a person imposing a moral law seen to be binding, they were mere abstractions, increasing in emptiness the higher they were in the series, the highest being absolute vacancy. In vain had Aristotle protested that all reality is individual: the Platonic theory, that all knowledge is of ideas or universals, prevailed, with the result that the highest knowledge was held to be knowledge of that which is absolutely universal, viz.

indeterminate being or, as Plotinus held, something lacking even the determination of being--the Supreme Good. That the super-civic man should find satisfaction in gazing into vacancy, or be any more valuable in the world after he had done so, no matter how spotless his life and ecstatic his look, is inconceivable.

But while, in the Greek world, the sphere of activity of the super-civic man was vanis.h.i.+ng into nothingness, among a small and obscure band of restored exiles of Semitic race, that sphere had come to claim the entire man and all his relations, practical and spiritual. Isaiah's little band of faithful followers (see p. 133) had grown into a nation, living by no law save that of Jehovah, a very real, very awful, and very holy personality, whom the heaven of heavens could not contain, but who yet watched the rising up and the sitting down of every son of man. Long before Quintilian wrote his elegant treatise on rhetoric, or Plotinus his pantheistic Enneads, there had sprung from the bosom of this people a man who, bursting, at the expense of his life, the narrow bounds of his nationally, elevated the theocracy of his people into a Kingdom of Heaven, which he had bade proclaim to all the world. It was proclaimed, and then (though to some it seemed a stumbling-block, and to others foolishness) the super-civic man, who for hundreds of years had been wandering in darkness, in search of his fatherland, suddenly became aware that he had found it in the Church of Christ. He now no longer tries to escape from the visible world into the emptiness of an abstract first principle; but, in the service of a First Principle who is the most concrete of realities, and who numbers the very hairs of his head, he goes down into the most loathsome depths of the material world to elevate and redeem the meanest of the sons of men. There is no question of bond or free, ruler or ruled, now. In the Kingdom of Heaven there are no such relations. The only greatness recognized there is greatness in service; the only law, the Law of Love. Love! yes, the whole secret is in that one word. By adding love to the conception of the G.o.d of his people, by exemplifying it in his own life, and demanding it of his followers, Jesus accomplished what had baffled all the wisdom of the Greek sages. He restored the moral unity of man, abolished the old world, and made a new heaven and a new earth. In vain have the advocates of an indeterminate, self-evolving first principle, whether calling themselves Neoplatonists, mystics, materialists, evolutionists, Hegelians, or Theosophists, striven to bring back the old world with its cla.s.s distinctions and inst.i.tutional ethics; in vain have they sought to sink the individual G.o.d and man of reality in the universal ideas of thought. The Law of Love, which is the ground of individuality, as well as of true society, has bidden, and will bid them, defiance.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

THE SEVEN LIBERAL ARTS

The Greeks originally recognized two branches of liberal education[6]

(1) Gymnastics, for the body, and (2) Music, for the soul. Out of music grew, in process of time, not only the so-called Liberal Arts, that is, the arts that go to const.i.tute the education of every freeman, but also what was regarded as a superfluous luxury (pe??tt?), Philosophy. It is the purpose of this appendix to trace, as far as possible, this gradual development.

In doing so, one must bear in mind that originally the term "Music"

covered, not only what we call music, but also poetry, and that poetry was the vehicle of all the science that then was. The Homeric _aoidos_ knows the "works of G.o.ds and men." Strictly speaking, therefore, it was out of music and poetry that all the arts and sciences grew. The first step in this direction was taken when Letters were introduced, that is, about the first Olympiad.[7] But it was long before Letters were regarded as a separate branch of education; they were simply a means of recording poetry. Even as late as the time of Plato, Letters are still usually included under Music. In Aristotle, they are recognized as a separate branch. It follows from this that, when we find Greek writers confining soul-education to Music, or Music and Letters, we must not conclude that these signify only playing and singing, reading and writing. Socrates was saying nothing new or paradoxical, when he affirmed that Philosophy was the "highest music." The Pythagoreans had said the same thing before him, and there can be no doubt that Pythagoras himself included under Music (1) Letters, (2) Arithmetic, (3) Geometry, (4) Astronomy, (5) Music, in our sense, and (6) Philosophy (a term invented by him). Plato did the same thing. He speaks of "the true Muse that is accompanied with truth (?????) and philosophy." But in his time "Music" was used in two senses, a broad one, in which it included the whole of intellectual education, and a narrow one, in which it is confined to music in the modern sense. It is in this latter sense that it is used by Aristotle, when he makes the intellectual branches of school education (1) Letters, (2) Music, and (3) Drawing. Philosophy he places in a higher grade. Having distinguished Letters from Music, it is natural enough that he should a.s.sign to the former the branches which Pythagoras had included under the latter. His literary scheme appears to be (1) Grammar, (2) Rhetoric, (3) Dialectic, (4) Arithmetic, (5) Geometry, (6) Astronomy. Add Music, and we have exactly the Seven Liberal Arts; but, as Drawing must also be added, it is clear that there was, as yet, no thought of fixing definitely the number seven. That Drawing was for a long time part of the school curriculum, is rendered clear by a pa.s.sage in a work of Teles (B.C. 260) quoted by Stobaeus (xcviii, 72), in which it is said that boys study (1) Letters, (2) Music, (3) Drawing; young men, (4) Arithmetic, and (5) Geometry. The last two branches are here already distinguished from Letters; but we cannot be sure that the list is intended to be exhaustive. What is especially noticeable in the list of Teles is, that it draws a clear distinction between the lower and higher studies, a distinction which foreshadows the _Trivium_ and _Quadrivium_ of later times.[8]

Philosophy, or the highest education, Aristotle divided into (1) Theory and (2) Practice. Theory he subdivided into (a) Theology, First Philosophy, or Wisdom, called later Metaphysics, the science of the Unchangeable, and (b) Physics, the science of the Changeable; Practice into (a) Ethics, including Politics and conomics, and (b) Poetics or aesthetics.

After Teles we hear little of the Greek school-curriculum until about the Christian era. Meanwhile, the Romans, having acquired a smattering of Greek learning, began to draw up a scheme of studies suitable for themselves. It is noticeable that in this scheme there is no such distinction as the Greeks drew between liberal (??e?????a?, ?????????, ?????a?) and illiberal (??a?s??) arts.[9] As early as the first half of the second century B.C., Cato the Censor wrote a series of manuals for his son on (1) Ethics, (2) Rhetoric, (3) Medicine, (4) Military Science, (5) Farming, (6) Law. It is very significant that the only Greek school-study which appears here is Rhetoric; this the Romans, and notably Cato himself, always studied with great care for practical purposes. It seems that Cato, in order to resist the inroads of Greek education and manners, which he felt to be demoralizing, tried to draw up a characteristically Roman curriculum. Greece, however, in great measure, prevailed, and half a century later we find Varro writing upon most of the subjects in the Greek curriculum: Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Music, Philosophy, besides many others. He wrote a treatise in nine books, called _Disciplinarum Libri_. Ritschl, in his _Quaestiones Varronianae_,[10] tried to show that these "Disciplinae" were the Seven Liberal Arts, _plus_ Architecture and Medicine, and Mommsen, in his _Roman History_, has followed him; but Ritschl himself later changed his opinion. There seems no doubt that (1) Grammar, (2) Rhetoric, (3) Dialectic, (4) Music, (5) Geometry, and (6) Architecture were treated in the work: what the rest were we can only guess.[11] There is no ground for the a.s.sertion that the Seven Liberal Arts were obtained by dropping Architecture and Medicine from Varro's list. It must have been about the time of Varro, if not earlier, that Roman education came to be divided into three grades, called respectively (1) Grammar, (2) Rhetoric, and (3) Philosophy, the last falling to the lot of but few persons. Of course "Grammar" now came to have a very extensive meaning, as we can see from the definition of it given by Dionysius Thrax, in his grammar, prepared apparently for Roman use (B.C. 90). In the Scholia to that work (I am unable to fix their date), we find the Liberal Arts enumerated as (1) Astronomy, (2) Geometry, (3) Music, (4) Philosophy, (5) Medicine, (6) Grammar, (7) Rhetoric.[12]

But to return to the Greeks. In the works of Philo Judaeus, a contemporary of Jesus, we find the Encyclic Arts frequently referred to, and distinguished from Philosophy. The former, he says, are represented by the Egyptian slave Hagar, the latter by Sarah, the lawful wife. One must a.s.sociate with the Arts before he can find Philosophy fruitful. In no one pa.s.sage does Philo give a list of the Encyclic Arts. In one place we find enumerated (1) Grammar, (2) Geometry, (3) Music, (4) Rhetoric (_De Cherub._, -- 30); in another (1) Grammar, (2) Geometry, (3) "the entire music of encyclic instruction" (_De Agricult._, -- 4); in another (1) Grammar, (2) Music, (3) Geometry, (4) Rhetoric, (5) Dialectic (_De Congressu Quaer. Erud. Grat._, -- 5); in another, (1) Grammar, (2) Arithmetic, (3) Geometry, (4) Music, (5) Rhetoric (_De Somniis_, -- 35), etc.