The Making of the Late Antique Mind

Abstract

The relationship with the classical past, a core element of formal education in any period of Graeco-Roman civilization, is the topic of the final chapter. As the engagement with cultural achievements of the past was key to late antique schooling, reflection on education gave birth to a characteristic sense of temporality, an awareness of the very lateness of late antiquity. The chapter focuses on four writers who articulated this new consciousness: the rhetorical teacher Himerius, the preacher John Chrysostom, Augustine as a letter writer, and Cassiodorus as a monastic educationalist. These authors conceptualized educational practices as a vehicle for self-positioning vis-à-vis temporality. Learning, especially reading practices, was seen by them as correlating with historical consciousness. By this move, learning was reinterpreted as a historical and reconstructive enquiry: while engaging with works of previous centuries, learners were supposed to acquire a sense of temporality and determine their standpoint with regard to intellectual history. Studying the classics produced the times in which the classical authors were writing as a distinct period in time, different from the times in which the late antique readers lived. This handling of the past was characteristic of a postclassical mentality.