8
Scripture in theStudium and
the Rise of the Humanities
David Lyle Jeffrey
Almost everyone knows this riddle:‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’^1
Not so many have a good answer. Tertullian’s famous question has both been
quoted and repeated, often so as to characterize the early Christians as
philistine, suspicious of art and academic learning. There is a similar passage
in St Jerome’s letter to Estochium (Epist.22.29–30), and every student of later
antiquity is familiar with it; it relates the troubled dream of this great fourth-
century scholar in which‘the Judge of all’accuses him of being not a Christian
but a Ciceronian—conveying thus a remembered guilt which Jerome, in this
instance for pedagogical purposes, confesses. Near the headwaters of Anglo-
Saxon literature we hear the theme again, adapted now by Alcuin, likewise a
formidable scholar, admonishing with authority the monks of Lindisfarne:
‘Quid Hineldus cum Christo?’—‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’(Epist.
169). Though the alien attraction which concerns Alcuin is Anglo-Saxon
pagan epic and for Tertullian and Jerome the literary legacy of Greece and
pre-Christian Rome, the point is evidently the same.Caveat lector!, all three
seem to say: a grave risk of theological adultery attends upon dalliance with
pagan authors. It is as if they reiterate the epistle of Paul to say that the true
philosopher of Christ will keep himself pure and unspotted from the world,
and certainly‘teach no other doctrine’(1 Tim. 1:3–4).
Typical modern citations of these famous injunctions continue to implicate
much of Christianity in a certain dour abstemiousness where the liberal arts
are concerned. They seem to indicate a desire to separate, even cordon off,
humanistic learning from what are sometimes taken to be more‘appropriate’
spiritual preoccupations. In such a characterization the wall of separation
constructed for early and medieval Christianity can seem almost as steep as
(^1) Tertullian,De praescriptione haereticorum18; cf.De spectaculis4, 26, and 30.