3. The Schooling of the Poet: Christian Influences and Latin Rhetoric in the Early Middle Ages

Every literature teacher in any culture must at some point answer the question: What should I teach and when and how should I teach it? Perhaps the most difficult dimension of this question lies in the problem of how to deal with the past, how to teach children and young adults to respond to or to comprehend literature written in traditions with which they are no longer naturally familiar. How, for instance, can one effectively explain the complex symbolical reaches of biblical and classical allusion in a novel like Moby Dick to students who have never heard of Elijah and do not understand the value of naming the four winds? No amount of factual glossing will ever recreate the interweaving of traditions, that steady presence of biblical and classical hero, that enlarges the maniacal character of Captain—or is it King—Ahab.

One of our essential problems is how to teach literature grounded in a daily reading of the Bible to students who do not read the Bible. The first Christian teachers faced a similar, though somewhat inverted, problem. During the third, fourth, and fifth centuries in the Latin world, especially Gaul, Italy, and northern Africa, the secular educational order passed slowly into its inevitable demise. Despite the Emperor Julian's edict of 362 against Christian teachers, churchmen gradually replaced non-Christians in the important positions of secular authority, including that of rhetor, the highest post in the rhetorical schools. As this change was made, Christian teachers had to find methods of absorbing an incongruous past. But then, unlike now, it was the Bible which determined the conditions and assumptions of the present against which the past was to be judged and into which it was to be assimilated.

It would be easy to suggest that the problems in the rhetorical schools during the politically chaotic third, fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries were simply those of two clashing cultures—a pagan past giving way to Christianity. However, the situation was more complicated than that formula suggests. The structure of the school system itself was increasingly precarious. Until they passed out of existence in the early sixth century in Gaul, an area that has been called "more Roman than Rome,"¹ the rhetorical schools maintained the traditional two-part structure, comprised at the first level of a school of grammar and on the secondary level of a school of rhetoric. However, though structurally similar to late classical schools, these early medieval schools of rhetoric suffered from a loss of direction and purpose. Initially, they had been the training grounds for young orators and public figures. With the loss of the forum as the major arena of public life, the schools were forced to shift their emphases and methods. The old curriculum, strained and altered to meet new conditions, could scarcely provide a steady sense of continuity with the classical pagan past.

Moreover, the early Christians were not on the whole a culturally alien group in Greek and Latin society. Though the early church was itself far from unified, representing the merger of Eastern, Middle Eastern, and Western influences, of mystery cults and rival religions, early Christians in the Greek and Latin world were fully part of Greek and Latin culture. As they became accepted and even powerful in that society, they shared in the existing education. Jerome in the fourth and Augustine in the early fifth century were but two of the many prominent Christians who studied and taught in the rhetorical schools. Frequent conversions further blurred the line between pagan and Christian. One of Jerome's teachers, the prominent rhetorician Gaius Marius Victorinus, was a pagan when he taught Jerome but a Christian at his death. Culturally, socially, even historically, early Christian roots were embedded in Graeco-Roman traditions. Even first-century biblical exegetes, such as Philo of Alexandria, were more at home with Plato than with Genesis and Exodus. Beneath the struggle for control of social, political, and religious institutions which was waged in the early Middle Ages, there ran a deep channel...