The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of DublinNewman, John Henry
Religion
The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin
Newman, John Henry
Education, Higher; Universities and colleges
satchels not much more than a hundred years after they were written.
I need not go on to show at length that they have preserved their place in
the system of education in the _orbis terrarum_, and the Greek writers
with them or through them, down to this day. The induction of centuries
has often been made. Even in the lowest state of learning the tradition
was kept up. St. Gregory the Great, whose era, not to say whose influence,
is often considered especially unfavourable to the old literature, was
himself well versed in it, encouraged purity of Latinity in his court, and
is said figuratively by the contemporary historian of his life to have
supported the hall of the Apostolic See upon the columns of the Seven
Liberal Arts. In the ninth century, when the dark age was close at hand,
we still hear of the cultivation, with whatever success (according of
course to the opportunities of the times, but I am speaking of the nature
of the studies, not of the proficiency of the students), the cultivation
of Music, Dialectics, Rhetoric, Grammar, Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics,
and Geometry; of the supremacy of Horace in the schools, “and the great
Virgil, Sallust, and Statius.” In the thirteenth or following centuries,
of “Virgil, Lucian, Statius, Ovid, Livy, Sallust, Cicero, and Quintilian;”
and after the revival of literature in the commencement of the modern era,
we find St. Carlo Borromeo enjoining the use of works of Cicero, Ovid,
Virgil, and Horace.(33)
5.
I pass thus cursorily over the series of informations which history gives
us on the subject, merely with a view of recalling to your memory,
Gentlemen, and impressing upon you the fact, that the literature of
Greece, continued into, and enriched by, the literature of Rome, together
with the studies which it involves, has been the instrument of education,
and the food of civilization, from the first times of the world down to
this day;—and now we are in a condition to answer the question which
thereupon arises, when we turn to consider, by way of contrast, the
teaching which is characteristic of Universities. How has it come to pass
that, although the genius of Universities is so different from that of the
schools which preceded them, nevertheless the course of study pursued in
those schools was not superseded in the middle ages by those more
brilliant sciences which Universities introduced? It might have seemed as
if Scholastic Theology, Law, and Medicine would have thrown the Seven
Liberal Arts into the shade, but in the event they failed to do so. I
consider the reason to be, that the authority and function of the monastic
and secular schools, as supplying to the young the means of education, lay
deeper than in any appointment of Charlemagne, who was their nominal
founder, and were based in the special character of that civilization
which is so intimately associated with Christianity, that it may even be
called the soil out of which Christianity grew. The medieval sciences,
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