The Uses of Greek Learning

The quickness that comes from earlier training does a great deal toward perceiving whatever needs to be perceived. But the things that can be taken in by the mind alone are the mind’s own proper exercise, and they fall into three kinds, according as we are considering how many a thing is, how large it is, or what can be said about it. For reasoning that runs by demonstration plants a clear faith in the spirit of the person who follows it, so that he cannot conceive of the thing demonstrated being otherwise; and so it keeps us from giving way to people who attack us by fraud. In studies like these the soul is cleansed of the things of the senses and roused, so that it can see truth distinctly. [a]

For good feeding, and training that is kept gentle, make fine natures; and fine natures, once they have had such training, become better than they were before — in other ways, but above all in what they produce, as happens with the other living creatures too. That is why it is said, “Go to the ant, you lazy man, and become wiser than it is. It lays up food in plenty, and of many kinds, at harvest, against the hardness of winter.” Or go to the bee, and learn how hard she works: she feeds over a whole meadow and produces one honeycomb. And if you pray in your storeroom, as the Lord taught, and worship in spirit, then your management will no longer be taken up with the house alone but with the soul as well — what must be given to it, and how, and how much; what must be laid aside and stored up in it; and when it should be brought out, and to whom.

For people do not become fine and good by nature but by learning, in the same way that people become doctors and ship’s pilots. All of us alike, for instance, look at a vine and at a horse. But it is the farmer who will know whether the vine bears well or badly, and the horseman who will easily tell a spiritless animal from a fast one. That some are naturally better disposed toward virtue than others is shown by what those better-disposed men go on to pursue. But that perfection in virtue is not the private property of the ones with the better natures is proved by this: people who are badly disposed toward virtue by nature usually reach excellence once they get the training that suits them, while people whose natural bent is right for it turn out badly through neglect.

Again, God has made us social and just by nature. So it must not be said that justice arises out of what is planted in us and nothing more. The good that comes to us with our making is to be thought of as roused by the command, the soul being trained to be willing to choose what is finest.

But just as we say a person can be a believer without learning, so we also say it is impossible for a person without learning to grasp the things the faith declares. To take up what is well said, and to refuse the opposite, is not brought about by faith alone, but by faith joined to knowledge. If ignorance is a lack of training and instruction, then it is teaching that produces knowledge of things divine and human. And just as one can live rightly in poverty of this world’s goods, so one can in plenty. We do admit that a person will reach virtue both more easily and more quickly with earlier training. But virtue is not therefore out of reach without it; it is reached only when people have learned, and have had their senses trained by practice.

As Solomon says, “Hatred stirs up strife, but instruction guards the ways of life,” and it guards them in such a way that we are not taken in or led astray by men practiced in low arts for the harm of those who listen to them. “But instruction that goes uncorrected wanders off,” it says. We have to be at home in the art of reasoning, so as to refute the deceitful opinions of the sophists. Anaxarchus, then, writes well and aptly in his book on kingly rule: “Wide learning helps a man greatly and harms him greatly, according to who has it. It helps the man who deserves it, and it damages the man who readily blurts out every word he has, and in front of the whole people. One must know the measure of the right time; that is what wisdom comes to. And those who sing at people’s doors, however skillfully they sing, are not reckoned wise but get themselves a name for folly.” And Hesiod:

By “full of words” he means the man who is fluent; by “clear of voice,” the man who is clever; and by “divine,” the man who is skilled — a philosopher, and acquainted with the truth.

So Greek preparatory learning, and philosophy along with it, is shown to have come down from God to people — not aimed at one target, but the way showers fall on good farmland, and on the dung heap, and on the housetops. Grass sprouts and wheat sprouts alike; fig trees and other trees that grow anywhere come up on graves. And the things that grow this way stand as a figure of truths, since they get the benefit of the same rain. But they do not have the same quality as the ones that spring up in rich soil, and so they either wither or are pulled out. [j]

Here the parable of the sower helps us, which the Lord himself explained. For the farmer of the soil that is in human beings is one: he who from the beginning, from the founding of the world, sowed seeds that nourish; he who in every age rained down the Lord, the Word. It was the times and the places that received these gifts which made the differences we see. And the farmer sows not only wheat, of which there are many kinds, but other seeds too — barley, beans, peas, vetch, and the seeds of vegetables and flowers. To the same farming belongs planting as well, and all the work that has to be done in nurseries and gardens and orchards, and the laying out and raising of every kind of tree.

In the same way, the keeping of sheep and the keeping of herds, the breeding of horses and of dogs, the craft of bees — all these skills, and, to put it broadly, the tending of flocks and the raising of animals, differ from one another more or less, and every one of them is useful for life. And philosophy — by which I do not mean the Stoic school, or the Platonic, or the Epicurean, or the Aristotelian, but whatever has been well said in each of these sects, teaching righteousness together with a knowledge shot through with reverence toward God — this whole, picked out of all of them, is what I call philosophy. But conclusions of human reasoning that people have hacked about and falsified I would never call divine.

And now we must look at this as well: whether people who do not know how to do good ever live well — for they have stumbled on doing good. Some, too, have aimed well at the word of truth by understanding. “But Abraham was not counted righteous by works, but by faith.” So it is no advantage to them, once life is over, that they do good works now, if they have no faith. That is also why the Scriptures were translated into the language of the Greeks: so that they would never be able to plead ignorance as an excuse, since they can hear what we have in our hands, if only they want to.

It is one thing to speak about the truth, another for the truth to interpret itself. Guessing at the truth is one thing, and the truth itself another. A likeness is one thing, the thing itself another. The first comes of learning and practice, the second of power and faith. For the teaching of reverence toward God is a gift, but faith is grace. “For by doing the will of God we come to know the will of God.” “Open to me, then,” says the Scripture, “the gates of righteousness; I will go in through them and give thanks to the Lord.” But the paths to righteousness are many and various — since God saves in many ways, being good — and they lead to the Lord’s road and gate. And if you ask about the royal and true entrance, you will hear: “This is the gate of the Lord; the righteous will go in through it.” Many gates stand open, but the one in righteousness is in Christ, and through it all the blessed go in and set their steps in the holiness of knowledge.

Clement, in his letter to the Corinthians, setting out the differences among those the church approves, says it plainly: “One is faithful; one is able to speak knowledge out; one is wise at telling one word from another; one is formidable in what he does.”

But the art of sophistry, which the Greeks worked up, is a power of illusion that makes false opinions look like true ones by means of words. It turns out rhetoric for persuading and disputation for wrangling, and so these arts, if they are not joined to philosophy, will do everyone harm. Plato openly called sophistry “an evil art,” and Aristotle, following him, shows it to be a dishonest art, one that plausibly makes off with the whole business of wisdom and lays claim to a wisdom it has never studied. [s]

To put it briefly: rhetoric begins from the probable, works by attempted proof, and ends in persuasion; disputation begins from what is matter of opinion, works by contest, and ends in victory. In the same way sophistry begins from what merely appears, and its working is twofold — one part rhetorical, running on unbroken and exhausting the subject, the other logical and proceeding by questions — and its end is to be admired. The dialectic in fashion in the schools, on the other hand, is a philosopher’s exercise in matters of opinion, for the sake of skill in argument. But truth is not in any of these at all.

With good reason, then, the noble apostle runs these superfluous arts of words down, and says: “If anyone does not attend to sound words but is puffed up by a kind of teaching, he knows nothing; he is sick over questions and battles about words. Out of these come quarrelling, envy, insults, evil suspicions, and the endless wrangling of men whose minds are corrupted and who are robbed of the truth.” You see how strongly he moves against them: he calls their art of logic a disease — the art that its lovers, Greeks or barbarians, plume themselves on, chattering and mischievous as it is. Very beautifully, then, the tragic poet Euripides says in the Phoenician Women:

For the Word who saves is called “sound,” since he is the truth; and what is sound and healthy stays deathless forever. But separation from what is healthy and divine is irreverence toward God, and a deadly sickness. These men are ravenous wolves hidden in sheepskins, kidnappers, smooth-talking seducers of souls — secret about it, but proved to be robbers — trying by fraud and by force to catch people like us, who are plain and have less power with words.

So says the tragedy. That is what these quarrelers are like, whether they follow one of the sects or practice their miserable dialectical arts. These are the men who “stretch the warp and weave nothing,” as the Scripture says, pushing on with a useless task — what the apostle called “the cunning of men, by which they lie in wait to deceive.” “For there are,” he says, “many unruly and empty talkers and deceivers.” That is why it was not said to everyone, “You are the salt of the earth.” For some even of those who hear the word are like the fish of the sea, which are reared in brine from birth and still need salt to make them fit to eat. And so I thoroughly approve of the tragedy when it says:

So we must not set out to please the crowd. What we practice is not what will please them, but what we know is far from their taste. “Let us not be greedy for empty glory,” says the apostle, “provoking one another, envying one another.” And this is how the truth-loving Plato speaks, as though God were in it: “I am the sort of man who obeys nothing in me but the argument that, on reflection, appears to me the best.”

So he charges those who trust opinions without intelligence and knowledge with abandoning right and sound reason for no warrant, and with believing a man who is a partner in falsehood. For it is bad to cheat yourself of the truth; it is good to speak the truth and to hold real things as our opinions.

People are robbed of what is good against their will. Still, they are robbed either by being deceived, or by being charmed out of it, or by being forced and refusing to believe. The man who does not believe has already made himself a willing prisoner; and the man who changes his conviction has been cheated, forgetting that time takes some things away without his noticing and argument takes others. And once an opinion has been taken up, pain and anguish compel a man on one side, quarrelsomeness and anger on the other. Above all, those are charmed out of it who are either bewitched by pleasure or terrified by fear. All of these are changes made willingly, and by none of them will anyone ever arrive at knowledge.

Some people who think themselves naturally gifted will not touch philosophy or logic; more than that, they will not learn natural science. They demand bare faith and nothing else — as though they wanted to pick the bunches straight off without taking any care of the vine at all. Now the Lord is figured as the vine, and the fruit is to be gathered from him with hard work and the farmer’s skill, according to the word. [ac]

We have to prune, dig, tie up, and do the rest of the work. The pruning hook, I should think, and the mattock, and the other farm tools are needed for tending the vine, so that it will bear fruit fit to eat. And it is with medicine as with farming: the man who has learned to any purpose is the one who has worked through the various lessons, so that he is able to cultivate and to heal. It is the same here. I call a man truly learned when he brings everything to bear on the truth, so that by culling what is useful out of geometry and music and grammar and philosophy itself, he guards the faith against assault. As was said, the athlete who is not equipped for the contest is held in contempt.

So too we praise the experienced helmsman who “has seen the cities of many men,” and the doctor who has had wide experience — which is how some describe the empiric. And the man who brings everything to bear on living rightly, getting his examples from Greeks and from barbarians, is an experienced searcher after truth and really a man of much counsel, like the touchstone — the Lydian stone, that is — which is believed to have the power of telling counterfeit gold from genuine. And the one who truly knows, with all his wide knowledge, can tell sophistry from philosophy, beautifying from athletic training, cookery from medicine, and rhetoric from dialectic, and the other sects that go with the barbarian philosophy from the truth itself.

And how necessary it is, for the man who wants a share in the power of God, to handle matters of the mind by philosophizing! And how serviceable it is to sort out expressions that are ambiguous, and expressions the Testaments use as though they meant the same thing! For the Lord, at the time of his testing, skillfully matched the devil with an ambiguous expression. And I still do not see, at this point in the argument, how on earth the supposed inventor of philosophy and dialectic is himself led astray, taken in by that very figure of speech which consists in ambiguity.

And even if the prophets and apostles did not know the techniques by which the exercises of philosophy are put on display, still the mind of the prophetic and teaching Spirit, spoken in secret because not everyone has an ear that understands, calls for skilled ways of teaching if it is to be set out clearly. For the prophets and the disciples of the Spirit knew that mind without error. They knew it by faith, in a way others could not easily manage, as the Spirit has said. But people who have not learned cannot take it in that way. “Write the commands down twice over,” it says, “in counsel and knowledge, so that you may answer with words of truth to those who send to you.” What, then, is the knowledge of answering? Or the knowledge of asking? It is dialectic.

What follows from that? Is speaking not our business, and does action not proceed from the Word? For if we do not act for the Word, we shall be acting against reason. But work that is rational is brought to completion through God. “And nothing,” it says, “was made without him” — the Word of God. And did the Lord not make all things by the Word? Even the animals work, driven on by fear that compels them. And do the people who are called orthodox not set themselves to good works without knowing what they are doing?