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Christianisation and the dissemination of Christian teaching 733

of Willibrord’s companions was killed.

143

Willehad was also spared by the

sortes,even though some pagans thought that he deserved to die because of his

preaching against idolatory.

144

On the other hand he and his companions risked

death when one of them destroyed a shrine at Drenthe.

145

When Boniface cut

down the oak at Geismar, he is said to have met with no opposition from the

pagan crowd which had gathered.

146

Geismar, though, was within the Frankish

sphere of inﬂuence and it may be that Boniface could in this instance rely on

the support of the mayors of the palace.

Missionaries may at times have had the backing of secular forces in their

acts of desecration. Certainly they worked together with the secular arm when

force was employed as a means of Christianisation. Amandus was so appalled

by the prevalence of apostasy in the region of Ghent that he persuaded Bishop

Aicharius of Noyon to obtain letters from King Dagobert, authorising forcible

conversion.

147

The chief example of the use of force in evangelisation during the

early Middle Ages, however, is the Christianisation of the Saxons, which came

to be intimately related to their conquest during the reign of Charlemagne.

From 772, when he attacked Saxony and destroyed the Irminsul, until 804,

when he resorted to mass deportation in order to solve the Saxon problem,

Christianisation was central to Charlemagne’s policy.

148

In 776 the Saxons

promised to become Christians as part of their submission to the Frankish king.

In 778 and 782 they rebelled under the pagan leadership of Widukind against

Carolingian rule and perhaps particularly against the strident Christianity of

Charlemagne’s ﬁrst Saxon capitulary.

149

In 785 Widukind accepted terms and

baptism, but there was still pagan reaction to come between 792 and 804.

The Saxon revolts are an indication of the weakness of force as a method

of effecting religious change. Ultimately the Saxons did accept Christianity,

although even in the late ninth century there was still fear of violence at the

hands of pagan robbers.

150

It is doubtful whether the Christianisation of Saxony

really was achieved by force rather than by a longer-term transformation of

beliefs, taboos and social norms. What ultimately caused such a transformation

is impossible to determine. Preaching may have had some effect, though the

message propagated by the missionaries, to judge by the writings of Martin of

Braga and Pirmin, is not self-evidently attractive to pagans whose cosmology or

view of religion was very different. At times a missionary may have found a way

of presenting the Christian message so as to challenge common assumptions

and prompt conversion. In the late eighth century the Bavarian priest Ingo

shocked pagan aristocrats by treating their Christian servants with greater

143

Alcuin, Vita Willibrordi cc.10–11.

144

Vita Willehadi c.3.

145

Vita Willehadi c.4.

146

Willibald, Vita Bonifatii c.6.

147

Vita Amandi c.13.

148

uttner (1965), pp. 454–87.

149

Capitulatio de Partibus Saxoniae.

150

Vita Liutbirgae c.12.

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734 ia n wood

respect than he treated them.

151

The servants he entertained to food and to wine

served in golden goblets, while he left the masters outside to be fed like dogs.

On other occasions more may have been achieved through Gregory the Great’s

policy of assimilating as much pagan tradition as possible into new Christian

celebrations. In the long run, however, most was probably achieved through the

steady inﬂuence and example of the more impressive clergy. Augustine, Fursey,

Boniface, Gregory of Utrecht and Anskar are all said to have won converts by

their style of life. At this level Christianisation, which in many respects was

a formal and outward process, could develop into conversion, that is into a

much deeper transformation within the life of an individual. Such conversions,

however, take us beyond the history of the Christianisation of western Europe,

into the history of piety and monasticism.

151

Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum c.7.

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chapter 27

EDUCATION AND LEARNING

Jacques Fontaine

In 476 the overthrow of the last emperor of the West symbolised the discrete

disappearance of Rome. But during the following two centuries, this political

break-up affected the economic and social structures of the Roman world only

partially, and even less those of its education and culture. In fact, huge changes

in these latter, compared to the Hellenistic civilisation of the paideia,had

already taken place between the third and ﬁfth centuries, during the period

which we now call later antiquity. But it was only after the end of the ﬁfth

century that the last ancient schools were to disappear one by one. At least, that

was true in what had been the Western Empire. For in the East, it was only in

the seventh century, following attacks from Persians, Avars, Slavs and Arabs,

that the transmission of antique culture and the exercise of literary creation

was to suffer a true eclipse. There would eventually be a complete break in

linguistic communication between the Latin world and a Greek empire in

which the abandonment of bilingualism and total Hellenisation would form

part of a strategy for survival.

Research over the last century has destroyed the traditional view that the

political and military collapse of Rome led to the ‘barbarisation’ of a west-

ern world overwhelmed by ‘massive invasions’. What followed the collapse of

Rome, ‘the Middle Ages’, was famously denigrated by Gibbon as ‘the triumph

of barbarism and religion’,

and that late eighteenth-century view remained

largely unchallenged until the publication of a work by Pierre Rich

ein1962.

Rich

e’s Education et culture dans l’Occident barbare was more closely related to

historical reality, taking up the challenge issued by Gibbon. It found support

in works which pleaded the cause of important political, social, institutional

and even ﬁscal continuities between the civilisation of late antiquity and that

Gibbon (1839), 12 cap. 71, 2,p.392.

Rich

e(1972) and the other works of this author: bibliography in Sot (1990), pp. 15–22; but also Illmer

(1971); Settimane of 1971 focussed on the school in the early Middle Ages: La Scuola (1972); and La

Cultura (1981).

735

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736 jacques fontaine

of the so-called ‘Germanic’ kingdoms which in the ﬁfth century shared out

amongst themselves the lands of the Roman West.

One must, therefore, keep the following two points in mind, balancing

one against the other: on the one hand, the material destruction brought

about after 406 by civil war and invasions, the growing paralysis of public

scholastic institutions, and the scarcely intellectual forms of education and

way of life of the Germanic invaders, caused serious damage to the vitality

of antique culture and even to the civilisation of the written word in the

West. On the other hand, this written civilisation nevertheless survived, by

keeping alive the ideals of later Roman culture among a traditionally educated

elite, and then by developing new forms of education.

It was the Christian

church that had earlier begun to put these new forms in place in order to

provide training for future clerics and monks, and even for all those who were

baptised. Whilst amongst the Roman nobility of the towns and the provinces

family education was retaining or resuming its ancient place, the bishoprics

and the monasteries were gradually taking over the public schools of the late

Empire.

Cultural continuity was aided by the delayed effects of the shocks to the

political and military establishments. In towns and on large estates – spared,

restored and even shared out by the new masters – cultural activity was pur-

sued with pride as a fundamental component of Roman identity. People there

continued to read and write, to copy and correct the manuscripts of ancient

works; they still composed inscriptions in prose and in verse; they educated

children by the acquisition of a traditional Latin, and more rarely, Greek, cul-

ture. Elsewhere, the ﬁrst courts of the Germanic kings willingly welcomed

Roman writing specialists whom these princes needed to manage their new

states, and to draw up the respective rights of their Germanic and Roman sub-

jects. The demographic and cultural superiority of these latter in the majority

of the ‘occupied’ regions tilted the gathering process of cross-cultural fertil-

isation towards Romanisation, and thus towards Latin culture. This process

was particularly rapid amongst those peoples who, like the Goths, had for

some time already been in continuous contact, if not cultural osmosis, with

the civilisation of Romania.

In particular the works of Werner (1989) and (1992), pp. 173–211 (both works have full bibliographies).

For the thesis of ﬁscal continuity, Durliat (1990).

A useful essay on cultural deﬁnition and periodisation is Martin (1976). See also the posthumous

work of Marrou (1977).

Sidonius Apollinaris read and commented on Terence and Menander with his son: Epistolae 12, 1–2;

and Paulinus of Pella evoked his own family education in Gaul: Eucharisticos 60–7. This pedagogical

function of the family had existed from the time of the oldest Roman education: see the Libri ad

Marcum Filium of Cicero; and Marrou (1950), pp. 316–18.

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Education and learning 737

Continuity was even more solidly manifested in ecclesiastical society. The

principles and the programmes of a new Christian culture, propaideia, which

integrated into that culture a good proportion of the ancient paideia, had been

laid down by St Augustine between 397 and 421,inhis treatise De Doctrina

Christiana. This blueprint for preaching in fact traced the programme of a new

culture, closely linked to a teaching which was essentially religious, and which

aimed at proclaiming and communicating the contents of Christian doctrine.

Beyond an intellectual cultura animi of which Cicero had defended the end

and the classical means, it proposed what some years previously Paulinus of

Nola had already called a cultura cordis –inthe biblical, and therefore Augus-

tinian sense of the word cor.

The classical exercising of intelligence found itself

directed towards a spiritual decision of an existential nature. All culture, under-

stood in the ancient and therefore Ciceronian sense, thus becomes a means

oriented towards a religious end which surpasses it: the personal encounter

with God in the Holy Scripture, which preserves his presence via his Word,

and in the vita communis of a monastic or clerical community. All cultural

activity – writing or reading, spoken or written, heard or read exegesis, the

spiritual discourse of the confabulatio or of the more widely collective collatio,

right up to the conceptual systematisation of a ‘theological’ discussion on

God–is thus integrated into a speciﬁcally religious activity.

Integrating pro-

fane authors by recognising in them a value for training in the foundations

of culture, this radical co-option of ancient culture can also be viewed as the

cultural conversion of Christianity.

It founded a new civilisation: that of a

paideia of which Christ alone was the ‘pedagogue’, as Clement of Alexandria

wrote back in the third century. Christ was ‘the interior master’ who, as Augus-

tine later wrote in his De Magistro, taught the faithful to ‘become like little

children’ and to allow themselves to be instructed by him, in the Pauline sense

of the ediﬁcation of the inner man.

See the introduction and notes to Combes and Farges (eds.), Œuvres de St Augustin, and especially

the new edition by Moreau, Bochet and Madec (1997); classic commentary by Marrou (1958),

pp. 329–540;cf. also Duane and Bright (1995).

Cicero, Tusculanes ii.13:‘utager . . . sine cultura fructuosus esse non potest, sic sine doctrina animus . . .

Cultura autem animi philosophia est’; and Paulinus of Nola, Epistolae 39, 3:‘qualem agri tui speciem

ﬁeri a uilico tuo postulas, talem Deo Domino cordis tui redde culturam’. Paulinus’ use of the term

cor goes back to the biblical, even psalmist sense in Latin translations of the Bible: Bauer and Felber

(1988). Compare the Augustinian uses, for example, in Maxsein (1954), pp. 357–71; for Paulinus:

Fontaine (1972), pp. 585–6.

Marrou (1937), pp. 209–86.

This is drawing on Brown’s playful but apposite formula ‘The conversion of Christianity’ which

forms the title of Brown (1971), ch. 7 (p. 82).

Luke 18:16 and Matthew 18:3.Onthis evangelical and Christic basis of all Christian education, see

for example Fontaine (1992a), pp. 6–10. The semantic values of rabbi and didaskalos converged in

the evangelical designation of Christ as magister.

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738 jacques fontaine

In these last centuries of later antiquity, the continuity of ancient forms

was therefore accompanied by a progressive conversion of the content and

meaning of cultura,inaslow process that took no account of the violence of a

break. From this double perspective during the sixth and seventh centuries, the

history of culture and of education appeared to be that of the slow assimilation

of the problems and solutions proposed in the De Doctrina Christiana. This

new De Oratore was then read, copied and applied by the great Christian

writers who would both reﬂect and quite clearly inform the culture and the

education of their own time.

For this slow metamorphosis was far from being

homogeneous: it differentiated itself in time and space, in the uneven rhythms

of a Romania in the process of regionalisation since the fourth century, but also

of new Christianities in the Celtic and Germanic countries of the north. These

rhythms weresubject to the pulsations of a political history,which could oppose

or favour the reorganisation of education, and the ﬂowering or the overthrow

of cultural activity. What a contrast, at the end of the sixth century, between

the ruins of Italy and the rebuilding of Spain!

The end of the sixth century, and the decades which followed it, saw an

increase in speed in the changes in the political and religious ﬁeld: the decline

of Byzantium between the end of the long reign of Justinian (565) and the

assault by the Persians and Slavs against the Empire (between 622 and 630),

the disappearance of the Burgundian and Ostrogothic Arian kingdoms, and

the conversion of the Visigoths of Spain to Nicaean Catholicism (589). This

was truly the period when the debate between the antique past and new

future of Christian Europe was at its most lively. Great writers – and men of

action

– then began to intervene in this cultural debate, by producing the

works upon which rests their reputation as ‘the founders of the Middle Ages’.

These writers were Cassiodorus in Italy, Gregory of Tours in Gaul/Francia,

Pope Gregory the Great, and in Spain, Isidore. Were they still ‘ancient’ or were

they already ‘medieval’? It is signiﬁcant that a recent essay on periodisation

should have dismissed this alternative as too simplistic and that it should have

called some authors ‘rather ancient’ and others ‘rather medieval’.

Just as much as the differencesbetween these intellectual giants, the common

features of their contributions clariﬁed the evolution of culture. For cultural

See for example the debt of Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis to the Augustinian treatise: R

egle

pastorale, ed. Judic et al., pp. 39ff; and in the case of Isidore: Fontaine (1983a), ii,pp.794ff and 933

(list of references). More widely, Opelt (1974).

Gregory of Tours, Gregory the Great and Isidore of Seville were bishops charged with heavy pastoral

and administrative responsibilities. The laymen Cassiodorus and Boethius assumed high ofﬁce in

the Ostrogothic state.

Rand (1928).

Banniard (1980), pp. 113–14, declared Fortunatus and Isidore to be ‘rather ancient’, but Gregory of

Tours and Gregory the Great ‘rather medieval’. See also Fontaine (1983a), ii,pp.807–30, for Isidore.

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Education and learning 739

differentiation did not disintegrate in a ﬂash. In all four, in fact, in explicit

theory or in tacit practice, one can see the same concerns: to preserve ele-

mentary grammatical training without which the Christian message cannot be

correctly transmitted in Latin by either spoken or written word; to ensure the

correct delivery of this message to every single member of the Christian peo-

ple, whatever their background, their state of life, their level of culture, or their

linguistic ability; to reveal, to practise, to teach to this end an attitude of true

balance between a faith more or less strictly adhering to the heritage of later

antique culture – profane and Christian – and the necessary adaptations which

would allow it to be received by an elite. In order to do this Cassiodorus and

Isidore put the accent on faith, if not on restoration, particularly by producing

encyclopaedic works. The two Gregories were more aware of the urgent need

to adapt to all audiences – even illiterate ones (which does not mean to say

that they were uncivilised) – and each in his own way boldly set an example by

using literary styles appropriate to uneducated audiences, or at least to those

with little education in the traditional sense of the word.

In the seventh century the inﬂuence of these four authors was to make itself

felt in a western Europe where, geographically, culture was in full transfor-

mation. The most active centres were beginning to shift from the Mediter-

ranean towards the west, the north and the north-west, and new partners were

increasingly coming into this ‘incubation of European culture’.

The growing

stagnation of Byzantine Africa even before its conquest by Islam, the distress

of an Italy still ruined by the Byzantines and then by the Lombards, the dete-

rioration of the Merovingian kingdoms, frequently split up and paralysed by

impotence, all created in the south and in the centre of the former Roman

West what could be called ‘depressed areas’. Culture, and in particular literary

culture, went into a sort of stagnant period there. The more innovative centres

were to appear elsewhere: in northern Italy, in the abbeys in the north of France,

in the north-west of Spain with its monastic school and writers from Bierzo;

even, on the wider scale of new European regions, in the wake of the ‘Isidorian

renaissance’, in Betica, then in Toledo, in Galicia, and even in Ireland.

Butitwas the British Isles that were, for two centuries, going to pick up and

assume the leadership of the new culture.

The Celts in Ireland, who from

the ﬁfth century had received both Christianity and Latin at the same time,

would develop and export to England, and then to the continent, to Gaul and

Germany, their ideal of a monastic lifestyle, pure and ﬁrm, but attentive to an

intellectual and even literary education. Christianised in their turn from the

end of the sixth century, the Anglo-Saxons would bring about the rebirth in

Curtius (1938), p. 130.For other designations, Fontaine (1983a), ii,p.826.

On development of Christian culture in Ireland and Britain, see Stancliffe, chapters 15 and 16 above.

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740 jacques fontaine

southern England and the birth in Northumbria of a new Latinity, the result

of a beneﬁcial encounter between the cultural inﬂuxes from Ireland, Gaul

and Rome. This Latinity would have as its greatest representative a learned,

lettered, artistic monk, the Venerable Bede (d. 735), rightly considered as the

last of the ‘great founders of the Middles Ages’ and the immediate precursor

of the Carolingian reformatio.One can see that the seventh century scarcely

deserves its reputation as the nadir of European culture.

For better or worse the long reign of the emperor Justinian (527–565) dom-

inates the historical imagination of the sixth century. The attempts by this

emperor to reconquer the former western part of the Empire and thus to

bring about the uniﬁcation of the imperial lands which bordered the Roman

Mediterranean ended in failure.

From the point of view of culture, and of

the ancient institutions that had ensured its transmission, this interference by

Byzantium in the West produced contradictory effects, but all three of which

had an effect upon the change that was in progress. Indeed, depending on the

place and the time, this change could be seen as a restoration or a challenge

but also as acting as a brake.

In truth, Justinian’s restoration of public scholastic institutions in the ancient

mould producedlasting effects only in the capitals of the West (Carthage, Rome

and Ravenna) where they had deservedly succeeded in surviving until then.

At the request of Pope Vigilius, Justinian promulgated in 554 the Pragmatic

Sanction which, amongst other things, re-established the ofﬁcial salaries tra-

ditionally paid ‘to grammarians, orators, doctors and lawyers, in order that in

our republic there should ﬂourish young men instructed in liberal studies’.

But the difﬁculties of the Byzantine reconquest in Italy did not allow Justinian

either the time or the necessary resources to put this ﬁne decision into effect.

In Africa, reconquered as early as 533, the restoration of imperial power nev-

ertheless favoured the resumption of a scholarly and literary life which, for a

long time, had been thwarted by the hostility of the Vandals to the Catholic

Romans. In about 550 the grammarian Flavius Cresconius Corippus praised

in Virgilian hexameters the Byzantine victories of General John Troglytus over

the Berber invaders, in the last Roman epic on a war theme: the Johannide.

After that, towards 566,hewould compose panegyrics in Latin verse about the

emperor Justinian and the quaestor Anastasius.

Southern Spain, where from 554 to 624 the soldiers of the basileus only

occupied a coastal strip of varying width, was far from enjoying the same

cultural vigour. There is scarcely any comparison between the long African

On Justinian’s aims and strategies, see Louth, chapter 4 above.

Justinian, Novella, pro petitione Vigilii, Novellae 7, 22:‘annonas quae grammaticis uel oratoribus

uel etiam medicis uel iurisperitis antea dari solitum erat . . . erogari praecipimus, quatenus iuuenes

liberalibus studiis eruditi per nostram rem publicam ﬂoreant’.

Education and learning 741

Johannide and the nine emphatic verses, which in 589 or 590 the Byzantine

patrician Commentiolus had engraved on the walls of his capital Cartagena,

which he had restored.

Butarecent identiﬁcation attributes to Bishop Severus

of M

alaga several cantos of a biblical epic that follows the ancient tradition of

the Evangeliorum Libri of Juvencus. Such a discovery illustrates the fact that the

Hispano-Romans of Betica as ‘frontiersmen’ were aware of this foreign presence

of Greeks who had come from a different political and cultural world: the most

educated ended up by seeing in this a sort of challenge hurled at their own

creativity. The chronological coincidence between the last decades of Byzantine

occupation and the appearance, in Seville, of the literary works of Isidore makes

one think even more about this point. Certainly, some Hispano-Romans of

the south had gone to be educated in the East, such as John of Biclaro did

towards 558; and in the 580s Leander, the older brother of Isidore, had not

thought it wrong to go to seek the support of the Byzantines against the still

Arian Visigoths.

But the conversion of the latter to Catholicism changed the balance of power

betweenthe Visigothickingdoms and the Empireof the East, and consequently,

the attitude of the inhabitants of Betica towards the Greeks who were ﬁrmly

established in the south of their province. Isidore, the younger brother of Lean-

der and his successor as bishop of Seville, never knew very much Greek. His

clear-cut choice was for the Goths and not the Byzantines, and in 624 he would

celebrate the expulsion of these last soldiers of the basileus from a land that

was rediscovering peninsular unity.

Isidore’s distrust of oriental Christianity

was in accord with his ‘national’ political stances: at the Council of Seville in

619 he had a Syrian bishop condemned as guilty of ‘acephalous’ heresy.

Con-

versely, in the inscriptions that decorated his library, he still manifested a warm

liking for the great Christian doctor of the third century, the Greek, Origen,

condemned in 552 by a Council of the East that Justinian had summoned.

One has to put oneself in this double perspective in order to understand the

meaning of the work of Isidore. Even if it were possible that Isidore could have

used technical manuals and theological ﬂorilegia translated from the Greek,

it remains true that his grammatical, encyclopaedic, historical and religious

works were inspired by Latin sources. For his purpose, Hispanic culture had

Vives (1969), inscr. 364,p.127. The bishops Licinianus of Carthagena and Severus of M

alaga were

Hispano-Romans who wrote in Latin: see Isidore, De Viris Illustribus 42–3; and especially the edition

of Severus, bishop of Malaga?, In Evangelia, ed. Herzog et al.

See the last chapter of the second edition of his Historia Gothorum; and Teillet (1986).

Council of Seville ii, canon 12: De quodam Acefalorum episcopo. The Monophysites who, refusing

the Henotikon of the emperor Zeno, broke communion with the ﬁve patriarchs of the East were

called ‘acephalous’ (literally: ‘without a leader’).

On these passages see Fontaine (1983a), ii,p.756; and for commentaries, pp. 757 and 851–2.

742 jacques fontaine

to be capable of rivalling the literary productions of Justinian’s century, as

well as responding to the proper needs of the church and kingdom of Spain.

Nothing of this sort happened in Gaul/Francia, where the soldiers of the

East never set foot. But an isolated case shows indirectly the beneﬁcial inﬂuence

there of the Latin schools re-established in the capital of the future Byzantine

exarchate of northern Italy. It was indeed in Ravenna that the Cisalpine Venan-

tius Fortunatus undertook the excellent studies which enabled him to display

later, in the service of the Frankish courts of Thuringia and northern Gaul, the

reﬁned talent of an ancient poet: rara avis in the northern Gaul of the end of

the sixth century.

But the military impact of the Byzantine reconquest did not exert purely

positive inﬂuences, favourable to the renewal of western culture. It also plunged

Italy into the anguish of an interminable war (536–555); it ruined the Ostro-

gothic kingdom and at the same time destroyed an already fruitful co-operation

between Italians and Goths, which held out hope for a process of assimilation

comparable to that which, half a century later, Hispano-Romans and Visigoths

of Spain would bring to a successful conclusion.

This all too brief a ﬂowering

was illustrated, at the beginning of the sixth century, by two senators from

Italy. These were Boethius and Cassiodorus, both of whom were still recep-

tive to Greek language and culture. Connected to the illustrious Roman gentes

of the Anicii and the Symmachi, the philosopher Anicius Manlius Torquatus

Severinus Boethius left a work that made a threefold contribution to medieval

culture. He devoted four treatises to the four mathematical arts and designated

them for the ﬁrst time by the term quadrivium.Heundertook the transla-

tion of the work of Aristotle, but his execution in 525 brutally interrupted this

work, although fortunately he had already managed to translate the Stagirite’s

works of logic. The result of this was that Aristotelian logic dominated western

thought for half a millennium, whilst the other works of Aristotle would only

be known in the West from the twelfth century onwards, via Arab translations.

The Byzantine reconquest thus slowed down, if not seriously mutilated, the

thought of a West which, with some rare and brilliant exceptions, would no

longer read Greek. The third cultural contribution of Boethius was, paradox-

ically, the result of his dramatic end. Condemned to death, he composed in

his prison the last ancient chef d’œuvre of philosophical prose and poetry, the

prosimetrum entitled The Consolation of Philosophy. This rational and fervent

meditation on the blessings of good fortune, and on evil, on true good and

happiness, and on Providence and Free Will, can be read, as it were, as the

spiritual testament of ancient wisdom.

On the Byzantines in Italy, see Moorhead, chapter 5 above.

On Boethius, see the studies published for the ﬁfteenth centenary of his birth (480–1980), especially

Gibson (1981). On the Consolatio, O’Daly (1991) and Courcelle (1967).