The classical goals of education, eloquentia et sapientia, eloquence and wisdom, cannot be successfully realized without a persevering reference to the higher and integrative wisdom of Sacred Scripture. Today, I will suggest briefly at the end, we have found to our cost that the secular substitute, lacking transcendence, cannot ground and integrate the humanities.

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Tertullian famously asked, while St. Jerome related a troubled dream in which “the Judge of all” accuses him of being not a Christian but a Ciceronian, and Alcuin admonished the monks of Lindisfarne, “What has Ingeld to do with Christ?”, each echoing St. Paul in his still more extreme warning to the Corinthian Greeks about both syncretism and idolatry: “What has Christ to do with Belial?”

“Caveat lector!” all three seem to say: A grave risk of theological adultery attends upon dalliance with pagan authors. It is as if they wanted to separate, even cordon off, humanistic learning from more “appropriate” spiritual preoccupations, and typical modern citations of these famous injunctions implicate Christianity in a certain dour abstemiousness where the liberal arts or belle-lettres are concerned.

But does such exclusivism accurately describe the biblical influence on the humanities in Western history? No. The rich tradition of liberal learning in the West has in fact remained at the most fundamental levels more biblical than classical. From the fountain of biblical study flowed not only a high order of widely applicable interpretative skills ( techné), but, more fundamentally, confidence in the crowning of knowledge with wisdom (its logos) continuously to correct and regenerate intellectual culture.

The classical goals of education, eloquentia et sapientia, eloquence and wisdom, cannot be successfully realized without a persevering reference to the higher and integrative wisdom of Sacred Scripture. Today, I will suggest briefly at the end, we have found to our cost that the secular substitute, lacking transcendence, cannot ground and integrate the humanities.

Citing the Pagans

In intellectual history, ironies and contradictions are the norm. Jerome himself defended a notably generous citation of pagan authors in his own writings, but did so ingeniously by an appeal to worthy precedent, namely, the practice of the biblical authors themselves. He thus established a pattern of argument and of intellectual and textual practice that tells us much about how it would be biblical, and not Roman, authors who would come eventually to provide the apologia for humane learning generally.

Jerome asserts that the Jewish biblical authors themselves make learned and thoughtful use of mid-eastern and Hellenic pagan literature (modern scholarship has confirmed many of his ascriptions in detail) and that St. Paul quotes from the Greek poets, such as Epimenides (Titus 1:12), Menander (1 Cor. 15:33), and Aratus (Acts 17:28). This, he says, establishes an order of appropriation self-confident enough that Paul can make skillful, fitting, often ironic use of alien instruments, much as when (Jerome says rather wryly) David uses Goliath’s own sword to hack off the fallen giant’s head.

Less humorously and yet tellingly for our subject, after citing the Deuteronomic laws permitting marriage to a captive woman, he asks: “What wonder . . . if I also, admiring the fairness of her from the grace of her eloquence, desire to make that secular wisdom which is my captive and my handmaid a rightful matron of the true Israel?”

Jerome goes on to cite a large bibliography of Jewish and Christian writers, bishops, and apologists, all of whom made deft use of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, and Quintillian to extend the reach and defend the claims of the gospel. But it is evident that pagan writers have not set the agenda.

Before Jerome, Clement had been a master of Greek literature, yet he celebrated the Hebrew scriptures as “wisdom in all its splendor,” distinct from and superior to the Hellenic foundation. As Robert Wilken noted in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, in Clement’s writings the Bible “emerges for the first time as the foundation of a Christian culture.”

So Jerome could build confidently upon an already established culture for which the Scriptures have become implicitly (when not explicitly) the primary foundation. Intellectually, as time goes on, marriage to secular wisdom proves more fruitful than celibacy; progeny abound, and in their turn become fruitful.

However, the language this progeny speaks is no longer Greek, but a vernacular version of what the reader’s preface to the 1611 King James Bible calls “the language of Canaan” and southerners in the United Sates call “the language of Zion.” Even as metaphor, this indicates a cultural fact of decisive importance.

Wisdom & Eloquence

The development of the humanities in Western culture cannot be fully understood apart from an appreciation of scriptural husbandry and a kind of ecclesiastical mothering that, together, have birthed and nurtured Western intellectual life down to the present.

In brief, I want to support and extend Wilken’s thesis that the notion that Christianity was “hellenized has outlived its usefulness” and “that a more apt expression would be the Christianization of Hellenism, though that expression does not capture the originality of Christian thought nor the debt owed to Jewish ways of thinking and to the Jewish Bible.”

We cannot trace adequately the shaping of Western intellectual culture in the humane disciplines without considering a certain North African bishop, in particular, his enormously influential On Christian Doctrine, which helped to shape the way in which the Bible has come to be institutionalized in Western culture—even when invisibly. What Augustine set out to accomplish in this book was probably much less: really, just a broad-based guide to reading the Bible, sufficient to undergird an intelligent appreciation of Jewish texts in a Gentile culture.

But in its adequation of the goals of Ciceronian education to a biblical order of reasoning about language and truth, Augustine’s work became a touchstone for later humanistic authors. The list of those indebted to it is long, but includes Cassiodorus, Bonaventure, Wyclif, Erasmus, Petrarch, Milton, Newman, and C. S. Lewis, to name just a few.

Augustine’s pedagogical stratagems for the disciplines required an intelligent reading of Scripture that became in some ways more influential than his exegesis. They helped to make the Bible not only the historical foundation for humane learning in the West, but also the procedural and methodological basis of nearly all scholarship in the humanities, including textual criticism, philological analysis, poetics, language theory, narrative epistemology, historiography, anthropology, positive law, and natural law.

So what did Augustine do? With regard to the goals of education, he does not seem to differ much from Cicero: eloquence and wisdom are the enduring desiderata. But though himself a teacher of rhetoric, he is emphatic that eloquence is an instrument, not an intrinsic good.

Why is this important? Because divine wisdom is essentially the burden of Scripture’s content, and superior wisdom in the life of the reader its ultimate purpose. This wisdom is the intrinsic good at which all study should aim. Acquisition of this wisdom in turn provides a more reliable platform for a distinctive and superior grace in utterance. “One speaks more or less wisely,” Augustine thinks, “to the extent that he has become more or less proficient” in the Holy Scriptures.

Wisdom, rather than Ciceronian eloquence in itself, is the ultimate justification of all higher learning. Meanwhile, biblical language constitutes a special order of eloquence, “fitting for those of higher authority.” These convictions have had incalculable influence on Western culture.

Texts Are Means

Yet the instrumentality of language nevertheless requires careful reflection, and texts were for Augustine a means and not an end. He denounced “that miserable servitude of the spirit in the habit of mistaking signs for things,” arguing that “it is a mark of good and distinguished minds to love the truth within words and not the words themselves.” In the pursuit of wisdom, “we love those things by which we are carried along for the sake of that toward which we are carried.”

This image of education as a journey—ours is to be “a road of the affections” on which we learn the good by doing the good—deeply obligated to the stories of Abraham and the Exodus, is charged with implications for the practice of the intellectual and moral virtues. Not everything we use instrumentally is to be loved, but since the end of our pursuit is knowledge of that Being whose image we call “human,” knowledge of the human is essential to our own participation in that Being.

These formulations are echoed seven centuries later in Anselm of Canterbury’s Monologion, as an introduction to all higher intellectual reflection. Implicitly, our participation in the imago Dei makes of the study of the humanities something almost sacramental—at least as we acknowledge that much we recognize as the highest human good is not simply a product of our own acculturation, or as we might now say, our “social construction.”

Recognition of the magnitude and authority of our exemplar, Augustine wants to say, is essential, and not least because it allows the mind formed by the Scriptures to become capable of a true cosmopolitanism. For example:

If those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, have said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared; rather, what they have said should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted to our use.

Referring to the Egyptians, who “had not only idols and grave burdens,” but also “vases and ornaments of gold and silver and clothing which the Israelites took with them secretly when they fled, as if to put them to a better use,” he writes:

In the same way all the teachings of the pagans contain not only simulated and superstitious imaginings and grave burdens of unnecessary labor, which each one of us leaving the society of pagans under the leadership of Christ ought to abominate and avoid, but also liberal disciplines more suited to the uses of truth, and some most useful precepts concerning morals.

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