ESSAY

by Ferdi McDermott

The origins and transmission of the Western liberal tradition, from the Library of Alexandria to the English humanist school

Liberal education did not spring fully formed from an English quadrangle. It travelled: from Egypt to Greece, from pagan philosophy into Christian schools, from the deserts of the East to Ireland, and from Irish and Anglo-Saxon scriptoria into the classrooms of Charlemagne, Alfred, Winchester, Eton and John Colet.

“Children arrive in the world as heirs to achievements they did not make. They have a right to receive them.”

Egypt: the memory of wisdom

Education as we know it did not begin in a modern ministry, still less in an examination board. Its roots reach back into Egypt. For centuries medieval kings purported to trace their ancestry to that mystical land. To the Romans, and even to the Greeks, Egypt was a totem of hidden knowledge. Plato repeatedly lends Egyptian antiquity to his arguments: in the Phaedrus, the story of the invention of writing is attributed to the Egyptian god Theuth; in the Timaeus, an Egyptian priest gently tells Solon that the Greeks are children, possessing no truly ancient tradition. An Egyptian source gave an anecdote age, mystery and spice.

The Greeks mocked the Egyptians for their animal cults, their strange customs and their defiant conservatism. At the same time they were bewitched by them. The ancient Hebrews, who defined themselves partly through the memory of an escape from Egypt, were no less haunted by it. The land of the pyramids has exercised this fascination for at least three millennia.

But the Egypt that concerns us is not chiefly the Egypt of pharaohs. It is the Egypt of Alexandria: the new city founded by Alexander the Great and home to the most celebrated library of the ancient world. Here Greek intellectual ambition met Egyptian antiquity, royal patronage and the traffic of the Mediterranean. It was an institution built on a magnificent premise: that knowledge could be collected, ordered, compared and handed on.

Its longest-serving chief librarian was Eratosthenes of Cyrene, in modern Libya. In about 240 BC, using the angle of the sun at two places and the measured distance between them, he calculated the circumference of the earth with astonishing accuracy. But Eratosthenes did not content himself with circumscribing the globe. He did something similar for its history and continents. He helped establish chronology and geography as systematic disciplines; he wrote on mathematics, astronomy, literary criticism and poetry. He was the sort of scholar whom a modern university would find administratively inconvenient: there was no single department capacious enough to contain him.

The ancient Near East was fertile in wine and grain. Egypt became the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Yet this country was fertile also in ideas, and one of those ideas was what we have come to call academia: the patient curation and synthesis of existing thought, joined to new discovery, so that the next generation might inherit more than the last.

As one contributor to the 2020 volume Michaela: The Power of Culture puts it, pupils have a right to inherit the culture of our civilisation: the poetry, literature, scientific theories, mathematical proofs, symphonies and works of art through which humanity has built up beautiful and elegant knowledge. The purpose of a curriculum, the writer argues, is to curate this inheritance so that pupils can marvel at it, understand it and appreciate its highest achievements. The passage neatly—and probably unknowingly—summarises a philosophy pursued with vigour in Eratosthenes’ Alexandria more than two thousand years before.

The Cross above the globe

Alexandria was Greek without being merely Greek. Alexander had been the pupil of Aristotle, who had been the pupil of Plato, who had listened to Socrates. Into this Hellenic setting Christianity burst upon the scene. It had Jewish roots and proclaimed a Jewish Messiah; but it spread through a Greek-speaking world, and its New Testament was written in the common Greek of the day. By the second century it had many adherents in Roman Alexandria.

Later Christian tradition associated the Alexandrian Church with St Mark and spoke of a great catechetical school descending from him. The historical picture is less tidy. We can be confident that Alexandria became a remarkable centre of Christian teaching; we should be more cautious about imagining a continuously chartered university with St Mark as its first vice-chancellor. Pantaenus, Clement and Origen belong to a world of teachers, circles of pupils, catechesis, philosophical enquiry and biblical scholarship rather than to a modern campus. Yet what emerged there was, in intellectual terms, something momentous: Christianity learnt to address the whole inheritance of Greek thought without either surrendering to it or simply destroying it.

The Christian doctrines of Creation and Incarnation gave this work a peculiar energy. The created world was good and made by God; human nature was good enough for the Son of God to assume it. The world around us and the human body were not prisons to be despised. They were doubly blessed. Yet man, as our catechisms still teach, most resembles God in his intellect. The health of mind, body and soul therefore belonged together. ‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly,’ says Christ in St John’s Gospel. In mission countries the old instinct remains obvious: the Church builds churches, but also schools, clinics and universities. Education is one of the gifts God gives his children through the Church.

According to St Mark’s Gospel, a man from Cyrene carried Christ’s cross on the way to Calvary. It was in the adopted home of another Cyrenian, Eratosthenes, that Christianity placed that cross, intellectually speaking, above the globe he had measured. Grammar, logic and rhetoric—the threefold way later called the trivium—and arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy—the quadrivium—prepared the mind for philosophy and theology. From physics to metaphysics, as Aristotle might have put it. The activity of man was in constant turmoil, but the contemplation of God supplied a fixed point: stat crux dum volvitur orbis—the Cross stands still while the world turns.

In Clement’s Alexandria pagan learning flourished under Christian patronage. Reason flourished, but under the sceptre of Christ. Clement was no enemy of civilisation. He advised Christians to obey the nomos, the law and custom of the city, wherever it did not contradict the Logos, divine reason itself. They might participate in trade, but should become known for honesty; visit the baths, but not loiter; take part in athletics, but preserve modesty. Women might adorn themselves, but not become slaves to adornment. Clement can sound like an ancient St Francis de Sales. One cannot help thinking that his flock must have been nice people to know.

We should not turn Clement’s circle into an imaginary Victorian school timetable. Nevertheless, his works reveal a recognisably liberal ideal: Scripture and catechesis; Greek poetry and philosophy; music, physical discipline, prayer and moral formation. Education was not merely the acquisition of useful information. It was the ordering of a life.

Out of Egypt: Ireland and the custody of memory

And so we come, by what may seem a very long road, to the Antiphonary of Bangor. Produced in the north of Ireland in the later seventh century, it is now in Milan, carried to the continent by Irish monks. Like many of the oldest books in continental libraries, it is itself a travelled thing. In one of its hymns the community of Bangor is described as ex Aegypto traducta: transplanted, or translated, out of Egypt. Why should a community on the cold edge of the Atlantic remember itself in Egyptian terms?

Part of the answer lies in monastic genealogy. John Cassian had absorbed the practices and teaching of Egyptian monasticism before establishing communities near Marseille. Later tradition placed part of Patrick’s formation in Gaul, within a church increasingly marked by Cassian and by the Desert Fathers. Irish monasticism did not reproduce Egypt in miniature, and its precise debts are debated; but Irish monks saw themselves as heirs to the ascetic and intellectual tradition that came from the East. Egypt was no longer merely a country. It was a spiritual country of origin.

Patrick was born around the year 400, somewhere in Roman Britain. He was a Romano-Briton, speaking a Celtic language related to Welsh and possessing the provincial Latin of the late Empire. Captured by Irish raiders and enslaved as a youth, he spent years tending animals in Ireland. After escaping, he later returned as a missionary. The familiar story should not be inflated into the claim that Patrick single-handedly abolished Irish slavery or pacified the whole island. What can be said is more interesting: a former slave returned voluntarily to the people who had enslaved him, armed not with a legion but with a Gospel, a sacramental system and a culture of learning.

Rome meanwhile was in slow decline. In the portentous winter of 406–407, Vandals, Alans and Sueves crossed the Rhine—frozen, according to the traditional account. The western imperial structure fragmented. Churches and libraries suffered; schools lost patrons; manuscripts were neglected or destroyed. The barbarians were not uniformly stupid and the Romans were not uniformly civilised, but the machinery by which culture reproduced itself had been damaged. In this setting the monastery became an ark: a house of prayer, certainly, but also a workshop, farm, school, guesthouse, scriptorium and library.

Ireland already possessed learned native orders: druids, poets, jurists and keepers of genealogy. The relationship between these traditions and the Christian schools remains one of the great arguments of Celtic studies. The romantic picture in which Patrick simply converts seven grades of Druidic initiation into the seven liberal arts is too neat to be proved. Nor is the opposite picture—in which civilisation arrives in Ireland as an entirely foreign cargo—credible. What happened was inculturation. Native learning was neither wholly erased nor left untouched. It was written down, argued with, baptised and changed.

The Irish learned to write Latin with extraordinary distinction; they also became among the earliest peoples of western Europe to write extensively in their own vernacular. Irish glosses appear beside Latin texts, and the Auraicept na nÉces developed as a learned reflection on Irish grammar and the lore of poets. Pagan tales, genealogies and laws survived because Christian scribes copied them. We therefore meet an apparent paradox that recurs throughout the history of liberal education: an institution with firm convictions can preserve books with which it does not entirely agree. Indeed, it may preserve them better because it believes that truth is one and has nothing finally to fear from enquiry.

From the sixth century, Irish monasteries attracted pupils from Britain and the continent. Exact numbers in medieval sources should be treated with care, but the scale and reputation of centres such as Bangor, Clonard, Clonmacnoise and later Glendalough are beyond dispute. Some pupils became clerics; others did not. Learning was not enclosed within a professional caste. Irish scholars in turn travelled outwards. Columba founded Iona; Columbanus founded houses across Gaul and Italy; their successors carried manuscripts, computus, biblical learning and a fierce ascetic confidence into a Europe whose political map had been torn apart.

Then came the Vikings. Monasteries were rich, visible and poorly defended; they were raided repeatedly. Yet destruction was not the whole story. Vikings settled, traded, intermarried and were converted. Irish learning changed without disappearing. Classical epics were translated and adapted; native histories were compiled; monasteries and secular learned families continued their work. Ireland had not sealed antiquity in a jar. It had kept the conversation alive.

Charlemagne: learning becomes public policy

The Irish and Anglo-Saxon missions carried books and teachers back towards the centre of Europe. In the eighth century, the thread reaches the court of Charlemagne. The great Frankish king understood something that rulers repeatedly forget: an empire cannot be held together only by cavalry. It requires words that mean the same thing in different places, clergy who can read the texts they proclaim, administrators who can write intelligibly, and teachers who can produce more teachers.

Charlemagne gathered scholars from across Europe. The most famous was Alcuin of York, formed in the cathedral school of York and heir to the Northumbrian world of Bede. At the palace school and later at Tours, Alcuin promoted the liberal arts, corrected texts and trained pupils who would train others. The Carolingian Renaissance was not a modern secular enlightenment. Its impulse was reforming and religious: better Latin, better books and better schools would produce more faithful worship and more intelligent government. Yet precisely because the faith made claims about truth, grammar mattered. A badly copied Bible was not merely inelegant; it might say the wrong thing.

Scriptoria multiplied books. A clear and regular handwriting—Carolingian minuscule—made texts easier to read and copy. Cathedral and monastic schools were encouraged. Ancient authors survived in large part because Carolingian scribes made new copies of crumbling exemplars. Here the liberal tradition acquired one of its permanent characteristics: recovery is an act of creation. To copy a text accurately, to punctuate it, compare manuscripts and teach it is not passive nostalgia. It is the rebuilding of a world.

The seven liberal arts supplied an architecture. The trivium taught the pupil to understand language, test an argument and express truth persuasively. The quadrivium examined number: number in itself, in space, in time, and in space and time—arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. These arts were called liberal not because they were vaguely progressive, nor because they excluded discipline, but because they were proper to a free person and helped make the mind free. They were arts of thinking before they were subjects to be examined.

Alfred: a king translates

Across the Channel, the Viking crisis produced another royal educator. Alfred the Great looked upon ninth-century England and lamented the collapse of learning. Churches possessed books, but too few men could understand them. His answer was characteristically practical: recover Latin learning, educate the young, and translate into English the books ‘most necessary for all men to know’.

Alfred’s programme is one of the decisive moments in English education. He did not despise Latin; he wanted more people capable of learning it. But he also recognised that the road to wisdom could begin in the mother tongue. Works associated with his programme included Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Augustine’s Soliloquies and historical writing. Whether every translation traditionally attributed to Alfred was executed by his own hand matters less than the royal purpose that joined them.

Here again we find transmission joined to government. Alfred’s schools were to educate not only future monks but the sons of free men who had the means to pursue learning. Literacy, moral formation and public responsibility belonged together. The king who fortified towns and fought armies also translated books. He knew that a civilisation survives by defending its borders, but also by remembering what lies within them.

The school under the shadow of the church

For the next five centuries the liberal tradition took institutional form in monasteries, cathedral schools, grammar schools and the new universities. There was no single medieval system. Some schools were tiny; some famous. Some were attached to religious houses, others to cathedrals, collegiate churches, towns or charitable foundations. Their quality depended, as schools always do, on endowment, leadership and the accidental arrival of a brilliant teacher.

Yet certain patterns endured. Grammar was foundational because Latin opened the treasury: Scripture, liturgy, law, theology, medicine, philosophy and the common correspondence of educated Europe. Boys learnt by heart, imitated models, disputed propositions and spoke aloud. Music was not an optional enrichment tacked onto the serious curriculum. Song schools trained choristers for the daily offices; grammar schools trained minds for further study. Chapel and classroom were neighbours because worship itself required literacy, memory, number, music and rhetoric.

The universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford grew from this world. Their faculties organised the arts as preparation for the higher studies of law, medicine and theology. The disputation, sometimes caricatured as sterile hairsplitting, trained students to state an objection fairly, distinguish senses, assemble authorities and answer in public. At its best, scholastic education taught intellectual courage joined to intellectual courtesy: the objection must be heard before it can be resolved.

The English collegiate tradition united prayer, common life and study. A college was not merely a building containing classrooms. It was a corporation extended through time: founder, fellows, scholars, servants, benefactors, dead and living members bound by rule, endowment and daily remembrance. Education acquired walls, gardens, libraries, chapels, dining halls and rhythms. The architecture made a claim. Learning was not a transaction conducted between a vendor and a customer. It was a form of life.

Winchester and Eton: the endowment of hope

In 1382 William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor of England, founded Winchester College. His plan joined it to New College, Oxford: a school to prepare seventy scholars and a university college in which learning could continue. England had been ravaged by the Black Death. Clergy and educated administrators were scarce. Wykeham’s response to catastrophe was not to lower the horizon but to endow a ladder.

His motto, ‘Manners Makyth Man’, has survived partly because it states the liberal conviction with lapidary force. A man is not made by birth alone. Education shapes conduct, speech, judgment and character. Winchester was religious, residential, disciplined and charitable. Its seventy scholars were not decorative additions to a fee-paying enterprise; they stood close to the founder’s purpose.

Henry VI imitated the model when he founded Eton College in 1440 and King’s College, Cambridge, the following year. Eton was a collegiate church as well as a school, with priests, clerks, choristers, almsmen and poor scholars. The first charter provided for twenty-five poor scholars; the foundation was enlarged towards the famous company of seventy. Eton looked back to Winchester and forward to King’s. The school and university college were two stages of one ascent.

The repeated number of seventy was therefore more than an administrative convenience. At Winchester and then at Eton, a founder set aside permanent places for scholars whose education was to be sustained by the life and property of a corporation. The boys shared chapel, choir, hall, lessons, discipline and memory; beyond them waited New College or King’s. School and university, worship and scholarship, charity and high intellectual ambition were built into a single institutional design. These foundations gave the liberal tradition a body intended to survive the men who made it.

Early Eton boys studied Latin—at first Latin alone. Their days were long, their holidays few, and memorisation occupied a place that would alarm a modern educational consultant. Yet it would be a mistake to see only repression. Latin was the passport to a republic of letters extending across frontiers and centuries. To write verses, imitate Cicero, parse Virgil and speak within a shared learned language was to join the living and the dead.

Westminster belonged to the older monastic stream. A charity school grew within the Benedictine precincts of Westminster Abbey, and its continuous existence is certain from the early fourteenth century. Its great royal refoundations belong to the upheavals after our stopping point; but on the eve of the Reformation there were already boys learning grammar beneath the shadow of the Abbey. Winchester, Eton and Westminster represent different branches of the same tree: episcopal foundation, royal college and monastic school. In each, worship, scholarship, music, memory and corporate life remained intertwined.

The humanists return to the sources

By the fifteenth century, scholars in Italy were recovering Greek with new intensity, hunting manuscripts and refining Latin style. Renaissance humanism was not, at first, a revolt against Christianity. It was a revolt against bad Latin, second-hand learning and the lazy repetition of formulas. Its cry was ad fontes: back to the sources. Read Scripture in its languages; read the Fathers themselves; read Cicero rather than a digest of Cicero. Let the text speak before the commentator closes in.

England received this movement through travellers, scholars and friendships. William Grocyn taught Greek at Oxford. Thomas Linacre combined classical scholarship and medicine. Erasmus moved between countries and households, making Europe itself into a university. Thomas More united legal training, classical wit, public service and devotion. Their humanism did not abolish the medieval liberal arts. It refreshed them by recovering the books for which the arts had been tools.

The great educational monument of this English humanism was St Paul’s School, founded in 1509 by John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s—not Dean of Westminster. Colet entrusted its governance to the Mercers’ Company, endowed free places, and sought the advice of Erasmus. The school was to be Christian and humanist: good letters in the service of good life. Colet disliked barbarous schoolbooks and wanted boys nourished on authors whose language and morals were worth imitating. Erasmus helped with educational texts and shared the conviction that teaching should form judgment rather than merely display the teacher’s learning.

This was a revolution conducted by schoolmasters. Greek entered more firmly into the curriculum; new grammars and printed books multiplied; the studia humanitatis—grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy—gave classical literature renewed immediacy. The printing press made possible a scale of transmission that Alexandria’s librarians could only have dreamt of. Yet the ideal would have been recognisable to Eratosthenes: gather, compare, correct, understand, transmit.

Nor had the body disappeared. The full liberal ideal never concerned a brain floating above a desk. Plato had joined music and gymnastics; Clement had discussed athletics and modesty; monastic life ordered study alongside manual work; English colleges joined classroom, chapel, hall and playing field. The details changed, sometimes radically, but education still meant the formation of a person in a community, under discipline, in the presence of things judged worthy of love.

On the eve of rupture

On the eve of the English Reformation, then, liberal education was already ancient, Christian, international and restlessly renewed. It had passed through Egypt without being merely Egyptian; through Greece without remaining pagan; through the Church without becoming only clerical; through Ireland without becoming insular; through royal courts without becoming merely political; and into schools whose names still carry authority today.

Its history is not a simple relay race in which one runner hands an unchanged baton to the next. Traditions do not travel like sealed parcels. They are translated—and the Latin verb traducere can mean both to lead across and, suggestively, to transplant. At every stage something was selected, lost, recovered, baptised, disputed or reinvented. That is not a defect in the tradition. It is the manner of its life.

What remains constant is a conviction about inheritance. Children arrive in the world as heirs to achievements they did not make: languages, proofs, poems, harmonies, arguments, laws, prayers, paintings and discoveries. They have a right to receive them. But inheritance is not passive possession. The pupil must learn to read, distinguish, remember, question, admire and eventually add something of his own.

In Alexandria, the library tried to gather the world. In the Christian schools, the world was set beneath the Logos. In Ireland, books and disciplines crossed the sea. Under Charlemagne they became an instrument of renewal; under Alfred they learnt to speak English. At Winchester and Eton they were given corporate bodies intended to outlive their founders. With Colet and Erasmus they returned to the sources, sharpened by Greek and multiplied by print.

Then came rupture: reform and dissolution, new foundations and old destructions, confessional battles, scientific revolutions, empire, industry and the modern state. The liberal tradition would survive all of them, though never unchanged. That is another story. For the moment we leave the boys of England at their desks, conjugating Latin verbs while a new world gathers outside the school door.

Ferdi McDermott is Principal of USA Heritage Academy.

Selected sources and further reading

• Plato, Phaedrus 274c–275b; Timaeus 22b–23b.

• Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus and Stromata.

• Patrick, Confessio; Muirchú, Life of Patrick (used cautiously as later tradition).

• Alfred the Great, Preface to the Old English Pastoral Care.

• Winchester College, ‘History of Winchester College’.

• Eton College and Eton College Collections, histories of the 1440 foundation.

• St Paul’s School, ‘History and Archives’ (John Colet and Erasmus).

• Katharine Birbalsingh (ed.), Michaela: The Power of Culture (John Catt, 2020).

• Westminster School, ‘History, Archives and Collections’.

• M. David Litwa, Early Christianity in Alexandria (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

• The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity, ed. Lewis Ayres and H. Clifton Ward (Cambridge University Press, 2023).