The Protestant Reformers and Classical Education

Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it” (Jer. 6:16; ESV). Proponents of classical education—whether secular and so unwittingly, or Christian and so wittingly—apply the divine mandate to “ask for the ancient paths” to the task of education. They turn to previous centuries and millennia to discover not only the great thinkers and great ideas that have shaped Western civilization, but also time-tested, reliable methods of transmitting truth and wisdom (i.e., the “good way”) from one generation to the next. In a modern context of rapidly evolving educational approaches driven by utilitarian pressure to produce cogs in the machinery of American consumerism, advocates of classical education aim, like teachers of ages past, to equip students to live well. An end achieved, to their thinking, by giving students a traditional “liberal arts” education; an education, that is, that properly frees (“liberal” coming from the Latin liberare, “to free”) students from their natural bondage to ignorance and animalistic instinct, so permitting them to flourish both individually and socially.

The revival of classical education in America—a revival still gaining momentum—is often traced to the work of John Erskine, Mortimer Adler, and Robert Hutchins in the 1920s and 30s. These scholars developed “great books” university courses (i.e., courses comprised of Socratic discussion on the most influential writings in Western civilization) and helped codify the Great Books of the Western World series first published by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952.[1] Their labors ultimately spawned “honors” programs in various universities as well as new academic institutions whose entire curricula were rooted in the “great books.” Works on education by two British luminaries, Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis, in the 1940s further contributed to a push toward recovering classical education, especially in primary and secondary schools.[2]

But the modern revival of classical education has, of course, deeper roots. Pivotal voices in the perennial task of educating students were looking “for the ancient paths” long before the early twentieth century. The Protestant Reformers—Martin Luther, John Calvin, et al.—were some of the earliest proponents of classical education in a form not too distant from its modern expression. The role the Reformers played in relation to present-day classical education is easy to overlook, with their status as religious reformers tending to eclipse their status as educational reformers. But that role should, arguably, be noted as a task that requires: 1) observing the enthusiastic reception of classical learning by the Reformers; 2) observing the theological rationale that informed the Reformers’ enthusiastic reception of classical learning; and 3) observing the role that the Reformers played in promoting and establishing Protestant schools—primary, secondary, and tertiary—that embodied their enthusiasm for classical learning.

The Protestant Reformers’ Reception of Classical Learning

The Reformers encountered classical learning in and through a historical phenomenon that today we call “Renaissance Humanism.” Renaissance Humanism was an intellectual movement that, as its name would suggest, piggy-backed upon the broader, late-medieval “rebirth” of culture (art, architecture, etc.) that swept through Europe from the 14th century onward. Just as Renaissance artists (think Michelangelo, Raphael, or Da Vinci) looked to ancient architecture, painting, and sculpture for inspiration, humanist scholars looked to ancient authors and ideas for inspiration.

Of course, this required access to those ancient authors and ideas. At the heart of the humanist movement, therefore, was a recovery of texts that had been lost to Western civilization for many years and renewed interest in the languages necessary—especially Greek, Hebrew, and Latin—to access those texts. The Italian scholar Petrarch (d. 1374), often referred to as the “father of humanism,” famously stumbled upon various Latin manuscripts—for example, numerous works by Cicero—that were accumulating dust in medieval monasteries, overlooked by monastic copyists in favor of Sacred Scripture or medieval writings. Numerous Greek manuscripts that had been lost to the Latin West following the dissolution of the Roman Empire found their way into Western Europe as Greek scholars fled the medieval expansion of Islam. With these recovered Latin and Greek texts in hand and the study of ancient languages requisite to read them, the humanist cry “ad fontes!”—back to the sources—took form.

Humanists turned to ancient writings not to champion—at least as a movement—any specific ancient philosophy (Platonism, Stoicism, etc.) or particular branch of knowledge (theology, medicine, law, etc.) but to champion ancient ideas per se as well as the rhetorical skills that ancient writers employed to advance those ideas. The movement—known to its proponents not as “humanism” but as studia humanitatis (“studies of humanity”)—grew and reached its zenith in the early sixteenth-century work of Desiderius Erasmus (d. 1536). As it grew, of course, it profoundly shaped the curricula and pedagogy of Europe’s universities. And thereby, it profoundly shaped the academic experience and thought of the Protestant Reformers.

When Luther arrived at the University of Erfurt in 1501, humanism was in its proverbial heyday. Ancient Greek and Latin poetry was all the rage, and the university boasted of publishing the first book in Greek typeset (a Greek grammar) in all of Germany.[3] Luther’s first degree in liberal arts was richly informed by humanism, but his later training in theology—following his famous decision to join the Augustinian monastic order—followed a more traditional scholastic route. Luther compensated for that fact in his private theological study and eventual work as a Reformer by making good use of humanist literature (e.g., Erasmus’s Latin-Greek parallel Bible of 1516, a thoroughly humanist publication that revolutionized early modern biblical studies) and surrounding himself with scholars with stronger humanist credentials (most notably, Philip Melanchthon).

Those Reformers who contributed to a version of Protestantism distinct from Luther’s brand—namely, “Reformed Protestantism”—drank more deeply from the humanist well, both in their private study and their academic training. Ulrich Zwingli received a humanist training at the universities of Vienna and Basel; Johannes Oecolampadius at the universities of Bologna, Heidelberg, and Tübingen; and, of course, John Calvin, a second-generation Reformer, at the University of Paris.

The classical learning the Reformers received through their humanist training colored every aspect of their thought and writing. The classical learning the Reformers received through their humanist training colored every aspect of their thought and writing. Click To Tweet One need merely pick up their works for evidence of this; the writings and letters of these men are peppered with references to ancient authors, allusions to classical mythology, and linguistic considerations relative to Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. Calvin, in fact, aspired to a career as a humanist scholar prior to his conversion, a fact that bore fruit in his first publication in 1532, a commentary on the Roman philosopher Seneca’s De Clementia.[4] God, of course, had different plans for Calvin, but Calvin’s appreciation for classical learning and the tools (e.g., the ancient languages) necessary to access classical learning remained unabated after he somewhat grudgingly turned his efforts to pastoral work in Geneva. One evidence of this is the dedication of his commentary on 1 Thessalonians (1551) to Mathurin Cordier, Calvin’s Latin teacher from his earliest days at the University of Paris. Calvin’s deep appreciation for Cordier was rooted in the fact that Cordier, in teaching him Latin, had equipped him to access the best of ancient pagan authors in addition to theological writings and commentaries of church fathers and medieval theologians.

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Notes:

[1] Great Books of the Western World, 60 vols., 2^nd edition, ed. by Mortimer Adler et al. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990).

[2] See especially Dorothy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning (Crossreach Publications, 2016), and C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (HarperOne, 2015).

[3] See Julius Köstlin, The Life of Martin Luther, trans. by John Morris (Lutheran Publication Society, 1883), 49-58.

[4] For a fuller and more nuanced account of Calvin’s humanism, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Christian Humanism of John Calvin,” in Jens Zimmerman, ed., Re-envisioning Christian Humanism: Education and the Restoration of Humanity (Oxford University Press, 2016).