It’s often claimed Medieval Christians invented the university. But this is as false as the similar claim that they invented the hospital. In both cases the underlying claim is used to sell a “Christianity saved the world” narrative in the halls of revisionist history that deserves a little debunking. Here I will adapt material from my book Science Education in the Early Roman Empire, which in turn is adapted from a chapter in my Columbia University dissertation, and which expands considerably on many other points about the education system in the ancient world and its relationship to Christian Medieval and early modern educational ideals. So if you like what you see here, you might want to get and read my book in its entirety. Citations and bibliography for everything to follow are to be found there (except where I reference a source here).

The Analogy

Consider the analogy I just suggested. Hospitals, even the scientific kind empirically designed for the purpose and function of serving the sick, had already been invented by the Greeks and Romans. Whereas what Medieval historians call hospitals were actually more like religious hospices, which were already ubiquitous across the ancient world even before the rise of the scientific hospital.

Temples of healing were everywhere, like monastery hospices primarily staffed by holy people but often also attended by one or more local medical scientists, sometimes even serving in city-funded positions (most cities had state funded or subsidized medical staff under the Roman Empire). Proper hospitals, the kind principally in the care of medical scientists and designed according to the latest scientific knowledge, were primarily for military and government citizens and their slaves, but this was not different in practice from the Medieval situation, where most of the sick only had religious hospice care available at best, and real medical hospitals came late (in fact mostly only during the course of the Scientific Revolution) or were rare (as for example the singular institution in Constantinople), and only the privileged had easy access to them. Real medical hospitals of this kind were also developed and spread by Muslims, evolving on the Greco-Roman model, well before Western Christians adopted the idea.

So there isn’t any real sense in which Christians “invented” the hospital. They didn’t expand their presence either. When they began building Christian hospices in the 4th century and after, these were displacing or replacing their pagan counterparts, not necessarily adding to them. In fact, hospice capacity almost certainly declined with the catastrophic declines in populations and wealth in the West and comparable more gradual decline in the East. Nor did the Christians make hospitals cheaper. You might have noticed there is no such thing as a free Christian hospital today. And though in the Middle Ages the poor might often be charitably accommodated, fees scaled to means, or the local government even fund a hospital for the community, all of this was just as much the case in the Roman Empire.

Similarly, Christians didn’t “invent” the university. They had just gradually improvised a version of what already came before. They didn’t make a college education any better either, or any cheaper or more widely available. Rather, the only novel features of the Medieval university as a concept is a trivial matter of its administrative organization, having evolved from student and teacher unions into teacher-controlled corporations, and the consequent formalization of awarding degrees certifying completion, to replace letters of reference from one’s tutors (a further development, of universities becoming research centers, didn’t happen until well after the Middle Ages and was effectively a consequence of the Scientific Revolution).

Otherwise there is no practical difference between Medieval and ancient universities, and indeed ancient universities were superior in educational content until the 17th century, when again the Scientific Revolution had already been effecting changes throughout Europe. Christians today, however, will play a semantic game with the word “university,” just as they do with the word “hospital” (conflating scientific hospitals with religious hospices, for example), and thus mean by the word just the trivialities of their new administrative structures and procedures (which development had nothing to do with Christianity anyway), and then act like Christians introduced the entire institution.

This is the error I am correcting today. If by “university” you mean simply a school with a campus, a library, and endowed professorships in multiple subjects of advanced study attended by students in common, the ancients already had that. If instead all you mean is one of those that also is run like a centralized corporation and awards diplomas, you can credit the former addition to Christians and the latter to Muslims (an idea which Christians then borrowed), but neither was an addition in any way inspired by Islam or Christianity itself, so religion can’t plausibly get any credit for that anyway. And if instead what you are concerned about is the quality and availability of a college education, neither of those additions is relevant.

The Ancient Education “System”

Though in Roman times there were no formal names for different stages of education as there are today, it’s not unreasonable to apply familiar terms by analogy. The ancient system can be broken down into primary, secondary, higher, and advanced education—although these divisions were not clearly made at the time, we can see something like them in practice.

• Ancient primary or “elementary” education under a “teacher” usually began at or soon after the age of seven, continued into the pre-teens, and involved only the imparting of literacy and simple numeracy (basic counting and arithmetic).
• Ancient secondary education (perhaps closer to what Americans would call “middle school”), under a higher-paid “grammarian,” typically occupied the early teens and always involved more advanced grammar and basic literary studies.
• And that period also included—for some who chose to undertake a more complete course of education and had the time and money for it—geometrical and other studies under a separate teacher (in particular music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy). Which was closer to what we would now call “high school” or “college prep.”

Notably, apart from specialized study in law, theology, or medicine, Medieval “universities” barely taught more than what the ancient equivalent of such “high school” students were already being taught.

Ancient higher education, the nearest analog to a “college” education, frequently began in the mid to late teens and usually consisted of an education in declamation and debate, in other words, “oratory” or “rhetoric.” Which included advanced grammar, logic, composition and literary studies. It was possible to skip rhetoric and begin a philosophical education instead, so in a sense philosophy was another form of higher education (a choice loosely analogous to the modern university distinction between studying the humanities or the sciences), but it was common to complete some degree of rhetorical education before switching to philosophy, and many philosophy professors included training in rhetoric in their curriculum.

Either way, a study of philosophy had to be chosen out of a student’s own interest (or his parents’ or patron’s insistence), and the reality is that most students who continued into higher education completed or undertook only rhetoric. After that, advanced education marks the ancient equivalent of a “graduate degree,” which in antiquity took the form of a professional education in medicine, engineering (which included mechanics, architecture, and astronomy), or some other academic specialty—law being the field most commonly chosen (even more so than today).

The Usual Causal Hypothesis

The argument is sometimes framed as “universities caused the Scientific Revolution; Christians caused universities; ergo Christianity caused the Scientific Revolution.” But this is incoherent. Universities gave scientists the education they would then indeed use to change the entire way we do science. But universities played no direct role in the Scientific Revolution. They weren’t research centers, and no discovery we credit to the Scientific Revolution occurred in a university.

In fact, universities at that time tended to be highly conservative and resistant to the new innovative methods and ideals of scientists that led to that Revolution. Universities were still teaching Aristotle when the likes of Gilbert and Galileo were reading more advanced ancient scientists who had already proved Aristotle obsolete. Universities were still prohibiting doctors from performing dissections or surgeries or mixing their own medicines (such manual labor being “beneath” the dignity of the elite and relegated to “lower class” butchers and apothecaries) when the likes of Harvey and Vesalius were trying to tear that nonsense down and return medicine to its ancient empirical, hands-on past.

Any attempt to attribute the ‘lack’ of a scientific revolution in antiquity to an apparent absence of value for science in the prevalent educational system must find a more relevant comparison. And for that, historians of the Scientific Revolution need to know how widely scientific subjects were actually taught in primary and secondary education before the 17th century. Studies of medieval university curricula do not apply to that question, since few among the population of the time would ever have advanced so far, if they received any education at all.

So if medieval primary and secondary education did not significantly differ in subject material from their ancient counterparts, or in the numbers thus educated, the question then becomes whether and to what extent late medieval higher education differed from ancient higher education in these respects. And it is not likely to come out well by comparison. The actual science content of medieval universities was very limited and circumscribed, consisting almost entirely of a limited survey of Aristotle (already scientifically obsolete even in the early Roman era) and (for medical students) Hippocrates and Galen, and the methods taught were predominantly not empirical.

In any school there was typically only one mathematics professor (who was not even an engineer and rarely even a productive astronomer) for every dozen or so professors of medicine (none of whom taught any hands-on dissection, apothecary, or experimental methods). Improvements in these respects only began in the 16th century, and thus again were more a product than a cause of a then-ongoing Scientific Revolution. As I already noted, universities did not conduct or promote new research, and to the end of the 17th century no actual scientific discovery was ever made in a university.

What we take for granted now in educational aims and standards is in fact largely a product of the mid-20th century, when the nuclear and space programs launched science and engineering as pervasive nationalist concerns. And though in America a slow and limited development toward increasing science content in primary and secondary schools had begun in the late 18th century, that’s again well after the Scientific Revolution—and even then it was only in the later 19th century that any science content could be called typical in American schools.

Indeed, even in England, often credited with driving the Scientific Revolution as we know it, as late as the dawn of WWII:

The British government and educational systems treated applied mathematics and statistics as largely irrelevant to practical problems. Well-to-do boys in English boarding schools learned Greek and Latin but not science and engineering, which were associated with low-class trades.

Which description would just as well fit schools in the United States before the American Revolution. It’s unlikely we’ll find it to have been much different in the Middle Ages. Or after. A rising craze for mathematics in the 16th and 17th centuries is often noted, for example, but standing back and looking at European society as a whole, this appears only to have occurred in rarified circles, just as in antiquity. The only difference is that far more sources have survived from the later period, creating only an illusion of more interest and activity.

Though a more focused analysis of the actual facts of medieval education is still needed, the other half of this comparison I provide in my book: what was the Roman educational system really like in these regards? In Science Education I cover this all in detail, every level of the education system, including even education through popular culture—how, for instance, knowledge came to be disseminated, sometimes even to the illiterate, through public show lectures, intellectual salons, parents and peers, even jury duty; as well as public libraries and inscriptions, which though directed at the literate, even the illiterate could absorb some information from, through patrons and peers who could read for them, and ideas and knowledge subsequently spread through word of mouth. Here I’ll just skip right to higher education: the ancient equivalent of college.

The Comparison

Of course, the ancient educational system emphasized the humanities (rhetoric, logic, literature); but so did the ancient medieval system—theology having replaced philosophy, and law being simply a continuation of rhetoric just as in antiquity; and both eras had their medical schools. In antiquity all significant science education really took place at the “college” or “college prep” level, either in schools of philosophy, which only a minority of students at this level attended, or under the tutelage of actual scientists, which was available to fewer still. But this was exactly the same in the Middle Ages.

In the Roman period those who decided to pursue practical or academic careers in philosophy, medicine, astrology, or engineering, rather than focusing all their energies on a generic rhetorical education, would come away with a far more impressive science education than anyone else in the Roman empire or anyone at all in the Middle Ages, even if only in varying degrees, and again only for the few.

Of course this differs considerably from today, since the Scientific Revolution has transformed our educational values. Now science is a major pursuit in colleges and universities, and has become a fundamental element of all school curricula even at the elementary level and especially at the secondary level and beyond. Thus scientific knowledge, and what was in antiquity advanced mathematics (not just geometry, but also algebra, combinatorics, and trigonometry), is today a major educational value, exactly the opposite of antiquity, where literacy and oratory and the skills related to reading, composition and argument represented the primary educational values, and most preparation for higher education consisted of the mastery of fundamentals related to those pursuits, leaving science as an ancillary or specialized interest even at the highest levels. But very much the same could be said of the Middle Ages. So the two eras did not differ in any notable way on these measures, except the quality of science education available to a Roman who undertook it was superior.

Likewise, it’s not yet clear whether the number of persons exposed to a university education in the High Middle Ages or even the early Renaissance was substantially greater than the number of persons exposed to an education in philosophy or the sciences in antiquity. Mere attendance alone would be an insufficient measure anyway, since the actual science content of medieval university curricula was very limited and circumscribed. In fact, if we are only talking about a standard university education, then medieval science content did not go much beyond what the ancients were already teaching at the “high school” or “college prep” level to teens (the so-called “encyclical” education, of higher maths and astronomy).

Thus medieval higher education should not be compared with ancient higher education alone, but ancient higher and encyclical education together. In antiquity, a student could not typically gain the tutelage of a professor of philosophy, rhetoric, medicine, or engineering without demonstrating they had completed that encyclical curriculum (usually by examination; or through a letter of reference from their tutors, the ancient equivalent of a diploma).

Ancient philosophy schools likewise contained far more discussion and quality of content in the sciences than medieval theology schools; while ancient law schools, no less than their medieval counterparts. Ancient medical schools, meanwhile, were far superior to their medieval counterparts. And there is no evidence the Middle Ages even had engineering schools for the training of mechanics, architects, and astronomers, who generally had to work under an apprentice instead, after little to no preparation in colleges. There might have been such schools in the East, under the Byzantine empire, but they would have declined with that empire, and there is no evidence of any superiority to their ancient predecessors. And at the same time, in both eras, rhetoric and law remained far more popular pursuits at the “college” level than philosophy or science.

Thus, in ancient higher education science was still a major educational value in the sense of being part of the “ideal” education and an actual pursuit of the more ambitious or talented students. It was “not” a major educational value only in the sense of not being a routine or universal component of the ancient equivalent of ‘going to college’. Nevertheless, as just noted, any comparison with medieval higher education will not be so straightforward, as what medieval universites taught to grant a ‘bachelor’s degree’ was essentially the encyclical or “college prep” curriculum in antiquity, which was then studied in parallel to grammar school, and thus prior to what we mean here by higher education.

Antiquity thus allowed two different scholastic tracks: a fast track from grammar school straight to oratory, argument, literature, and law, and a more rounded track that was directly equivalent to what one learned as an undergraduate at a medieval university. Assessing the relative numbers of students in either track as compared with college students in the Middle Ages has not been convincingly done and thus no argument can proceed from an assumption of any difference. There may easily have been many more well-rounded orators in antiquity than in even the High Middle Ages, leaving no fewer students exposed to the sciences; likewise, when we include students who pursued philosophy or the sciences instead of or in addition to rhetoric and law.

It seems unlikely that ancient standards for the education of philosophers and scientists that I document in Science Education continued in the Middle Ages, which oversaw a broad decline of scientific knowledge, and the gradual elimination of even the idea of a philosophy school. Cathedral schools and private teaching went on, but whether they could claim comparable science content is doubtful. Even with the rise of the universities near the end of the High Middle Ages, it’s hard to see even their science curriculum as comparable, much less surpassing, what ancient Roman philosophers and scientists had access to, as I demonstrate by comparison in my sequel, containing the rest of my Columbia dissertation, The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, where I show what level of science was actually reached, and how it declined in the Middle Ages.

Ancient “Universities”

In Greco-Roman times, whole cities operated as de facto universities. A student could walk about the campus of a city to attend lectures by many diverse experts in various classrooms throughout the day, in subjects ranging from philosophy and science to logic and the humanities. One could audit lectures in all the schools of philosophy, and in medical and engineering schools; some for a fee, some for free. And there were well-stocked public libraries one could walk to and consult for research and study (enterprising students would also have access to the private libraries of patrons or of their professors on retainer). Educationally, the practical effect is hardly any different from just “attending university.”

Nevertheless, soon the Romans started linking these institutions, establishing endowed professorships in various subjects with specifically associated school libraries; these included medical schools, law schools, and some form of schools of engineering, as well as schools for each major philosophical sect, whose professors were likewise starting to be state-appointed or state-subsidized.

Vespasian appears to be the first to have established actual imperial professorships, but only of rhetoric, in both Greek and Latin. This reflects again the primacy of literary education in ancient culture (represented by completion of the so-called trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic), over support for education in the so-called quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, music theory, and astronomy, all of which were nevertheless taught in any major city), or natural philosophy, or specific sciences, which nevertheless did still have their own schools here and there.

There were even endowments, by some emperors and municipalities, of philosophy professorships in some prestigious (or pretentious) cities, and imperial, municipal, and perhaps sometimes private support for “Museums,” which were not ‘museums’ in the modern sense where collections are displayed, but ‘Halls of the Muses’, i.e. temples to the goddesses of the arts and sciences. Well before the Roman period these had become quasi-religious social clubs for scholars. Although ancient Museums did often display statues of men renowned for their achievements in the arts, and sometimes other antiquities besides (such as paintings, treasures, and probably some scientific specimens and instruments), and were often associated with libraries. Most included lecture halls and communal dining rooms where ‘members’ ate for free. Since they were essentially the pagan equivalent of specialized churches, they had the same legal and social status as sacred ground. By the third century, Philostratus could specifically identify a museum as a place where distinguished men who gain membership can socialize and eat free meals together, much like the upperclass ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ of the 19th century.

The most famous of these was the Museum of Alexandria. Previously established and maintained by the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt, the Alexandrian Museum received continued support from the Roman government and the city of Alexandria. Strabo says under the Romans its president was appointed by the emperor. There were also Museums in other cities, such as Ephesus, Pergamum, Smyrna, Tarsus and of course Athens. Some of these appear to have had an even stronger emphasis on medical science than the Museum at Alexandria. Alexandria’s medical faculty had always been and remained preeminent, but its Museum must still have included in its membership engineers and astronomers, as well as scholars in other fields, as it certainly had done for centuries. The membership of the Athenian Museum, likewise, included philosophers and orators, if not other professionals as well. So it would be unbelievable that Ptolemy and Hero, the greatest known writers in the physical sciences in the Roman period, would both have resided and worked in Alexandria without being associated with the Museum.

Philosophy professorships might also have been associated with the Alexandrian Museum. A certain Anatolius (whether at that time or later, a Christian) was “appointed to the school of Aristotle’s successors in Alexandria by its citizens” in the third century A.D., a school that provided free meals and other “privileges” to its members (which possibly included a municipal salary or stipend in exchange for teaching). And this was the most scientific of sects. It’s hard to imagine it was not connected with the Museum in some respect, as it would have been at Athens. Other sects may have been similarly represented. For example, an inscription of the same century as Anatolius honors a certain Flavius Dionysodorus, “member” of the Alexandrian Museum, as a “Platonic philosopher,” which could mean he held the chair of its Platonism department, just as Anatolius likely did of the Aristotelian (on the same model as Athens, which I’ll discuss shortly). Even from a much later date, a papyrus of the sixth century supports this inference by mentioning that a certain Asclepiades “worked all his life in the Museum” in “the great city of Alexander” as “a teacher of philosophy.”

Unfortunately the whole source situation for the Alexandrian Museum is surprisingly poor, especially for the Roman period, although we know from extant inscriptions and papyri that this museum and its famous library still thrived. Outside Alexandria, we are told Marcus Aurelius endowed “professors at Athens in every educational field with an annual salary” in the later second century (most likely in 176 A.D.), and we know a little about what exactly this involved. This endowment paid handsome salaries for a professor (or perhaps even more than one) from each of the four leading philosophical sects (Platonists, Stoics, Epicureans, and Aristotelians), as well as professors of rhetoric.

Hadrian had accomplished something similar in Rome with his building and endowment of the Athenaeum. Built shortly after 134 A.D., the Athenaeum at Rome supplied professors in various subjects—though details are sketchy, it was likely similar to what Aurelius established at Athens. As these setups at Athens and Rome included libraries and lecture halls as well as several chaired professorships, these really should be considered the first Western universities. A similar setup in Roman Alexandria is almost certain, especially if the Alexandrian chair of Aristotelian philosophy awarded to Anatolius was a part of the Museum and its Library, as one would expect to be the case, and we might infer the same of Dionysodorus and Asclepiades. It’s hard to believe Athens would have preceded Alexandria in receiving such a benefaction as endowed chairs for every major sect, so we should expect that this act by Aurelius extended to Athens a system already standardized in Alexandria.

And such a development at Athens was probably not ex nihilo, as all these schools with appointed professors already existed as private institutions that were to some extent regulated by the government. For example, in an inscription of 121 A.D. emperor Hadrian establishes, at the request of Trajan’s widow (the wife of his predecessor and adoptive father) an allowance that non-citizens may be appointed head of the Epicurean school at Athens. That the post had ever been limited to Roman citizens in the first place entails Roman state involvement from an even earlier time.

The other sects likewise already had established schools and professorships in Athens as well. So really Aurelius only added more centralized state organization and financing to what we should really call a loosely organized private university. The same had surely happened in Alexandria long before (in that case, before the Romans even acquired the city).

Although we have no definite evidence, Athens, Rome, and Alexandria might not have been alone in receiving these benefactions and institutions. But by the second century these three cities appear to have had the full practical equivalent of universities. Those early universities may have had only a limited effect on science education, as in those respective cities there were already numerous experts and philosophers to study under, and there might not have been many other cities who enjoyed such benefactions, even as a result of local or municipal philanthropy, much less imperial. But their significance should not be overlooked.

Conclusion

All in all, state and public support for education in the early Roman period was not as extensive as that seen in nations after the Scientific Revolution, but in many respects greater than any seen throughout most of the Middle Ages or in any other culture (other than the Hellenistic culture that originally influenced the Romans, and perhaps the Byzantine culture after them). This included the first steps toward what were effectively universities, with all the components in place—public research libraries, lecture halls, and endowed or subsidized professorships in philosophy, literature, law, and the sciences—just lacking centralized administrations.

Likewise, although state supported education did not aim at improving access to science education, it would have indirectly done so to some degree, especially in state support of Museums, which provided more direct support for associations of scholars and scientists, and in the endowment of professorships in philosophy and medicine, or the extending of privileges to them. Medieval state and public support for education is not likely to compare as well, until the rise of their universities, yet even those were small and few in number for quite some time and thus, at least until the Renaissance, might not have surpassed what had already been available in the early Roman empire.

Indeed, given that the content of Medieval university curricula was sub-par relative to the advanced knowledge imparted at the highest levels of education under the Romans—which had moved well beyond Aristotle in every field (including logic, biology, physics, astronomy, climatology, and beyond)—it’s hard to maintain the Medieval universities were any better, and thus were at all necessary to the subsequent stages of human progress. Ancient universities would have worked just fine and just as easily fueled a Scientific Revolution, had Christendom not lost interest in scientific progress for a thousand years.