the rhetorical barrier erected between faith and rational discourse by advocates
of liberal learning since the Enlightenment. These august latter-day guardians
of purity, facing one another from opposite ramparts, include such venerables
as Edward Gibbon, David Hume, and, in his 1809 decision to separate the
study of theology from the other humanities disciplines at Berlin, Wilhelm
von Humboldt.^2 They have still more strident successors. Nor should we
dismiss their tactical moves (perhaps on either side) as entirely misinformed
concerning biblical counsel in the matter—the ancient voices were echoing
St Paul in his still more extreme warning to the Corinthian Greeks about both
syncretism and idolatry:‘What has Christ to do with Belial?’(2 Cor. 6:11–15).
Our modern separationists think of biblical piety as the contaminant. In
either case, the separation is highly artificial.When,forexample,wepeer
into the layers of papyrus book fragments composing the papier mâché
cartonnage of a second-century Egyptian mummy mask, we do notfind
thescrapsfromdiscardsofthelibrariesatAlexandriaorelsewherealong
the Nile represent only classical Greek and Coptic documentary texts; we
find already Christian texts, notably biblical texts among these‘recycled’
library discards.
The monastic library at St Catherine’s in Sinai, and even more dramatically,
manuscripts in all Western Europe, reveal that there was a living tradition of
learning in Christendom which studied and preserved many a classical Greek
and Roman text alongside Scripture commentaries and theological treatises. It
is not at all certain that we could have, in other circumstances, counted on
pagan libraries to have preserved Christian texts.
The exclusivism of our own time, however motivated, has not well reckoned
with the cosmopolitan balance of early and medieval Christian textual study,
and certainly not with the character and method of the biblical influence on
humanities education in Western intellectual history. I want to suggest here
that the rich tradition of liberal learning in the West has in fact remained at
the most fundamental levels more biblical than classical, despite a contem-
porary academic bias towards wishing it otherwise, and that this fact has
been very good for the preservation and advancement of classical literary
studies.Iwantalsotosuggestthatitisafirst-order obligation of liberal
arts programmes which lay persuasive claim to their heritage to treat the
actual textual and literary foundationwith utmost seriousness in curriculum
and research.
In intellectual history ironies and contradictions are the norm. To take not
the least example: what we know of many classical as well as pre-Christian
(^2) See the discussion by Stephen Prickett,Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of
the Bible(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xiv; 180ff.; andWords and the Word:
Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986),
passim.
162 David Lyle Jeffrey