Church and Education

Contents Updated: Friday, March 10, 2000

• Education and Human Suffering
• Education Under Paganism
• Education in the Roman Empire
• Education in the Middle Ages

Education and Human Suffering

The Ages of Faith were ages of crime, of gross and scandalous depravity, of cruelty and of immorality. A progressive improvement has taken place in conduct, both public and private, as faith has diminished. While the ages of faith—notably the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages but even into the beginning of the Industrial Revolution—were ages of gross ignorance, ours is the best educated age in history.

Ignorant men and women can have high character, and cultured people can have low character, but these people are exceptions. Ignorance and culture are incompatible, for even primitive cultures require knowledge, however parochial it is. Conduct and civilization rises with literacy and education.

Christians claim that the Church knew and acted upon this—Christianity gave the world schools. To a degree this is true, but it forgets to say that Christianity first destroyed schools! The Pagans in Europe, whom Christianity succeeded, had a fine system of education, but the Christians did not like it.

1. Christianity supervised the ruin of the Pagan schools without a murmur, indeed applauded its disappearance, and made no effort to replace it.
2. So little was done in the way of education during the thousand years of absolute Christian domination that more than ninety percent of the people in every Christian nation were illiterate and densely ignorant.
3. The modern school systems that have educated the Victorian masses and given us a technological workforce are due entirely to secular needs, and were mainly held back by the Churches.

What Christian will admit the suffering of humanity through ignorance since Greek and Latin schoolmasters were thrown into the dust and trampled on by priests? Christians had the words of Christ, they will say, but the children of our Christian nation of Britain suffered hell 1800 years after Christ uttered his words about children. The haunted and apprehensive look of vacancy and the unhealthy pallor of the slave was on the face of children at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and in some places today, it is returning. At the age of six or seven, if they had survived birth, their filthy, drainless homes and the fetid streets, they were sent to work. After twelve hours in a suffocating atmosphere was too much for their enfeebled bodies, where were the Christians who restrained the hand of their overseers?

From the fifth to the nineteenth century, half the people born died as children robbed of the only life they could know. The Christian middle classes assuaged their guilt by laying them to rest in “God’s little acre,” and praying that they went to heaven—a happier place, they said truly because their greed and selfishness had made life hell.

To use the words of George Eliot, when faced with such truths, Christians argue:

Indeed, indeed, two and two certainly make four, but it does not do to press these things too far.

Education Under Paganism

Christianity supposedly rendered to the child three services by abolishing the practices of abortion, the exposure of children and infanticide.

The Fathers of the Church put abortion on a level with murder because they thought that the foetus had an immortal soul. In the age of contraceptives it ought not to be needed but, in the ancient world it was inevitable, and even in our world any theologian who condemned a woman unfortunate enough to have to resort to it is a moral pervert.

In its early years, the Church failed to reduce the practice. The Fathers condemned it—there was not much in connexion with sex they did not condemn. The Stoics also condemned it. Seneca, Juvenal and others condemned it. Neither Christian nor Pagan ever succeeded in putting a stop to it. Even in the days before the abortion laws, doctors organised in groups to offer abortion on demand to those who could pay, with no interference from the police. Only the poor had to risk the back street abortionist—but there were a lot of poor women.

The exposure of children and infanticide were accepted in the Pagan world. The old Roman law did not reach across the threshold of a man’s house. The father had power of life and death over his wife, his children and his slaves. The new-born child was brought to him, and be decided whether he would “receive it into the family”. If he refused to take the baby-girl in his arms, she was taken out of the house and hid in a public place, where slave-dealers or baby-farmers found and reared it. Legally the father could have her suffocated but the “moral obligations of parents toward their children were fully and deeply felt by the Roman nation”—they drew the line at murdering them!

When the Roman Empire began, infanticide was still law but then legislators condemned it. A Victorian authority, Lecky, who was always sensitive not to offend Christians, wrote:

The power of life and death, which in Rome was originally conceded to the father over his children, would appear to involve an unlimited permission of infanticide, but an old law, popularly ascribed to Romulus, restricted the parental rights, enjoining the father to bring up all his male children, and at least his eldest female child, forbidding him to destroy any well-formed child till it had completed its third year, when the affection of the parent might be supposed to be developed, but permitting the exposition of deformed or maimed children with the consent of their five nearest relations.

Terence and Apuleius each make a character tell his wife to kill a new-born baby girl, and the wife is depicted as too humane to do it! Seneca approved the idea of murdering “weak and monstrous” new-born children. If the Christians of the modern world want to condemn parents to a lifetime of endless difficulty bringing up deformed or deficient children, then they must take on the burden of suport themselves as a charitable service. Many parents take on this duty out of love and a sense of guilt, but none should be obliged to. Nature is not sentimental about foetal abnormalities, humans might be, but parents should have the choice!

Under Augustus, a father used his legal right to execute a delinquent son, and provoked the indignation of Rome. The Emperor Hadrian banished a man who had killed his son for adultery with his step-mother. The Stoic lawyer Marcianus praised the emperor, saying:

The power of a father should be displayed in affection, not atrocity.

The commonest cause of Pagan riots against Christians was that the Christians had accused them of infanticide, but apart from the maimed, deformed or feeble children, who could not be cured, and would be a burden on poor families, no evidence of the alleged prevalence of infanticide exists. New-born female babies were certainly exposed, just as they still are in some eastern countries, because they too were thought of as burdensome, but Pagan moralists even condemned that practice.

The Pagan lawyer Paulus, three centuries before the Church had any influence, condemned smothering casting away, denying food and exposing newly born children. The Church also condemned it but did not stop it. The Pagan Emperor, Trajan, decreed that an exposed child could not be made a slave, but the Christian Emperor, Constantine, repealed this law. Pagan Emperors, Caracalla and Diocletian, tried to stop traffic in children.

Education in the Roman Empire

By the second half of the fourth century, a network of primary schools had spread over the empire. Just as Christianity took it over, the empire had started elementary schools for the children of the workers, where, at the expense of the municipality, freedmen taught them the three Rs. The children of the wealthy were always educated privately by tutors.

St Augustine was born in 354 AD in the small Roman town of Thogaste, in what is now Algeria. He attended a free elementary school in his native town, to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. When he had mastered these elementary accomplishments, he graduated to the “grammar” or high school in the same small Romano-African town. His parents intended him for the bar, and at the age of sixteen, he graduated again to a still higher school, the school of rhetoric. Even for this he did not need to go to Carthage. After a few further years he was sent to the school at Carthage, which was effectively a university.

Augustine tells us that nothing was paid for his education. The decrees of the emperors fixed the salaries of teachers that the municipality paid. So, small towns like Thogaste had a free grammar school as well as free elementary schools. Literacy must have been the general condition, and ancient Pompeii, with its names cut in marble slabs at every street corner, shows that the people were literate.

The elementary school was held in the porch of a house, with sheets of canvas at each end, and the teacher received a miserable payment. They were so poor that we have no difficulty in believing that there was an elementary school wherever there were a few score children to teach. Teachers were proverbially poor, even though they supplemented their teaching pay with other work. Horace spoke of “wretched schoolmasters” living on reheated cabbage.

The elementary school taught writing on tablets coated with wax marked with a stylus, pointed at one end for writing, and broad and flat at the other end for erasing. Children caused annoyance in residential areas chanting their times tables. In the year 400 AD, when the triumph of Christianity was complete, the Church came to power in a world where the mass of the workers had learned to read and write. The leaders of the Church had a complete government system of schools radiating from Rome over the entire empire. Paganism had created those schools.

The Church destroyed it all in the fifth century. Christianity was, by imperial decree, the only religion of the western world. By the year 500 AD, no Pagan schools remained. No writer on education can prove the existence of a single school in Europe at that date. To say that Christianity gave the world schools, when its triumph saw the annihilation of the finest system of education the world ever had, until the second half of the nineteenth century, is a monumental lie. The Pagan Romans of the fourth century had a educational system with free schools at different levels—it all disappeared in the fifth century.

Education in the Middle Ages

Pope Gregory, a monk, ruled the Church from 590 to 604 AD. The triumph of Christianity was now complete, Paganism and civilization were dead. Rome had not been destroyed by the Goths, but decade by decade, it fell into ruin at the hands of the forty thousand miserable and grossly ignorant Christians who now moved amongst the decaying buildings that had once housed a million. Europe was correspondingly desolate.

Gregory, before be became a monk, had been a Roman patrician, a rich man of the standards of the time, even Prefect of Rome. Gregory pronounced the end of the world. A man with possessions, the Bible said, had more hope of getting through the eye of a needle than of entering the kingdom of heaven. So the men who had large estates in Italy passed them over to the Papacy and joined monasteries waitung for the day that Christians have always waited for—when they would meet Jesus, they would say today. The Pope became a prince, and a few more forgeries, a century later, would make Popes kings. Gregory knew that the last trump would soon sound in the ears of the mortals, and so nothing but virtue mattered. He heard that Bishop Desiderius, of Vienne in Gaul, was conducting a small school, and he wrote him a letter:

After that we heard a thing that cannot be repeated without a feeling of shame—namely, that you are teaching grammar to some. This troubled us so greatly, and filled us with so deep a disdain, that we fell from our former praise of you to mourning and sorrow, because the praise of Jove must never be heard from the mouth that praises Christ. Think how grave and horrible it is for a bishop to repeat what even a religious layman should not. And, though our beloved son the presbyter Candidus denied the affair, at our pressing inquiry, and tried to excuse you, ye have not lost the suspicion, because it is so execrable for this to be said of a priest that it must be strictly investigated.

Desiderius had to give up “studying trifles and secular letters” to return to the Pope’s favor. Apologists try to maintain that Bishop Desiderius had been teaching the classics in church. The letter shows he was not accused of that and one still has to puzzle about the nature of the crime even if it is true.

After Gregory’s death, the tradition in the Church, was that the Pope had burned the old Roman libraries which still remained on the Capitoline and the Palatine Hills. Why should such a tradition be false? Civilization was to be killed. Gregory even pours scorn on the innocent rules of the grammarian Donatus, the teacher of St Jerome, an elementary form of profane learning.

The ignorance introduced by Christianity was profound. A bishop of Laon in France of the eleventh century says: “There is more than one bishop who cannot name the letters of the alphabet on his fingers”. Priests had no understanding of the Latin they mumbled. Even the secretaries of the Papacy at Rome sent out their documents in the most atrocious Latin, full of grammatical errors. Kings and nobles could not sign their names. Their signatures had to be cut for them in wood and stamped on documents. The illiteracy of Europe increased to more than ninety-nine percent.

The literary activity of the monks is as empty a legend as that of the early martyrs. The French writer, Montalembert is responsible for the myth, claiming that “every monastery was a school”. Not one monastery in a hundred educated even its own monks. Even schools for teaching clerics how to read the Bible and the Breviary were so obscure and paltry that the names of them have been lost.

The monks copied books, Montalembert says, and, in the monastery of Novaless, there were six thousand seven hundred hand-written books! The Moors in Spain had seventy public libraries besides private collections, one of which contained six hundred thousand books and, in Pagan days, the library of Alexandria had seven hundred thousand books. The Julian library at Rome which, with others, the Pope is said to have burned, contained one hundred and twenty thousand books.

At the close of the thirteenth century, the most intellectual and scholarly period of the Middle Ages, not one monk in the largest and greatest monastery of France, St Gall, could read or write! From the days of St Augustine, who railled against monks within a century of their appearance in Europe, until the Reformation, serious Christian literature is full of stern indictments of the idleness and the hypocrisy of the monks.

Christians have a vague idea that Plato and Aristotle and all the Greek works we so justly treasure were preserved by the monks of the Middle Ages. No piece of Greek literature was preserved by monks except perhaps, Aristotle’s “Dialectics”. Until the time of Charlemagne, who made the monks work, there was not a monastery in Europe that “rendered any service whatever in connection with classical literature”.

Do Christians really imagine pious monks spending the hours between prayers copying the obscenities of Apuleius, the amorous verse of Horace, the adventures of the gods and goddesses in Ovid? How does it square with Pope Gregory the Great’s attitude to the most elementary education?—and he was a monk!

Greek literature was preserved in the Greek Empire, and was conveyed to Europe by the Jews and Moors. As to Latin literature, religious monasteries regarded it, like Tertullian, as “inspired by the devil,” and would not look at it, and the bulk of the monasteries were too gross and ignorant to do any copying. Just because an abbot here and a bishop there liked a cup of wine, a maid and sensual matter in general, and preserved an odd book of verse, it is no cause for Christians to claim they preserved Latin authors. Copies even of the Latin classics were exceedingly rare in the Middle Ages, although a parchment-book lasted practically forever.

The copying that the monks did in their writing rooms,was of the bible and the Fathers of the Church—Christian literature. A famous scholar of the early twentieth century says bluntly that the monks destroyed more classical works than the barbarians.

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