Truth and Goodness: Greek

 The institutional pedigree of modern places of higher education goes back to medieval universities and the training centres of the learned professions such as law and medicine. Their intellectual pedigree, however, and, even now, much of their academic practice and professional standards derive from the Greeks, if not directly then at least by resurrection and imitation. The persistence of this tradition bespeaks its survival value. Nevertheless, the sheer length of time may be misleading, for the scale of higher education and the numbers and kinds of persons involved in it have remained relatively limited and stable until very recent times. That higher education, whether sacred or secular, has for so long been the province (or, as some might say, the privilege) of a small elite group, has undoubtedly fostered the continued vitality of Greek ideals and kept alive Socratic methods and Aristotelian virtues far longer than has been the case in other spheres of social life.

To speak thus is not to condemn these values, 'though it may well be true that the time has now come to re-assess them. For the moment it is enough to recount their survival and importance; for no valid estimate can be made of the present standing of educational practice and endeavour which does not take these classical origins into account.

Not all those who have been subject to the classical tradition need have read classics at school or university in the precise sense of studying Latin or Greek. It is the mode rather than the content of further education which is here at issue. Two principles of teaching learning may be accounted paramount in this tradition. The first is the conviction that learning and discovery - the pursuit of truth as it is sometimes grandly called - is an end in itself, worth doing for its own sake, and somehow demoted should it be subservient to any other end. The second is that this venture is best prosecuted by subjecting all received judgements and opinions to critical investigation and reconsideration.

Of the relatively few through the centuries who have enjoyed any higher education at all, probably only a minute number have been fully aware of the assumptions on which these principles themselves rested. Had they been aware of them, they might well have abandoned the practices before they became converted to the presuppositions of the Greek way of life.

Implicit in Greek values and explicit in the works of Greece's most influential philosophers is the idea, now foreign to our thinking, that whatever changes is imperfect and somehow unreal, and conversely that the nearer man can approach changelessness the closer does the human attain to the divine and the more does error give place to truth. Because the contemplation of the verities, once identified, was thought to be the highest end of man and because it was accompanied, Aristotle tells us, by the most rewarding pleasures, the practical life in which knowledge was applied to action must always be accounted inferior to theory – the Greek word for the intellectual contemplation of truth.

These sentiments, which have something of a religious quality, provided for educated Greeks the kind of moral and social support that has been found in the great religions. They were, however, different in one very important characteristic, for they were confined to those lucky enough to be endowed with brains and fortune both to be able to exercise their intellects at all and to be free to do so undistracted by mental tasks and economic dependence on others. It was not that lesser mortals had no opportunity to aspire to the good life so defined, but they could do so only vicariously, benefiting socially from membership of a group lucky enough to contain philosophers within it.

This situation rarely occurred historically; nevertheless its absence has not seriously diminished the attraction of the Greek ideal. Even today, when knowledge is valued overwhelmingly for its ameliorative effects on daily life in a thousand different ways, many academics still harbour the Greek ideals and speak in terms of classical values while they are plainly being paid, sometimes quite highly, to use their gifts otherwise.

During the long intellectual twilight from Hellenistic times to the Renaissance, the contemplative ideal seems to have been fostered more vigorously than the critical. There are Christian reasons for this emphasis which will be considered later. In what may loosely be called modern times, however, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is the importance of extending knowledge through critical reappraisal, even through systematic doubt, which has taken the first place in intellectual values.

It may be argued, indeed, that the very success of this intellectual discipline, from which the remarkable advances .in our knowledge of the natural order principally stem, has been largely responsible for the changed educational needs of the present century. So much learning is now subsidiary, being composed of large-scale accumulations of established data and tested laws of development and change that its conveyance can no longer be left to the medium of the Socratic dialogue or the Oxonian tutorial, but demands impersonal methods, mechanical aids and, paradoxically, both the speeding up of the processes of acquiring information at the same time as the extension of the years of tutelage. In some subjects, the methods and traditions formerly encountered in undergraduate studies may not now be met until after the first degree and, thus, for many students never.

Whatever vitality still resides in knowledge for its own sake and in the excellence of developing the critical faculty has been submerged in its own astonishing success.

The Greeks were able to speak meaningfully of knowledge for its own sake because they attached moral value to its discovery and contemplation, not only to the activity itself, but to the men who undertook it. The supreme example of the good man was the one who exercised the specifically human characteristic of reasoning most continuously and successfully. By definition such an exercise was only of the highest moral value if it were not subordinate to any other end. It was this moral quality which gave the Greek intellectual ideal its positive force and which has contributed to its continued significance down the centuries.

We have been describing this tradition so far, however, as though it could be isolated and defined apart from the other European attitudes to education, with which in time the Greek ideal became linked and sometimes confused. To separate the strands is analytically useful, but historically distorting; and we must now add to the picture another different account of the pursuit of knowledge, no less influential, but probably for most modern - students, even more thoroughly superseded.

Originally unconnected with Greek thought, the tradition of Hebrew wisdom and learning gradually intermingled with the other Mediterranean cultures, notably in Alexandria in the Hellenistic period immediately before Christ. It was, however, in Christianity itself, which became an expanding and missionary Judaic heresy, that the Hebrew vision of God met and profoundly influenced the peoples of the Mediterranean world.

Two characteristics make this religious vision of truth distinct from Greek thought. First, what is known is ultimately revealed or disclosed by God and is not the unaided work of human discovery; although if we reckon that reason in man is a quasi-divine faculty for the Greeks, the two accounts can be seen to be very close.

Secondly, because the divine-human relationship was seen as analogous either to a family relationship or even a love affair, it was also potentially universal and not limited to particularly gifted individuals. It was, indeed, not the character of the revelation as such which differentiated Judaic-Christian from Greek knowledge so much as the mode of the disclosing and the scope of the disclosure. But the difference was one of capital importance because, even if each scheme might be characterised as revelatory, one was primarily intellectual and limited to the few, while the other was primarily a confrontation of the whole personality with God and in principle open to all men. Moreover, an experience of the divine which affected the will rather than the intellect gave far greater weight to what the Bible calls 'Righteousness' than to the Greek ideal of contemplation.

It is difficult now to disentangle these originally distinct ways of thought, so used are we in Europe to combining their insights and language in a single fused culture pattern. The Christian tradition carried with it from its Hebrew past a body of sacred writings and offset as it were the Greek insistence on critical appraisal with the special veneration which attached to the preservation and interpretation of the inspired texts. As the two cultures fused, and especially after the decline of the creative period ill classical thinking, later Christian apologists applied the meticulous scholarship which had been transmitted to them from Jewish scribes to whatever was left of pagan thought which they believed worth preserving.

This habit of scholarly repetition, translation and exposition was carried over to the nascent post-imperial society and was available to, put to new uses when classical wisdom came to be valued again during and particularly at the end of the middle ages.

Until that time, however, the dominance of a unique divine disclosure of truth, enshrined in canonical scriptures, themselves carefully preserved and interpreted under the authority of the Church, fixed the limits of human knowledge in an unchanging mould. The social disturbance and decay of the failing Roman imperial system followed by centuries of disorder and unsettled conditions encouraged this tendency. By the time it was possible once again to resume the forward trend of Greek critical enquiry; it could only be done by opposing some of the more static and constricting characteristics of a religiously expounded body of revealed truth.

When we ask what purpose in terms of Christian values corresponds to the Greek belief that knowledge is to be pursued for its own sake and that the contemplation of truth is its own reward, we are driven to a conclusion which can finally only be knowledge of God and his creation and his purposes is to be sought because it is God's will that he should be known, that his creation should manifest his purposes and that his purposes should be fulfilled.

Knowledge thus brings the believer nearer to his divinely appointed end and is to be desired as an aid to salvation, a specific against sin, a fulfillment of the divine-human relationship of love. Knowledge of the glory of God is also knowledge for the glory of God; and if the worshipper becomes fully aware of his place in the sight of God and his share of the divine love, his response may be deemed to be not very different from that of the Greek philosopher contemplating the verities. (C. Vereker: Learning and Thinking, SCM Press).