20.2. Pagan Rhetoric in Christian Culture
And this education was for all, not only for the children of unbelievers. Gregory of Nyssa himself informs us that he attended the classes of heathen rhetoricians. So did Gregory of Nazianzus and his brother Caesarius, and so did Basil.
John Chrysostom was taught by Libanius, the last of the Sophists, who claimed that it was what he learnt in the schools that led his friend Julian back to the worship of the gods. Even Tertullian, who would not suffer a Christian to teach rhetoric out of heathen books, could not forbid his learning it from them. They were indeed the only means to knowledge. Efforts were made to provide Christian books modelled upon them. Proba, wife of a praefect of Rome, compelled Virgil to prophesy of Christ by the simple means of reading Christianity into a cento of lines from the Aeneid. Juvencus the presbyter dared, in Jerome's phrase, to submit the majesty of the Gospel to the laws of metre, and to this end composed four books of Evangelic history.
The two Apollinarii turned the Old Testament into heroic and Pindaric verse, and the New Testament into Platonic dialogues; Nonnus the author of the Dionysiaca rewrote St John's Gospel in hexameters; Eudocia, consort of Theodosius II, composed a poetical paraphrase of the Law and of some of the Prophets. But as soon as Julian's edict against Christian teachers was withdrawn, grammarians and rhetors returned to the classics with renewed zest and a sense of victory gained. Jerome and Augustine, both of them students and teachers, pointed out the educational capacity of the sacred books; but some 80 years after the publication of the de doctrina Christiana, in which Augustine as a teacher urged the claims of Scripture, we find Ennodius the Christian bishop speaking of rhetoric as queen of the arts and of the world. It was reserved for Cassiodorus (A.D. 480-575), the father of literary monasticism in the West, to attempt the realisation of Augustine's dream.
Like Ennodius his older contemporary, Cassiodorus loved and practised rhetoric, but he had visions of a better kind of education, and in 535-6 he made an abortive attempt to found a school of Christian literature at Rome, "in which the soul might gain eternal salvation, and the tongue acquire beauty by the exercise of the chaste and pure eloquence of Christians " His project was ill-timed; it was the moment of the invasion of Belisarius, and Rome had other business on hand than schemes of education and reform The schools were pagan to the end, and it may be said with truth that rhetoric retarded the progress of the Faith, and that Christianity when it conquered the heathen world was captured by the system of education which it found in force. The result of rhetorical training is very plainly seen in all the literature of the period and in the characters of the writers. Even the Fathers are deeply tinged with it, and Jerome himself admits that one must always distinguish in their writings between what is said for the sake of argument and what is said as truth. Though perjury and false witness were heavily punished, lying was never an ecclesiastical offence, and rigid veracity cannot be claimed as a constant characteristic of any Christian writer of the period except Athanasius, Augustine, and, outside his panegyrics, Eusebius of Caesarea.
Reference has already been made to some of the Eastern authors who wrote in the full current of Christianity but with no sensible trace of its influence. Passing West, we find ourselves in better company than that of the novelists and epigrammatists, and among men who even more effectively illustrate the tendencies of the time. By Macrobius we are introduced to a little group of gentlemen who meet together in a friendly way for the discussion of literary, antiquarian, and philosophic matters. Most of the characters of the Saturnalia are known to us from the history of the day and from their own writings, which express opinions sufficiently similar to those which Macrobius lends them in his symposium to make it a faithful mirror of fourth century thought and conversation
There is Praetextatus, at whose house the company first assembles to keep the Saturnalia. He is a scholar and antiquary, a statesman and philosopher, the hierophaut of half-a-dozen cults, formerly praefect of the city and proconsul of Achaia. His dignity and urbanity, his piety, his grave humour, his overflowing erudition, his skill in drawing out his friends, render him in all respects the proper president of the feast of reason. There is Flavian the younger, a man of action and of greater mark in the real world than Praetextatus, who however plays but a small part on Macrobius' stage. There is Q. Aurelius Symmachus, the wealthy senator and splendid noble, the zealous conservative and patron of letters, who opposed Ambrose in. the affair of the Altar of Victory and brought Augustine to Milan as teacher of rhetoric. There are two members of the house of Albinus, chiefly remarkable for their worship of Virgil. There is Servius, the young but erudite critic, who carries his scholarship with so much grace and modesty. There is Evangelus, whose rough manners and uncouth opinions serve as a foil to the strict correctness of the rest. There is Disarius the doctor, the friend of Ambrose, and Horus, whose name proclaims his foreign birth.
These persons of the Saturnalia we know to have been living men. What are the topics of their conversation ? The range is astonishing, from antiquities (the origin of the Calendar, of the Saturnalia, of the toga praertextata, linguistics (derivations and wondrous etymologies), literature (especially Cicero and Virgil), science (medicine, physiology and astronomy), religion and philosophy (a syncretism of all the cults), ethics (chiefly Stoical, e.g. the morality of slavery and suicide), down to table manners and the jokes of famous men. In a word, everything that a Roman gentleman ought to know is treated somewhat mechanically but with elaborate fullness — except Christianity, of which there is no hint. And yet one of the Albini had a Christian wife and the other was almost certainly himself a Christian.
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