Chrysoloras’ Greek: The Pedagogy of Cultural Transformation
by Richard Evans
This essay does not purport to offer new information about the
educational mission of Manuel Chrysoloras; rather what I hope to do, by
argument from a certain organization of familiar facts, is remind all of
us teachers of Classics, no matter at what level we work, school or
university, that the continuity of the Classical Tradition, especially on
the Greek side, owes much to enthusiastic teaching. In this regard, I wish
to recall the cultural impact of the founder of Greek studies in the
Western Renaissance, Manuel Chrysoloras, as a protreptic model for us
today.
As we arrive at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the United
States, it is more than apparent that the knowledge of Ancient Greek is
becoming a rare form of learning, and few students in schools or even in
universities pursue Greek at all. Empirical data do not tell the entire
story of the decline of Greek, as any classicist knows well from personal
experience with dwindling numbers students in Greek. The numbers
themselves paint a grim enough picture, however. As reported in a 1997
article by Richard LaFleur, Greek has declined from its position of .335
per cent of all university enrollments in 1960 to .113 per cent of all
university enrollments in 1995, i.e., 16,272 students of Greek out of a
total college population of 14,389,000 (“Latina Resurgens: Classical
Language Enrollments in American Schools and Colleges” 126). Even in the
face of declining student numbers, Hanson and Heath in Who Killed Homer?
point to, by contrast, the robustness of scholarly publication in the
field:
Between 1971 and 1991 the number of Classics majors dropped by 30
percent, as did Greek enrollments in the decade from 1977 to 1986.
Of over one million B.A.’s awarded in 1994, only six hundred were granted
in Classics, meaning that there are now five or six Classics professors in
the country for every senior Classics major, over thirty articles and
books each year for every graduating senior. (3, original italics)
As research and publication in Classics advance vigorously, ironically, at
the same time, the basic transmission of the essential linguistic
underpinning necessary to continue the authentic Classical Tradition
declines and falters. In school Classics, for certain, Greek is the weaker
sister: 114,000 National Latin Exams in 2001 to a mere 1134 National Greek
Exams makes the point (The National Latin Exam Newsletter, Spring 2001; “
2001 ACL/NJCL National Greek Exam-List of Prizes”). In respect to Greek,
then, it may be only a slight exaggeration to suggest we are returning to
a situation very similar to that of the end of the Middle Ages when Greek
was almost unknown among educated Westerners.
Then there was a renaissance or the Renaissance, at which time a wider
knowledge of Greek was reintroduced into Italy and from there
progressively spread through the educational structures of Europe.
Classics flowered and peaked in the nineteenth century, but the latter
twentieth century has witnessed a severe decline in the study of Classics,
especially of Greek. Many cultural issues are involved with this decline
of Greek, but here we will examine factors arising within the field of
Classics itself and remedies that may be found in the history of our own
discipline.
The particular ideological basis for contemporary American Classics
derives, in the main, from a disciplinary reorganization in the
Enlightenment under the German conception of Altertumswissenschaft.
Altertumswissenschaft was the response of classical scholars of the German
Enlightenment to a perceived need for a reorientation of Classical Studies
toward the new empiricism, progressive science and encyclopedism that was
embedded in Enlightenment thinking. The two chief figures of Enlightenment
Classics, who were to leave their indelible mark on the future direction
of Classics as a discipline, were the art historian and archaeologist, J.J
Winkelmann (1717-68), and his slightly later philological counterpart, F.A.
Wolf (1759-1824) who originated the term, Altertumswissenschaft (Pfeiffer
167, 173, 175). Winkelmann was seminal to the future of Classics by
applying the rationalistic, system-building spirit of the Enlightenment to
the study of ancient art. He personally visited the current excavations at
Pompeii and Herculaneum; he went on to Paestum and Agrigento; he placed
great importance on the empirical aspect of the study of art. Winkelmann’s
publications developed a more comprehension view of Mediterranean culture
and its relationship to Greece and Rome than had the older Classical
humanism. Art and archaeology were not longer oddities in an antiquarian
corner but become central issues in a progressively developing science of
Antiquity.
Next, Friedrich August Wolf was “[t]he last and greatest of Winkelmann’s
followers…”(Pfeiffer 173). Probably best remembered for his Homeric
studies, Wolf’s most lasting contribution to the discipline of Classics
overall was his rationalistic, organic and scientific vision of the field
“for which he invented the comprehensive term ‘Altertumswissenschaft’
(Pfeiffer 175).
Winkelmann and Wolf together laid out first a practice and then a theory
of Classics that endures to this day as a comprehensive and progressive
study for all aspects of the ancient world that touch on the Greece and
Rome. Given a research impetus by this systematic and scientific
orientation, the discipline engenders constant, specialized investigation
as its quintessential nature, and systematic production of new knowledge
is privileged over individualistic or eccentric interests (Pfeiffer 175).
The Enlightenment project of a science of Antiquity won over less
organized or more individualistic models (e.g. the nineteenth-century
British pattern or earlier Renaissance amateurism) and Classical
scholarship has become bureaucratized along methodological lines. What
counts as significant knowledge or practice in Classics still has to be
justified by the touchstone of Altertumswissenschft in order to be
acceptable for rewards in the arena of cultural significance.
This new science of Antiquity had a mission to recover lost aspects of the
Classical World through philological reconstruction and archaeological
excavation. How was this scientific perspective of Altertumswissenschaft
different from earlier views; or, put another way, what important aspects
of an earlier era of Classics lost ground to the consolidation of
Altertumswissenschaft as the dominant model for Classics in Germany (and
by adoption of the German model in the U.S.)?
A pointed example of an earlier and radically different viewpoint is
suggested by E.R. Curtius in European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages,
remarking on the ahistorical valuation of the auctores by the medieval
guardians of the Tradition:
All auctores are of the same value, all are timeless. No distinction is
made between Augustan and late Antique literature, or between Theodulus
and the early Christian poets. The passage of time on increases the list
of auctores.
Of course, such ahistoricism of the Middle Ages was challenged in the
Renaissance when Classical Latin literature was clearly distinguished from
Medieval through the rigorous stylistic canons of the Neo-Ciceronian
movement. Studia Humanitatis of the Renaissance produced serious scholars,
to be sure, but that period was also well furnished with the amateur
classicist soldier, statesman or cleric; the world of Classics was not
restricted to a small cadre of specialists working under a fairly
cohesive, professionalized disciplinary ideology. Certainly, transmission
of the Classical Tradition (teaching, if you like) was the dominant
mission and practice of classicists in both the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance because of the pragmatic demands of society for competent
Latinists in the professions. Altertumswissenschaft, on the other hand,
with its emphasis on systematic accumulation of new knowledge came at a
moment of the decline of Latin as a universal academic language and
provided the ideological platform for a narrowing but “intensive
professionalization of the field” (Selden). As the science of Antiquity
vied to imitate the aims of the natural sciences within German university
model (transferred to American graduate school in the late 1800’s), the
research motive (Wissenschaft) moved forward to challenge, and ultimately
to displace, transmission of Greek and Latin via teaching as the major
mission of Classics at the university level. Teachers, the prior guardians
of the Classical Tradition, (with the pragmatic need for Latin in wider
society receding) were reduced in status vis-à-vis the creators of new
knowledge while research, the practice of science, reaped rewards as the
primary mission of the reformed, German universities.
Placing research ahead of teaching of the Tradition may have been
culturally appropriate in the nineteenth century, given an adequate number
of readers of Greek and Latin at that time, but perhaps this priority is
no longer the only measure of good health for the discipline. As Hanson
and Heath report on disparity between teaching and scholarship for the
year 1992, with Greek enrollments falling to under .2 of a percent of all
university enrollment in the U.S.: “In the single year of 1992,
Classicists published and reviewed 16,168 articles, books and monographs…
The work of over 10,000 individual scholars appeared in nearly 1000
different journals” (1). Yet, the scientific demand for new knowledge,
fueling the ideological engine of “publish or perish,” continues to drive
its practitioners even when there are no students for them to teach.
How can the cultural significance of transmission, particularly the
transmission of Greek, be recovered within Classics community so that
Greek will survive and even thrive? Or to ask the question another way:
Can Alterutumswissenschaft as virtually the sole context for contemporary
Hellenic studies be challenged? I think that reference to founding figure
of the recuperation of Greek in the West may offer some guidance on this
point.
The Greek teaching of Manuel Chrysoloras at the Studium in Florence from
1397 to 1400 especially, (and then in Pavia from 1400 to 1403) will serve
as forceful tribute to the revolutionary cultural force of teaching as
Traditio. In fact, according to R.R. Bolgar in The Classical Heritage and
its Beneficiaries, the very direction of the Renaissance education and
culture was determined by the pedagogical practice and methods of this
Eastern diplomat: “ Pedagogically, the Renaissance began with Chrysoloras”
(268).
Chrysoloras’ fame was achieved as a teacher of Greek, not as a
Wissenschaftler; In Scribes and Scholars, Reynolds and Wilson remark that
1397, the year Chrysoloras began his lectures in Florence “is … a date of
fundamental importance in the cultural history of Europe…”(131, my
italics). Chrysoloras, of course, did write, but of what he published,
much was not specifically academic: some encomiastic epistles, a
Comparison of the New and Old Rome; his scholarly output (probably not
enough for tenure today at many major research institutions) was basically
a few translations and one short teaching text, the Erotemata, a brief,
but culturally important introduction to Classical Greek in catechistical
form, the first beginning Greek primer generally available in Europe since
the end of Antiquity (Pfeiffer 53). Chrysoloras’ personality and oral
teaching in Florence, however, set off a revolutionary resurgence of
Classical Greek in Italy and from there eventually to the rest of Europe:
His instruction and influence via students such as Leonardo Bruni,
translator and later Chancellor of Florence, and famous pedagogue Guarino
da Verona (who studied with Chrysoloras in Constantinople), accomplished
no less than the revival of Greek studies, after centuries of loss, in the
curriculum of Western education, restoring to the Classical Tradition its
bilingual heritage, so copiously illustrated in the Institutio Oratoria of
Quintilian (Bolgar 268-271). Chrysoloras’ Byzantine method of instruction,
i.e., to comment on a text from both an idiomatic and rhetorical direction
(Methodice) and on the informational or historical side (Historice),
remains standard today in commentaries on Classical texts (Bolgar 270).
Chrysoloras’ example demonstrates the dynamism and influence of pedagogy
as a major contributory force in the development of culture; it further
suggests that enthusiastic teaching can contribute to the revival of Greek
now just as it did in the Renaissance.
The decline of Greek today has no less serious cultural implications than
the lack of its knowledge at the beginning of the Renaissance. A
recuperation of the intellectual worthiness of teaching Greek, the
cultural and academic import of the pedagogical endeavor, must be
re-inscribed as a one of the central aims of Classics if it is to survive
in its traditional, language-based form. Contemporary cultural conditions
require some modification of the nineteenth-and-twentieth-century
orientation of Classical Studies as primarily a scientific enterprise. To
be sure, the Philodemus Project should advance and the new interpretive
disputes over recent Posidippus discoveries offer any Hellenist the
excitement of cutting-edge research, but these scholarly activities alone
will do little to create new readers of Greek. If a readership of Ancient
Greek is to develop in contemporary America, then the useful scientific
aims of high Enlightenment Altertumswissenschaft need to be balanced with
the historically prior and intellectually legitimate claims of
enthusiastic promotion and transmission of the Greek language and its
literature through the voices of living teachers, in the Renaissance
manner of Manual Chrysoloras. According to his model, excellent teaching
of Greek must be viewed as a culturally significant activity (dare I
suggest equally as important) along with research scholarship. Notably,
Ian Thomson in an article in GRBS, “ Manuel Chrsoyloras and the Early
Italian Renaissance,” stresses the culturally determinative direction of
Chrysloras’ pedagogy:
From at least the eighteenth century, when scholars first began to discuss
the “Italian Renaissance” as a cultural phenomenon, the importance of
Manuel Chrysoloras, the first notable professor of Greek in Western
Europe, has been widely recognized. Writers such as … Jacob Burckhardt
…
and Remigio Sabbadini have given him deservedly honorable mention as the
teacher of a number of influential humanists, whose interest in classical
studies did much to bring about the Renaissance as a whole. (63, my
italics)
What lessons, in summary, can we take from the example of Chrysoloras for
application to our own age? First, we notice that the continuity of
Hellenic studies from old Byzantium to Western Europe rests on a teacher
and the transmission of the tradition through personal teaching. As we a
have seen, Chrysoloras diffused a knowledge of Greek primarily through
passing it to others. Second, we can appreciate that Greek studies in the
West were motivated, picked up and carried on by Latinists. That is a
message to contemporary Latin teachers to embrace an enthusiasm for Greek
as the many important Latinists of the Renaissance did, to reflect on the
Hellenic background of Latin Literature and actively point this out to
students, to include some Greek in all Latin classes as appropriate to the
topic. And third, we can see that teaching itself, transmitting the
Hellenic Tradition from one living person to other living persons, is a
crucial and significant praxis in the work of high culture; pedagogy, too,
requires appropriate, professional rewards as highly valued, intellectual
work along with research and publication. Our discipline needs to take
vigorous steps to balance rewards for transmission of learning with those
for the advancement of new knowledge.
Of course, nothing here is really new, but perhaps the recollection the
hero ktistes of the recovery of Greek in the West will stimulate revised
thinking on the contemporary Classics scene about the determinative
cultural value of the example and voice of the living teacher for the
future direction of Greek.
Bibliography
ACL/NJCL National Greek Exam. “2001 ACL/NJCL Greek Exam-List of Prizes.”
ACL/NJCL National Latin Exam. National Latin Exam Newsletter. Vol. xvii,
no. 2, Spring 2001
Bolgar, R.R. The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1954.
Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
Trans. Willard Trask. 1953. Princeton/Bollingen Paperback edition.
Princeton: Princeton UP 1973.
“Enlightenment.” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 2. New York:
MacMillan and the Free Press, 1972.
Hanson, Victor Davis and John Heath. Who Killed Homer? New York: The Free
Press, 1998.
LaFleur, Richard. “Latina Resurgens: Classical Language Enrollments in
American Schools and Colleges.” The Classical Outlook 74.4 (1997):
125-130.
Pfeiffer, Rudolf. History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976
Reynolds, L.D. and N.G. Wilson. Scribes and Scholars. Second Edition.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.
Selden, Daniel L. “Classics and Contemporary Criticism.” Arion. Third
Series 1.1 (1990): 155-178.
return to menu
|
