“Nothing is more essential to government, nothing more helpful in leading a moral life, than the beauty of wisdom, the praise of learning and the advantages of scholarship.” – Alcuin of York (735-804 AD)
Let’s meet Alcuin of York. He was a big fan of Proverbs. And he has shaped your life.
Alcuin was the designer of many educational reforms across Europe in the 700s. He was a clever guy and good at admin. He put those skills to use to inspire a school system that influenced many people.
York was already a fancy place of learning before Alcuin was born. Rather than students just learning about the Bible (obviously a good thing), they had an ethos of learning just for learning’s sake. Whatever they learnt, they used it to see God’s word and his world more clearly. Alcuin went to school in a place like that.
Not everyone thrives at school, but Alcuin did. And he became passionate about his Christian faith.
He became a teacher at the school and took trips across Europe collecting the best books. The library at York became the pride of England, with big sections of theology and secular works. When his mentor moved on, he became head of the school, which was probably the best school in the world at the time, in his late twenties or early thirties.
What has Alcuin’s career got to do with the Bible and my old school?
York adopted way of doing education known as ‘wisdom-theology’.
It goes right back to Proverbs:
The Lord founded the earth by wisdom
and established the heavens by understanding.
By his knowledge the watery depths broke open,
and the clouds dripped with dew.
(Proverbs 3:19-20)
God made the world by his wisdom, understanding, and knowledge.
That means the world isn’t random or chaotic. It’s rational.
By God’s grace, by growing in wisdom ourselves, we can discover how God has made the world.
When we learn about how he made the world to work, we see insights into God’s wisdom.
In practice, this means that learning about God’s world in itself can be an act of worship.
Whether that’s the motion of planets, the rules of logic, harmonies in music, or mathematical equations.
This wasn’t really new. It was a rediscovery of a very old way of approaching God’s world. If you’ve got Google handy, you could find examples of it the six centuries before Alcuin came along. Throughout history, God’s people have always valued secular learning as way to learn God’s wisdom.
What did Alcuin do with this?
In the centuries before Alcuin, education in the Roman world had become something for the elites.
Alcuin’s influence and learning caught the eye of the king, Charlemagne.
Alcuin became Charlemagne’s advisor, sort of like an ancient version of a Minister for Education. Alcuin personally taught the king Latin, Greek and other subjects (but apparently the king was more like a university student today thinking that putting books by his bed would mean he would read them without actually reading them).
Charlemagne began laying down laws to recover ‘the studies of the liberal arts’ in 786.
In 789, the kind famously put in place legislation so that ‘children of servile condition’ and ‘the sons of free men’ could learn together, particularly how to read. Apparently, the king himself would turn up to schools to review students’ letters and poems. We have a report from one of those visits where he found that the children of lower rank outdid the nobles “with all the savours of wisdom, more than anyone could have hoped for.” The king also rebuked some of the children of nobility for their laziness in education.
Alcuin himself was an advocate for people to first learn Latin, Logic, Rhetoric, and then Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. After that, students could move on to History, Natural History (Physical Sciences), and Theology. At that time, church leaders were expected to master these subjects before moving on to studying theology and pastoral practice. They learnt from a wide range of authors who weren’t Christians, and could quote their work on a whim!
He regularly rooted his passion for these subjects in passages from the Book of Proverbs.
How much has this shaped your life? If you open up Microsoft Word and begin typing, I bet the font is ‘Times New Roman’. That is based on a handwriting style he demanded from students and scholars.
Back to Proverbs
Anyone might agree that these are great educational reforms, and I’m personally glad that Microsoft doesn’t default to Comic Sans when I write on Word.
To Alcuin, this only made sense because of Proverbs.
If the God of the Bible is not God, then we unravel any reason to want to study the world. If the Greek gods were real, then who could predict how these emotionally-flippant superpowered beings might decide to run the world each day. If there is no God, then the world was no made with any understanding, because there was no mind before the world began.
But it makes sense that we can know the way the world works only if it was made by a God who is wisdom himself and is unchanging.
The Lord founded the earth by wisdom
and established the heavens by understanding.
By his knowledge the watery depths broke open,
and the clouds dripped with dew.
(Proverbs 3:19-20)
This blog post has been inspired by John Dickson’s book Bullies and Saints: An honest look at the good and evil of Christian history.
