In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo about their article “Universities: Truth, Reason, or Emotion?” from Telos 200 (Fall 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 200 are available for purchase in our online store.
Universities: Truth, Reason, or Emotion?
Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo
There are a number of ways of considering the current crisis in Western universities and, in particular, their problems with ideas and practices about truth and truthfulness. One is to see it as a problem created by what is often termed “modernity,” which is to say the issues raised and the processes set in motion by the Enlightenment and the various reactions to it in the West. Going down this road invariably means invoking modern thinkers, ranging from Nietzsche to Weber to Foucault, all of whom provide considerable insight into the way in which certain ideas in the West have worked out and brought us to where we are today.
Late Antiquity and the Birth of Higher Education
Our contention is that there is a much longer story involved if we are to understand the contemporary university, a story going back to the ancient world with the emergence of both a totalizing philosophy in the shape of Neoplatonism and a set of schools that educated those who would become the administrative elite of the Roman Empire. Such a conjuncture of developments could not occur until the Roman Empire became more structured and bureaucratic as Diocletian created a new order after fifty years of chaos and disorder. This article will argue that this coming together of bureaucracy, a hyperrational form of philosophy, and hyperemotionalism crucially shaped the intellectual and educational experience of the West. It helped to create a “cultural patterning” that still shapes the intellectual experience of those educated in the West. What is missing or tends to be downgraded and placed in the background is what we term piety, a relationship to the world based on immediate experience, reverence, moderation, and toleration.
The empire of Diocletian (284–305) not only inaugurated a new imperial ideology, eminently theocratic and supported by new social and economic structures, but also witnessed the subordination of culture and of the schools to the imperial court and bureaucracy. Education became an increasingly important instrument of control and coercion in the hands of the state. This is exemplified by a speech entitled Pro Instaurandis Scholis (For the Restoration of the Schools) delivered in 298 AD at Autun by the pagan rhetorician Eumenius. The emperor Constantius Clorus had appointed Eumenius as head of a school in Gaul that would have produced officials for the imperial bureaucracy. The Gallic rhetorician was a member of the imperial bureaucracy himself and firmly believed that the support from the imperial exchequer would have brought about the revival, if not the renewal, of pagan culture. Although Eumenius’s statements were merely aspirational and never translated into a concrete program of action,[1] what is interesting in this speech, however, is on one side the claim that the state should provide financial support to the schools and on the other that the letters are the foundation of all virtues as they are “teachers of moderation, of the spirit of discipline, of diligence and patience,” since once these have been acquired in youth, they enable individuals to fulfill their public duties in life.[2] Such statements clearly demonstrate how the attempt to salvage pagan culture from the spread and penetration of Christianity led to the subordination of pagan schools to the power of the emperor and his bureaucracy. This would explain why emperors from Constantine onward were able to promulgate ordinances banning certain teachings or schools on the grounds that they failed to conform to current values and ideals and controlling the appointment of heads of rhetorical schools. The development would explain also how Constantine was able to interfere in Christian disputes and determine what constituted orthodoxy and what did not.
The emperor Julian attempted to reverse the Christianization of the Roman Empire, inaugurated by Constantine and continued by his son Constantius. One of his primary measures was the Rescript on Christian Teachers, promulgated in 362 AD, by which he sought to ban Christians teaching traditional pagan texts in the schools. Julian’s action should be understood within the context of an incipient imperial control of education as a means for cultural renewal. In the rescript Julian states:
I hold that a proper education results, not in laboriously acquired symmetry of phrases and language, but in a healthy condition of mind, I mean a mind that has understanding and true opinions about things good and evil, honourable and base. Therefore, when a man thinks one thing and teaches his pupils another, in my opinion he fails to educate exactly in proportion as he fails to be an honest man. . . . Now all who profess to teach anything whatever ought to be men of upright character, and ought not to harbour in their souls opinions irreconcilable with what they publicly profess; and, above all, I believe it is necessary that those who associate with the young and teach them rhetoric should be of upright character; for they expound the writings of the ancients, whether they be rhetoricians or grammarians, and still more if they are sophists.[3]
There are two aspects of this measure that are interesting. The first, mentioned earlier, is that Julian was able to issue the rescript because of the increasing bureaucratization of the empire. The second is that he would want to do this in the first place. By the middle of the third century, in fact, Christians and non-Christians shared a common education based on rhetorical and grammatical instruction that was founded on traditional Greek texts, including Homer and Hesiod. The problem, however, was how the contents of such education should be understood. Julian viewed the relationship between Christianity and pagan Hellenistic religiosity as being between two, not necessarily incompatible, universalist systems of which only one could be truly universalist, and this had to be the Hellenistic religion because it could encompass Christianity within it. He believed that Christianity was a particular and local manifestation of universal religion in a similar way to Judaism, hence his reference to Christians as “Galileans,”[4] a geographically circumscribed group whose ideas lacked the necessary universal foundations and appeal for it to be valid at any time and in any place
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1. Eumenius, Pro Instaurandis Scholis, in XII Panegyrici Latini, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).
2. Ibid., § 8.
3. Julian, Rescript on Christian Teachers, in The Works of the Emperor Julian, vol. 3, Letters. Epigrams. Against the Galilaeans. Fragments, trans. Wilmer C. Wright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1923), pp. 117–19.
4. Ibid.
