Chapter 13
§ 227. The system of National Education founded its first stage on the substantial basis of the family-spirit; its second stage on the division of the nation by means of division of labor which it makes permanent in castes; its third stage presents the free opposition of the laity and clergy; in its next phase it makes war, immortality, and trade, by turns, its end; thirdly, it posits beauty, patriotic youth, and the immediateness of individuality, as the essence of mankind, and at last dissolves the unity of nationality in the consciousness that all nations are really one since they are all human beings. In the intermixture of races in the Roman world arises the conception of the human race, the _genus humanum_. Education had become eclectic: the Roman legions levelled the national distinctions. In the wavering of all objective morality, the necessity of self-education in order to the formation of character appeared ever more and more clearly; but the conception, which lay at the foundation, was always, nevertheless, that of Roman, Greek, or German education. But in the midst of these nations another system had striven for development, and this did not base itself on the natural connection of nationality, but made this, for the first time, only a secondary thing, and made the direct relation of man to God its chief idea. In this system God himself is the teacher. He manifests to man His will as law, to which he must unconditionally conform for no other reason than that He is the Lord, and man His servant, who can have no other will than His. The obedience of man is therefore, in this system, abstract until through experience he gradually attains to the knowledge that the will of God has in it the very essence of his own will. Descent, Talent, Events, Work, Beauty, Courage,--all these are indifferent things compared with the subjection of the human to the divine will. To be well-pleasing to God is almost the same as belief in Him. Without this identity, what is natural in national descent is of no value. According to its form of manifestation, Judaism is below the Greek spirit. It is not beautiful, but rather grotesque. But in its essence, as the religion of the contradiction between the idea and its existence, it goes beyond nature, which it perceives to be established by an absolute, conscious, and reasonable Will; while the Greek concealed from himself only mythically his dependence on nature, on his mother-earth. The Jews have been preserved in the midst of all other culture by the elastic power of the thought of God as One who was free from the control of nature. The Jews have a patriotism in common with the Romans. The Maccabees, for example, were not inferior to the Romans in greatness.
--Abraham is the genuine Jew because he is the genuinely faithful man. He does not hesitate to obey the horrible and inhuman command of his God. Circumcision was made the token of the national unity, but the nation may assimilate members to itself from other nations through this rite. The condition always lies in belief in a spiritual relation to which the relation of nationality is secondary. The Jewish nation makes proselytes, and these are widely different from the _Socii_ of the Romans or the _Metoeci_ of the Athenians.--
§ 228. To the man who knows Nature to be the work of a single, incomparable, rational Creator, she loses independence. He is negatively freed from her control, and sees in her only an absolute means. As opposed to the fanciful sensuous intuitions of Ethnicism, this seems to be a backward step, but for the emancipation of man it is a progress. He no longer fears Nature but her Lord, and admires Him so much that prose rises to the dignity of poetry in his telological contemplation. Since man stands over and beyond nature, education is directed to morality as such, and spreads itself out in innumerable limitations, by means of which the distinction of man from nature is expressly asserted as a difference. The ceremonial law appears often arbitrary, but in its prescriptions it gives man the satisfaction of placing himself as will in relation to will. For example, if he is forbidden to eat any specified part of an animal, the ground of this command is not merely natural--it is the will of the Deity. Man learns therefore, in his obedience to such directions, to free himself from his self-will, from his natural desires. This exact outward conformity to subjectivity is the beginning of wisdom, the purification of the will from all individual egotism.
--The rational substance of the Law is found always in the Decalogue. Many of our modern much-admired authors exhibit a superficiality bordering on shallowness when they comment alone on the absurdity of the miracles, and abstract from the profound depth of the moral struggle, and from the practical rationality of the ten commandments.--
§ 229. Education in this theocratical system is on one side patriarchal. The Family is very prominent, because it is considered to be a great happiness for the individual to belong from his very earliest life to the company of those who believe in the true God. On its other side it is hierarchical, as its ceremonial law develops a special office, which is to see that obedience is paid to its multifarious regulations. And, because these are often perfectly arbitrary, Education must, above all, practise the memory in learning them all, so that they may always be remembered. The Jewish monotheism shares this necessity with the superstition of ethnicism.
§ 230. But the technique proper of the mechanism is not the most important pedagogical element of the theocracy. We find this in its historical significance, since its history throughout has a pedagogical character. For the people of God show us always, in their changing intercourse with their God, a progress from the external to the internal, from the lower to the higher, from the past to the future. Its history, therefore, abounds in situations very interesting in a pedagogical point of view, and in characters which are eternal models.
§ 231. (1) The will of God as the absolute authority is at first to them, as law, external. But soon God adds to the command to obedience, on one hand, the inducement of a promise of material prosperity, and on the other hand the threat of material punishment. The fulfilment of the law is also encouraged by reflection on the profit which it brings. But, since these motives are all external, they rise finally into the insight that the law is to be fulfilled, not on their account, but because it is the will of the Lord; not alone because it is conducive to our happiness, but also because it is in itself holy, and written in our hearts: in other words, man proceeds from the abstract legality, through the reflection of eudæmonism, to the internality of moral sentiment--the course of all education.
--This last stand-point is especially represented in the excellent Gnomic of Jesus Sirach--a book so rich in pedagogical insight, which paints with master-strokes the relations of husband and wife, parents and children, master and servants, friend and friend, enemy and enemy, and the dignity of labor as well as the necessity of its division. This priceless book forms a side-piece from the theocratic stand-point to the _Republic_ of Plato and his laws on ethical government.--
§ 232. (2) The progress from the lower to the higher appeared in the conquering of the natural individuality. Man, as the servant of Jehovah, must have no will of his own; but selfish naturalness arrayed itself so much the more vigorously against the abstract "Thou shalt," allowed itself to descend into an abstraction from the Law, and often reached the most unbridled extravagance. But since the Law in inexorable might always remained the same, always persistent, in distinction from the inequalities of the deed of man, it forced him to come back to it, and to conform himself to its demands. Thus he learned criticism, thus he rose from naturalness into spirit. This progress is at the same time a progress from necessity to freedom, because criticism always gradually opens a way for man into insight, so that he finds the will of God to be the truth of his own self-determination. Because God is one and absolute, there arises the expectation that His Will will become the basis for the will of all nations and men. The criticism of the understanding must recognize a contradiction in the fact that the will of the true God is the law of only one nation; feared by other nations, moreover, by reason of their very worship of God as a gloomy mystery, and detested as _odium generis humani_. And thus is developed the thought that the isolation of the believers will come to an end as soon as the other nations recognize their faith as the true one, and are received into it. Thus here, out of the deepest penetration of the soul into itself, as among the Romans out of the fusion of nations, we see appear the idea of the human race.
§ 233. (3) The progress from the past to the future unfolded the ideal servant of God who fulfils all the Law, and so blots out the empirical contradiction that the "Thou shalt" of the Law attains no adequate actuality. This Prince of Peace, who shall gather all nations under his banner, can therefore have no other thing predicated of him than Holiness. He is not beautiful as the Greeks represented their ideal, not brave and practical as was the venerated _Virtus_ of the Romans; he does not place an infinite value on his individuality as the German does: but he is represented as insignificant in appearance, as patient, as humble, as he who, in order to reconcile the world, takes upon himself the infirmities and disgrace of all others. The ethnical nations have only a lost Paradise behind them; the Jews have one also before them. From this belief in the Messiah who is to come, from the certainty which they have of conquering with him, from the power of esteeming all things of small importance in view of such a future, springs the indestructible nature of the Jews. They ignore the fact that Christianity is the necessary result of their own history. As the nation that is to be (_des Seinsollens_), they are merely a historical nation, the nation among nations, whose education--whenever the Jew has not changed and corrupted its nature through modern culture--is still always patriarchal, hierarchal, and mnemonic.
THIRD DIVISION.
THE SYSTEM OF HUMANITARIAN EDUCATION
§ 234. The systems of national and theocratic education came to the same result, though by different ways, and this result is the conception of a human race in the unity of which the distinctions of different nations find their Truth. But with them this result is only a conception, being a thing external to their actuality. They arrive at the painting of an ideal of the way in which the Messiah shall come. But these ideals exist only in the mind, and the actual condition of the people sometimes does not correspond to them at all, and sometimes only very relatively. The idea of spirit had in these presuppositions the possibility of its concrete actualization; one individual man must become conscious of the universality and necessity of the will as being the very essence of his own freedom, so that all heteronomy should be cancelled in the autonomy of spirit. Natural individuality appearing as national determinateness was still acknowledged, but was deprived of its abstract isolation. The divine authority of the truth of the individual will is to be recognized, but at the same time freed from its estrangement towards itself. While Christ was a Jew and obedient to the divine Law, he knew himself as the universal man who determines himself to his own destiny; and while only distinguishing God, as subject, from himself, yet holds fast to the unity of man and God. The system of humanitarian education began to unfold from this principle, which no longer accords the highest place to the natural unity of national individuality, nor to the abstract obedience of the command of God, but to that freedom of the soul which knows itself to be absolute necessity. Christ is not a mere ideal of the thought, but is known as a living member of actual history, whose life, sufferings and death for freedom form the security as to its absolute justification and truth. The æsthetic, philosophical, and political ideal are all found in the universal nature of the Christian ideal, on which account no one of them appears one-sided in the life of Christ. The principle of Human Freedom excludes neither art, nor science, nor political feeling.
§ 235. In its conception of man the humanitarian education includes both the national divisions and the subjection of all men to the divine law, but it will no longer endure that one should grow into an isolating exclusiveness, and another into a despotism which includes in it somewhat of the accidental. But this principle of humanity and human nature took root so slowly that its presuppositions were repeated within itself and were really conquered in this reproduction. These stages of culture were the Greek, the Roman, and the Protestant churches, and education was metamorphosed to suit the formation of each of these.
--For the sake of brevity we would wish to close with these general definitions; the unfolding of their details is intimately bound up with the history of politics and of civilization. We shall be contented if we give correctly the general whole.--
§ 236. Within education we can distinguish three epochs: the monkish, the chivalric, and that education which is to fit one for civil life. Each of these endeavored to express all that belonged to humanity as such; but it was only after the recognition of the moral nature of the Family, of Labor, of Culture, and of the conscious equal title of all men to their rights, that this became really possible.
I. _The Epoch of Monkish Education._
§ 237. The Greek Church seized the Christian principle still abstractly as deliverance from the world, and therefore, in the education proceeding from it, it arrived only at the negative form, positing the universality of the individual man as the renunciation of self. In the dogmatism of its teaching, as well as in the ascetic severity of its practical conduct, it was a reproduction of the theocratic principle. But when this had assumed the form of national centralization, the Greek Church dispensed with this, and, as far as regards its form, it returned again to the quietism of the Orient.
§ 238. The monkish education is in general identical in all religions, in that, through the egotism of its way of living and the stoicism of its way of thinking, through the separation of its external existence and the mechanism of a thoughtless subjection to a general rule as well as to the special command of superiors, it fosters a spiritual and bodily dulness. The Christian monachism, therefore, as the fulfilment of monachism in general, is at the same time its absolute dissolution, because, in its merely abstracting itself from the world instead of affirmatively conquering it, it contradicts the very principle of Christianity.
§ 239. We must notice as the fundamental error of this whole system, that it does not in free individuality seek to produce the ideal of divine-humanity, but to copy in external reproduction its historical manifestation. Each human being must individually offer up as sacrifice his own individuality. Each biography has its Bethlehem, its Tabor, and its Golgotha.
§ 240. Monachism looks upon freedom from one's self and from the world which Christianity demands only as an abstract renunciation of self, which it seeks to compass, like Buddhism, by the vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, which must be taken by each individual for all time.
--This rejection of property, of marriage, and of self-will, is at the same time the negation of work, of the family, and of responsibility for one's actions. In order to avoid the danger of avarice and covetousness, of sensuality and of nepotism, of error and of guilt, monachism seizes the convenient way of abstract severance from all the objective world without being able fully to carry out this negation. Monkish Pedagogics must, in consequence, be very particular about an external separation of their disciples from the world, so as to make the work of abstraction from the world easier and more decided. It therefore builds cloisters in the solitude of deserts, in the depth of forests, on the summits of mountains, and surrounds them with high walls having no apertures; and then, so as to carry the isolation of the individual to its farthest possible extreme it constructs, within these cloisters, cells, in imitation of the ancient hermits--a seclusion the immediate consequence of which is the most limitless and most paltry curiosity.--
§ 241. Theoretically the monkish Pedagogics seeks, by means of the greatest possible silence, to place the soul in a state of spiritual immobility, which at last, through the want of all variety of thought, goes over into entire apathy, and antipathy towards all intellectual culture. The principal feature of the practical culture consists in the misapprehension that one should ignore Nature, instead of morally freeing himself from her control. As she, again and again asserts herself, the monkish discipline proceeds to misuse her, and strives through fasting, through sleeplessness, through voluntary self-inflicted pain and martyrdom, not only to subdue the wantonness of the flesh, but to destroy the love of life till it shall become a positive loathing of existence. In and for itself the object of the monkish vow--property, the family, and will--is not immoral. The vow is, on this account, very easy to violate. In order to prevent all temptation to this, monkish Pedagogics invents a system of supervision, partly open, partly secret, which deprives one of all freedom of action, all freshness of thinking and of willing, and all poetry of feeling, by means of the perpetual shadow of spies and informers. The monks are well versed in all police-arts, and the regular succession of the hierarchy spurs them on always to distinguish themselves in them.
§ 242. The gloomy breath of this education penetrated all the relations of the Byzantine State. Even the education of the emperor was infected by it; and in the strife for freedom waged by the modern Greeks against the Turks, the _Igumeni_ of the cloisters were the real leaders of the insurrection. The independence of individuality, as opposed to monkish abstraction, more or less degenerates into the crude form of soldier and pirate life. And thus it happened that this principle was not left to appear merely as an exception, but to be built up positively into humanity; and this the German world, under the guidance of the Roman Church, undertook to accomplish.
II. _The Epoch of Chivalric Education._
§ 243. The Romish Church negated the abstract substantiality of the Greeks through the practical aim which she in her sanctity in works founded, and by means of which she raised up German individuality to the idealism of chivalry, i.e. a free military service in behalf of Christendom.
§ 244. It is evident that the system of monkish education was taken up into this epoch as one of its elements, being modified to conform to it: e.g. the Benedictines were accustomed to labor in agriculture and in the transcribing of books, and this contradicted the idea of monachism, since that in and for itself tends to an absolute forgetfulness of the world and a perfect absence of all activity in the individual. The begging orders were public preachers, and made popular the idea of love and unselfish devotion to others. They labored toward self-education, especially by means of the ideal of the life of Christ; e.g. in Tauler's classical book on the Imitation of Jesus, and in the work of Thomas-à-Kempis which resembles it. Through a fixed contemplative communion with the conception of the Christ who suffered and died for Love, they sought to find content in divine rest and self-abandonment.
§ 245. German chivalry sprang from Feudalism. The education of those pledged to military duty had become confined to practice in the use of arms. The education of the chivalric vassals pursued the same course, refining it gradually through the influence of court society and through poetry, which devoted itself either to the relating of graceful tales which were really works of art, or to the glorification of woman. Girls were brought up without especial care. The boy until he was seven years old remained in the hands of women; then he became a lad (a young gentleman), and learned the manner of offensive and defensive warfare, on foot and on horseback; between his sixteenth and eighteenth year, through a formal ceremony (the laying on of the sword), he was duly authorized to bear arms. But whatever besides this he might wish to learn was left to his own caprice.
§ 246. In contradistinction to the monkish education, Chivalry placed an infinite value on individuality, and this it expressed in its extreme sensibility to the feeling of honor. Education, on this account, endeavored to foster this reflection of the self upon itself by means of the social isolation in which it placed knighthood. The knight did not delight himself with common possessions, but he sought for him who had been wronged, since with him he could find enjoyment as a conqueror. He did not live in simple marriage, but strove for the piquant pleasure of making the wife of another the lady of his heart, and this often led to moral and physical infidelity. And, finally, the knight did not obey alone the general laws of knightly honor, but he strove, besides, to discover for himself strange things, which he should undertake with his sword, in defiance of all criticism, simply because it pleased his caprice so to do. He _sought adventures_.
§ 247. The reaction against the innumerable number of fantastic extravagancies arising from chivalry was the idea of the spiritual chivalry which was to unite the cloister and the town, abstract self-denial and military life, separation from the world and the sovereignty of the world--an undeniable advance, but an untenable synthesis which could not prevent the dissolution of chivalry--this chivalry, which, as the rule of the stronger, induced for a long time the destruction of all regular culture founded on principles, and brought a period of absence of all education. In this perversion of chivalry to a grand vagabondism, and even to robbery, noble souls often rushed into ridiculous excesses. This decline of chivalry found its truth in Citizenship, whose education, however, did not, like the [Greek: polis] and the _civitas_ of the ancients, limit itself to itself, but, through the presence of the principle of Christianity, accepted the whole circle of humanity as the aim of its culture.
III. _The Epoch of Education fitting one for Civil Life._
§ 248. The idea of the State had gradually worked itself up to a higher plane with trade and industry, and found in Protestantism its spiritual confirmation. Protestantism, as the self assurance of the individual that he was directly related to God without any dependence on the mediation of any man, rose to the truth in the autonomy of the soul, and began out of the abstract phantasmagoria of monachism and chivalry to develope Christianity, as the principle of humanitarian education, into concrete actuality. The cities were not merely, in comparison with the clergy and the nobility, the "third estate"; but the citizen who himself managed his commonwealth, and defended its interests with arms, developed into the citizen of a state which absorbed the clergy and nobility, and the state-citizen found his ultimate ideal in pure Humanity as cognized through reason.