Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture by Peter Gemeinhardt

What has education to do with dependency? In a famous letter, Jerome (d. 419) narrates that, in a dream vision, he was called before Christ and accused of still using ”pagan“ education: ”You are not a Christian but a Ciceronian!“ Why hadn’t Jerome got rid of this heritage? The lecture approaches Christianity and classical (grammatical, rhetorical, philosophical) education from a praxeological point of view: while theologians claimed that Christianity should not use such education, Christian life depended on practices of reading, writing, and speaking. Was such dependency on previous tradition and practice of tradition really inevitable? Did Christianity not get rid of paideia, or did it consciously put it to good use? Struggling with such
dependency contributed to a thorough transformation of classical education and enabled Christianity to survive the dramatic changes of its surrounding world.