The History Of Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley [motivational novels .TXT] 📗

INFLUENCES TENDING TOWARD A REVIVAL OF LEARNING

I. MOSLEM LEARNING FROM SPAIN

THE MOHAMMEDANS IN SPAIN. It will be recalled that in chapter V we mentioned briefly the Mohammedan migrations of the seventh century, and said that we should meet them again a little later on as one of the minor forces in the development of our western civilization. After their defeat at Tours (732) the Mohammedans retired into Spain, mixed with the Iberian-Roman-Visigothic peoples inhabiting the peninsula, and began to develop a civilization there. Figure 33 (p. 114) shows how much of the world the Mohammedans had overrun by 800 A.D., and how much of Spain was in their possession.

In Spain they developed a skillful agriculture (R. 85), as, in lands as hot and dry as Spain, all agriculture to be successful must be. They introduced irrigation, gave special attention to the breeding of horses and cattle, and developed garden and orchard fruits. To them western Europe is indebted for the introduction of many of its orchard fruits, useful plants, and garden vegetables, as well as for a number of important manufacturing processes. The orange, lemon, peach, apricot, and mulberry trees; the spinach, artichoke, and asparagus among vegetables; cotton, rice, sugar cane, and hemp among useful plants; the culture of the silkworm, and the manufacture of silk and cotton garments; the manufacture of paper from cotton, and the making of morocco leather—these are among our debts to these people. Though many of the above had been known to antiquity, they had been lost during the barbarian invasions and were restored only through their re-introduction by the Moslems.

GREAT ABSORPTIVE POWER FOR LEARNING. The original Arabians themselves were not a well-educated people. Before the time of Mohammed we have practically no records as to any education among them. When in their religious conquests they overran Syria (see Map, p. 103), they came in contact with the survivals of that wonderful Greek civilization and learning, and this they absorbed with greatest avidity.

It will be recalled, too, that in chapter IV (p. 94), it was stated that the early Christians developed very important catechetical schools in Egypt and Syria, and especially at Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa, Nisibis, Harran, and Caesarea. [1] (See Figure 27, p. 89.) It was also stated that the Christian instruction imparted at these eastern schools was tinctured through and through with Greek learning and Greek philosophic thought.

Here monasteries also were developed in numbers, and Syrian monks had for centuries been busy translating Greek authors into Syriac. It was also stated (p. 94) that the Eastern or Greek division of the Christian Church, of which Constantinople became the central city, was more liberal toward Greek learning than was the Western or Latin division of the Church.

By the fifth century, though, due in part to the breakdown of government, the increasing barbarity of the age, and the greater control of all thinking by the Church, the Eastern Church lost somewhat of its earlier tolerance. In 431 the Church Council of Ephesus put a ban on the Hellenized form of Christian theology advocated by Nestorius, then Patriarch of Constantinople, and drove him and his followers, known as Nestorian Christians, from the city. These Nestorians now fled to the old Syrian cities, which early had been so hospitable to Greek learning and thinking. [2] Being now beyond the reach of Christian intolerance and in a friendly atmosphere, they remained there, developing excellent higher schools of the old Greek type, and there the Mohammedans found them when they overran Syria, in 635 A.D.

Mohammedanism now came in contact with an educated people, as it did also in Babylonia (637), in Assyria (640), and in Egypt (642), and the need of a better statement of the somewhat crude faith now became evident. The same process now took place as had occurred earlier with Christianity. The Nestorian Christians and the Syrian monks became the scholars for the Mohammedans, and the Mohammedan faith was clothed in Greek forms and received a thorough tincturing of Greek philosophic thought. Within a century they had translated from Syriac into Arabic, or from the original Greek, much of the old Greek learning in philosophy, science, and medicine, and the cities of Syria, and in particular their capital, Damascus, became renowned for their learning. In 760 Bagdad, on the Tigris, was founded, and superseded Damascus as the capital. Extending eastward, these people were soon busy absorbing Hindu mathematical knowledge, obtaining from them (c. 800) the so-called Arabic notation and algebra.

THEY DEVELOP SCHOOLS AND ADVANCE LEARNING. In 786 Haroun-al-Raschid became Caliph at Bagdad, and he and his son made it an intellectual center of first importance. In all the known world probably no city, not even Constantinople, during the latter part of the eighth century and most of the ninth, could vie with Bagdad as a center of learning. Basra, Kufa, and other eastern cities were also noted places. Schools were opened in connection with the mosques (churches), a university after the old Greek model was founded, a large library was organized, and an observatory was built. Large numbers of students thronged the city, learned Greeks and Jews taught in the schools, and a number of advances on the scientific work done by the Greeks were made. A degree of the earth’s surface [3] was measured on the shores of the Red Sea; the obliquity of the ecliptic was determined (c. 830); astronomical tables were calculated; algebra and trigonometry were perfected; discoveries in chemistry not known in Europe until toward the end of the eighteenth century, and advances in physics for which western Europe waited for Newton (1642-1727), were made; and in medicine and surgery their work was not duplicated until the early nineteenth century. Their scholars wrote dictionaries, lexicons, cyclopaedias, and pharmacopoeias of merit (R. 86).

This eastern learning was now gradually carried to Spain by traveling Mohammedan scholars, and there the energy of conquest was gradually turned to the development of schools and learning. By 900 a good civilization and intellectual life had been developed in Spain, and before 1000 the teaching in Spain, especially along Greek philosophical lines, had become sufficiently known to attract a few adventurous monks from Christian Europe. Gerbert (953-1003), afterward Pope Sylvester II (p. 159), was one of the first to study there, though for this he was accused of having transactions with the Devil, and when he died suddenly at fifty, four years after having been elevated to the Papacy, monks over Europe are recorded as having crossed themselves and muttered that the Devil had now claimed his reward. A monk from Monte Cassino also studied at Bagdad, and brought back some of the eastern learning to his monastery.

[Illustration: FIG. 51. SHOWING CENTERS OF MOSLEM LEARNING]

MOHAMMEDAN REACTION SENDS SCHOLARS TO SPAIN. The great intellectual development at Bagdad was in part due to the patronage of a few caliphs of large vision, and was of relatively short duration. The religious enthusiasts among the Mohammedans were in reality but little more zealous for Hellenic learning than the Fathers of the Western Church had been.

Finally, about 1050, they obtained the upper hand and succeeded in driving out the Hellenic Mohammedans, just as the Eastern Christians had driven out the Nestorians, and these scholars of the East now fled to northern Africa and to Spain. [4] Almost at once a marked further development in the intellectual life of Spain took place. In Cordova, Granada, Toledo, and Seville strong universities were developed, where Jews and Hellenized Mohammedans taught the learning of the East, and made further advances in the sciences and mathematics. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, physiology, medicine, and surgery were the great subjects of study. Greek philosophy also was taught. They developed schools and large libraries, taught geography from globes, studied astronomy in observatories, counted time by pendulum clocks, invented the compass and gunpowder, developed hospitals, and taught medicine and surgery in schools (R. 86).

Their cities were equally noteworthy for their magnificent palaces, [5]

mosques, public baths, marketplaces, aqueducts, and paved and lighted streets—things unknown in Christian Europe for centuries to come (R. 85).

It became fashionable for wealthy men to become patrons of learning, and to collect large libraries and place them at the disposal of scholars, thus revealing interests in marked contrast to those of the fighting nobility of Christian Europe.

THEIR INFLUENCE ON WESTERN EUROPE. Western Europe of the tenth to the twelfth centuries presented a dreary contrast, in almost every particular, to the brilliant life of southern Spain. Just emerging from barbarism, it was still in an age of general disorder and