Nor is the result of this a sighing resignation: the ideal inspires vigorous action:

and again

and throughout there is the note of joyful confidence, the certainty of ultimate victory:

All this is found again in the Ad Uxorem. In spite of fire, torture, chains, the final note is a cry of joy:

There can be no doubt that these men were genuine. We feel without being told that the verses are

The ideal was deeply felt and widely spread. Even Sidonius could say of Lupus: ‘tota illi actionum suarum intentio ... Christus est’.[1405] There was a conscious strength in the idealism of these men which counted for much. ‘The Roman world crashes into ruin’, wrote Jerome, in another connexion, ‘yet our heads are upright and unbowed.’[1406]

This ideal had its effect on oratory. When Augustine wrote the Christian theory of eloquence,[1407] though he bases the technical part of it entirely on Cicero and though his sermons abound in parallelism, homoioteleuta, and even word-play, yet he made a great advance in declaring that eloquence was not dependent on rhetorical rules but based, rather, on genuine knowledge and true wisdom.[1408] He felt keenly the lack of truth in the rhetorical system. Of its teachers he says that truth was found constantly on their lips but never in their lives: ‘Dicebant Veritas et Veritas, et multum eam dicebant mihi, et nusquam erat in eis, et falsa loquebantur.’[1409] And he laid down his professorship of rhetoric so that he should not be guilty of selling material for the madness of the youths who studied the foolish falsehoods and practised the quibbling disputations of the rhetorical system.[1410] In the Principia Rhetorices he lays stress on understanding the case,[1411] and maintains that the end of oratory is not merely ‘bene aut vere dicere’ (as the later rhetoricians certainly thought), but ‘persuadere’.[1412] Thus he brings out the Christian conception of the essential relation of oratory to man—an ideal which Isocrates and Cicero had preached, but which had gradually been lost.

Similarly, in his theory of Christian education, the influence of the ideal is seen. In his scheme of learning, philosophy must make us understand ‘the order of things’, and help us to distinguish two worlds and Him who is the Father of the Universe.[1413] The whole perspective is determined by the Divine. Everything is related to it. And it is not a mere philosophical abstraction but a real and life-giving centre.

Jung, having described the barrenness of pagan studies, says: ‘Studia eadem in scholis clericorum’,[1414] and proves from Isidore and Gregory that the old Roman scheme of education was accepted throughout by the Christians. But there is something more to be said. The Christian schools, in so far as they did not fall into utter formlessness, accepted the scheme of Martianus Capella and of pagan education. But, in many cases at any rate, there was a change for the better in method and spirit. The Christians used their rhetoric in a living cause, their dialectic to probe questions crowded with contemporary interest; their Livy and Sallust to develop a philosophy of history, their literature to understand and spread the cause of truth for which they had been martyred. The pagans, on the other hand, used their rhetoric for fictitious cases (falsas lites), their dialectic for ingenious trifling, their history as the handmaid of rhetoric, their literature to imitate Cicero or Fronto or Pliny, to write freakish verses, or to flatter the emperor. A sign of the advance made by the Christians in the search for truth is that criticism begins to awake in a world on which traditional ideas had lain

Vigilantius in Gaul criticizes the rites of the Church and Pelagianism, Priscillianism, the questions about the spirituality of the soul—all point to a new stimulation of the intellect.

Yet Christian education also failed in its search for truth. As we have seen, the exigencies of the time drove its exponents to a zealous narrowness whose watchword was stated by Claudianus Mamertus, when, in his Contra vanos poetas, he said that the divine alone must be studied:

By limiting the meaning of ‘divina’ to dogma, the Church imposed fetters on the seeker after truth which, though not very prominent in our period, became exceedingly galling in the times that followed. Eucherius (to take a final example) writes to Valerian appealing to him to lay aside the love of the world and the study of worldly philosophy, to turn to the study of true piety and true philosophy.[1415] The key-note of the letter is: ‘Quid enim prodest homini si mundum universum lucretur, animae vero suae detrimentum patiatur?’ with a special connotation of ‘mundum’. The incompatibility between secular and sacred literature is emphasized, and illustrated by edifying stories about Clement, Gregory, and Paulinus of Nola. The conclusion is: ‘Quin tu, repudiatis illis philosophorum praeceptis ... ad imbibenda Christiana dogmatis studia animum adicis?... In illis namque eorum praeceptis vel adumbrata virtus vel falsa sapientia....’ The position is not that the philosophers should be read and then rejected, but that they should not be read at all.

Thus, the leaders of Christian education in Gaul, however excusable their attitude at the time, established that regrettable dichotomy between secular and sacred knowledge which has been the bane of succeeding ages. While, on the one hand, they made an advance towards truth by stimulating thought and criticism, on the other, they did not, perhaps could not, succeed in recognizing that truth is one and indivisible, and that her seekers know of no such divisions.

And so we are forced back on our ever-recurring problem: how is man, his emotions and environment being what they are, to attain to the scientific attitude of mind? Socrates long ago saw the difficulty of having a body which fills us with ‘passions and desires and fears and all sorts of fancies and foolishness’, and makes it impossible for us to be single-minded in our pursuit of the truth.[1416] Yet he, and the great teachers of mankind throughout the ages, have insisted with an earnestness that reached to martyrdom, that such an unswerving and disinterested quest is the one result in education that truly matters, that it is the condition of progress and the criterion of culture. And if the way is long and the battle fierce, we must choose the dust and heat rather than lose sight of the ideal. καλὸν γὰρ τὸ ἆθλον καὶ ἡ ἐλπὶς μεγάλη.