FROM ETHNIC TO COSMOPOLITAN LIFE

The distinguishing characteristics of Hellenic education were unity, comprehensiveness, proportion, and aimfulness. It extended to the whole human being, striving to bring the various elements of his nature into complete harmony in view of an end. This end was the State, in which the individual citizen was expected to find a field for all his activities. We have seen how, while conservative Sparta clung to this ideal to the last, and rigorously excluded those influences which tended to undermine it, Athens, by freely admitting these, gradually broke down the fair proportion between bodily and mental education, in an excessive devotion to the latter, and so came to make a distinction between the man and the citizen. The result was an epidemic of individualism which threatened the existence of all that was Hellenic. Against this destructive power the noblest men in the nation, an Æschylus, an Aristophanes, a Pericles, a Socrates, a Xenophon, a Plato, an Aristotle, fought with all the might of worth and intellect. Some of them sought once more to remerge the man in the citizen by means of a despotism and the suppression of all intellectual pursuits; others, seeing clearly the impossibility of this, tried so to define the sphere of the individual that it should not encroach upon that of the citizen, but stand in harmonious relation to it. They did this by placing the sphere of the individual above that of the State, and, inasmuch as the former was a purely intellectual sphere, they found themselves driven to conclude, and to lay down, that the contemplative life is the end and consummation of the practical, that the citizen and the State exist only for the sake of the individual. They were very far indeed from seeing all the implications of this conclusion: these showed themselves only in the sequel; but the fact is, that the principle of the separation between the man and the citizen, and the assignment of the place of honor to the former, proved at once the destroying angel of Hellenism and the animating spirit of the civilization which took its place. If we look closely at the schemes of Plato and Aristotle, we shall see that they try to render innocuous the spirit of individualism by exhausting its activities in intellectual relations to the divine, offering it heaven, if it will only consent to relinquish to the political spirit its earthly claims. They practically said: Man, in all his relations to his fellow-men here below, is a citizen; only in relation to God is he an individual. The history of the last two thousand years is but a commentary on this text. From the day when the master-mind of the Greek world credited man's nature with a divine element having a supreme activity of its own, European thought and life have been agitated by three questions, and largely shaped by the answers given to them: (1) What is the nature of the divine element in man? (2) In what form or institution shall that element find expression and realization? (3) How shall that institution relate itself to the State? And they have not yet been definitely answered.

Principles that are to move the world are never the result of mere abstract thought, but always of a crisis or epoch in human affairs. And so it was in the present case. The separation between the man and the citizen was accomplished in fact, before it was formulated in theory. On the other hand, the theory received emphasis from the events which accompanied and followed its promulgation. The battle of ChÆronea, which took place sixteen years before Aristotle's death, by putting an end forever to the free civic life of Greece, removed the very conditions under which the old ideal could realize itself, and forced men to seek a sphere of activity, and to form associations, outside of the State. The State, indeed, still maintained a semblance of life, and the old education, with its literature, gymnastics, and music still continued; but the spirit of both was gone. The State was gradually replaced by the philosophic schools, while intellectual training tended more and more to concentrate itself upon rhetoric, that art which enables the individual to shine before his fellows, and to gain wealth or public preferment. From this time on, the spiritual life of Greece found expression in the pretentious, empty individualism of the rhetorician, the lineal descendant of the sophists, and in the philosophical sects, which embodied the spirit of Socrates, their opponent.

The founder of the rhetorical schools may be said to have been Isocrates, who, after being a pupil of Socrates', turned against the philosophic tendency, and championed elegant philistinism. The aim of these schools was to turn out clever men of the world, thoroughly acquainted with popular opinions and motives, and capable of expressing themselves glibly, sententiously, and persuasively on any and every subject. They usually made no profession of imparting profound learning or eliciting philosophic thought: indeed, they despised both; but they did seek to impart such an amount of ordinary knowledge as to place their pupils in the chief current of the popular thought of their time. They thus became the bearers of practical education among a people who, having lost their political life without finding any higher, sought to obtain satisfaction in social intercourse. For hundreds of years they exerted an enormous influence, and, indeed, at certain times and places were formidable rivals of the philosophic schools.

The first man of Greek race who attempted to found a sect or school outside the State was Pythagoras, and there can be no doubt that all subsequent schools were in some degree modelled upon his. It is true that the Pythagorean school had been broken up and dispersed long before the days of Plato and Aristotle (see p. 54); nevertheless, his followers, scattered over Greece, had carried with them the ideas and principles of their master, and now that Athens had fallen into the condition against which the Pythagorean discipline had been a protest, these ideas found a ready response in the hearts of those men whom the social life of the time could not satisfy. Hence the schools of Plato and Aristotle, which had originally been mere educational institutions, turned, even during the lifetime of the latter, into sects (a???se??, heresies, as they were called later on), with definite sets of non-political principles, in accordance with which their members tried to shape their lives. It cannot be said that these two schools were in any high degree successful, and the reasons were that they were too purely intellectual, that they made no striking revolt against political life, and that they called for a type of man not easy to find. But, shortly after the death of Aristotle, there arose, almost contemporaneously, two other schools, which exerted an influence, deep and wide, for over six hundred years. These were the Epicurean and the Stoic. Widely as these differed in respect to means, they sought the same end, namely, personal independence, and they sought it by conformity to laws imposed by no human legislator, but by nature. The former took the law of the senses, the latter the law of the spirit, for its guide; and, by a strange contradiction, while the former championed free will, the latter professed fatalism. These four schools were the only ones that ever met with extensive patronage in Athens, and with the exception of the Academic, they never diverged far from the principles of their founders. In the time of Marcus Aurelius, after Athens had been for ages a mere Roman university, they were placed under State patronage, and supported by public funds, and there is no record to show that this was discontinued until they were finally closed by the Emperor Justinian in a.d. 529.

Not long after the death of Aristotle, Athens was supplanted by Alexandria, as the centre of Greek influence. Here the rhetorical and philosophic schools established themselves, and could soon boast a numerous discipleship. This, however, was no longer exclusively, or even mainly, Greek, but was recruited from all the nations of the known world, more especially those of the East. Phoenicians, Syrians, Jews, Persians, etc., not to speak of Egyptians, now became students of Greek philosophy, and members of philosophic sects, whose members not only studied together, but often, to a large extent, lived together in communities. About the year b.c. 300 were founded the famous Museum and Library of Alexandria—the first university and the first public library in the world. Round these the various sects gathered, to study, to discuss, and to exchange opinions. Nor was it Greek thought alone that engaged their attention. The opinions and beliefs of Egypt and the East came in for a share, and, in the end, for the largest share. Nor is this wonderful, when we consider the direction that thought and life were then taking.

We have already seen that, as Greek civic life lost the conditions of its existence, the thoughtful portion of the people came more and more to seek for life-principles in the supersensible world of intellect. The nature of this world Plato and Aristotle had done their best to reveal. But the event proved that neither an ordered host of ideas commanded by the Good, nor a Supreme Intelligence served by a host of lower intelligences, could yield the principles which the life of the time demanded; and thus we find the philosophers of Alexandria striving to people their intelligible world with forms drawn from all the religions of the East, including Judaism. Thus there grew up the various forms of Alexandrine philosophy, compounds of Greek thought and Oriental religion. On the basis of these again were organized, at the same time, various forms of social life, all tending more or less to religious communism. Hence came the Essenes (see p. 59), the Therapeuts, the Neopythagoreans, and the Neoplatonists, all of whom, notwithstanding certain shortcomings, did much to purify life, and to pave the way for a higher civilization.

In b.c. 146, Greece, and, in b.c. 30, Egypt, fell into the hands of the Romans and thenceforth formed provinces of their empire. Athens and Alexandria were now Roman university-towns, while Rome became more and more the diffusing centre of Greek and Oriental influence. It would be impossible, in a work like the present, to give even a sketch of the forms which education assumed in these three great centres, or in the world that revolved round them, in the six hundred and more years that passed between the loss of Greek autonomy and the triumph of Christianity. We shall merely endeavor to give a general notion of its two chief tendencies, which, as we saw, were towards rhetoric and philosophy; and we shall do this in connection with the names of two men, who may be regarded as respectively typical of the two tendencies, Quintilian the rhetorician, and Plotinus the philosopher. By doing so we shall pave the way for the consideration of the Rise of the Christian Schools.