Friday, February 6, 2015

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Only in Christian Europe were schools and the university system created.

No other culture came close to producing such vibrancy of inquiry and rationality.

by Ferdinand III



Major medieval historian Grant: β€œThe medieval university laid far greater emphasis on science than does its modern counterpart.”


How true. Globaloneywarming? Tulips to Teachers ?  Right.


It is ironic that Marxist-Atheist professors declaiming their Islam-is-Peace and Christianity-is-evil doctrinaire dogma from the sanctity of their well-pensioned ivory towers; are the benefactors of the Christian-invented University system. Without Medieval Christian civilization there would be no university system. The university concept is yet another Christian creation.


It took about 500 years for universities to develop. Starting in the 5th and 6th centuries Christians began compiling educational material for both children and for 'scholars'. Boethius and Cassiodorus are usually credited with providing much of the material for the Christian university system, detailing what the Medievals called the 'quadrivium': arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music theory which were merged with the so-called trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric). The 7 liberal arts were the prime subjects taught in the monastic schools and later on in the university system which began in earnest in the 11th century. These subjects were quite practical, unlike the plethora of useless majors, schools and professors we have today.


The compilation and codification of knowledge was a Christian-wide enterprise. Its breadth from the benedictory 'decline of Rome' to the 9th century is remarkable indeed. Thus we have:


β€œMarcianus Capella..at Carthage about A.D. 420. in two books, "Nuptiae Philologiae et Mercurii", carrying out the allegory that Phoebus [me: the god of the bright, the pure...]  presents the Seven Liberal Arts as maids to the bride. Philology, mythological and other topics are treated. In the seven books that follow, each of the Liberal Arts presents the sum of her teaching....same subject is found in the little book, intended for clerics, entitled, "De artibus ac disciplinis liberalium artium", which was written by Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus in the reign of Theodoric...translation of the Greek mathesis or mathemata, and stood in a narrower sense for the mathematical sciencesCassiodorus derives the word liberalis not from liber, "free", but from liber, "book"..."Origines, sive Etymologiae", in twenty books, compiled by St. IsidoreBishop of Seville, about 600... grammar..rhetoric..dialectic, both comprised under the name of logic; ...four mathematical branches....medicine, jurisprudencetheology... Alcuin the well-known statesman and counsellor of Charles the Great..(Wisdom hath built herself a house, she hath hewn her out seven pillars)..One of Alcuin's pupils, Rabanus Maurus, who died in 850 ..published under the title, "De Universo", what might be called an encyclopedia. The extraordinary activity displayed by the Irish monks as teachers in Germany led to the designation of the Artes as Methodus Hybernica. To impress the sequence of the arts on the memory of the student, mnemonic verses were employed such as the hexameter...”


The list of medieval scholars would run into the many hundreds. Most are lost to us. As French historian Regine Pernoud states, hundreds if not thousands of tonnes of documents in Latin sit undisturbed across Europe. Within these papers we would no doubt find hundreds of men and quite a few women, busy with the elaboration of the great works of Cassiodorus and Boethius, and the manufacturing of education. How many anti-Christian professors today even understand that their very lives and ability to slander and hate the past, is due ironically, to people from a culture they despise. Not many I suppose.