for its own sake; texts are memorized and covered with commentaries; refine-
ments become narrow and trivial. We see this in the Christian universities after- Even the surge of new foundations in this period did not breathe fresh
life into learning. The Islamic madrasas were scholastic from the outset; their
expansion brought activity only in the form of piling up supercommentaries
upon traditional texts. The maths of the rival Hindu orders were for the most
part similarly scholarly, sectarian, and dogmatic. In Greco-Roman antiquity,
too, the level of support for formal education does not correlate with the times
of creativity; the municipal schools of 250–500 c.e., with their high salaries
and their representation of the rival philosophies, repeated the traditional
positions in set rhetorical forms. Most of these educational systems centered
on dialectic and debate, but without promoting innovation. The contest itself
became a static form of training and display.
Neither madrasas nor Greek schools were universities in the European
sense. Academic institutions in China came closer to this structure. The impe-
rial university of the Han, and especially its expansion in the T’ang and
subsequent dynasties, had a differentiated faculty and trained for a series of
academic degrees. It was involved in much the same credentialing dynamics
for bureaucratic careers found in medieval Christendom when the universities
prepared students for careers in papal administration. But the prosperous
periods of the university tended to be intellectually the most stagnant. The
height of student population in the Han was the time when Confucianism was
formalized into textual orthodoxy; the huge examination system of the Ming
enforced Neo-Confucianism as an endless set of standard exercises. Similarly,
Buddhist intellectual life was stifled after the late T’ang, when the government
required formal examinations for certificates to become a monk.
The tendency of schools, with their formal curricula and examinations, is
conservative. Yet sometimes the schools are the center of creativity. We see
this when formal schooling was first institutionalized in Athens and in Alex-
andria, and there were later moments of upsurge especially at the latter. In
China, the creative period of Neo-Confucianism was connected to the devel-
opment of private schools and the movement to reform the university and the
official examinations. In Japan, the first three generations of the Neo-Confu-
cian schools were the height of innovation in philosophy, falling off as the
number of schools multiplied in the later Tokugawa. The forming of the
European schools in the 1100s was the milieu of creativity; in the next century
the process of formalization in the university, the piling up of authorities and
proofs known as “scholasticism,” was the vehicle for the higher development
of philosophy. Only in the Islamic madrasas was a creative phase missing; and
even here one can point to al-Ghazali’s sophisticated destruction of philosophy,
formulated at the great government-sponsored madrasa in Baghdad within the
first generation of its foundation.
520 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths