Aristotle and Ancient Educational IdealsDavidson, Thomas
Philosophy
Aristotle and Ancient Educational Ideals
Davidson, Thomas
Aristotle, 384 BC-322 BC; Education, Greek
But while, in the Greek world, the sphere of activity of the super-civic
man was vanishing into nothingness, among a small and obscure band of
restored exiles of Semitic race, that sphere had come to claim the
entire man and all his relations, practical and spiritual. Isaiah's
little band of faithful followers (see p. 133) had grown into a nation,
living by no law save that of Jehovah, a very real, very awful, and very
holy personality, whom the heaven of heavens could not contain, but who
yet watched the rising up and the sitting down of every son of man. Long
before Quintilian wrote his elegant treatise on rhetoric, or Plotinus
his pantheistic Enneads, there had sprung from the bosom of this people
a man who, bursting, at the expense of his life, the narrow bounds of
his nationally, elevated the theocracy of his people into a Kingdom of
Heaven, which he had bade proclaim to all the world. It was proclaimed,
and then (though to some it seemed a stumbling-block, and to others
foolishness) the super-civic man, who for hundreds of years had been
wandering in darkness, in search of his fatherland, suddenly became
aware that he had found it in the Church of Christ. He now no longer
tries to escape from the visible world into the emptiness of an abstract
first principle; but, in the service of a First Principle who is the
most concrete of realities, and who numbers the very hairs of his head,
he goes down into the most loathsome depths of the material world to
elevate and redeem the meanest of the sons of men. There is no question
of bond or free, ruler or ruled, now. In the Kingdom of Heaven there are
no such relations. The only greatness recognized there is greatness in
service; the only law, the Law of Love. Love! yes, the whole secret is
in that one word. By adding love to the conception of the God of his
people, by exemplifying it in his own life, and demanding it of his
followers, Jesus accomplished what had baffled all the wisdom of the
Greek sages. He restored the moral unity of man, abolished the old
world, and made a new heaven and a new earth. In vain have the advocates
of an indeterminate, self-evolving first principle, whether calling
themselves Neoplatonists, mystics, materialists, evolutionists,
Hegelians, or Theosophists, striven to bring back the old world with its
class distinctions and institutional ethics; in vain have they sought to
sink the individual God and man of reality in the universal ideas of
thought. The Law of Love, which is the ground of individuality, as well
as of true society, has bidden, and will bid them, defiance.
APPENDIX
APPENDIX
THE SEVEN LIBERAL ARTS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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