Golden Sapience: The True Nature of Education 5 of 11

It is fascinating to see that all of these renaissance men were born at the perfect time to take advantage of the new opportunities made available by a new world and a new way to distribute knowledge. The Latin works it seems, were infinitely more accessible to the Westerner than any of the virtually unknown Greek manuscripts. The popular  ignorance of Grecian wisdom seems almost farcical when one reads the Latin classics, for the whole of ancient academia revolved around Athens. In fact, every Roman of class or distinction made it their personal mandate to learn Greek for the political, diplomatic, and academic powers invested in the language.14 Furthermore, as Oxford University Press’s blog attests: “In Rome, the wealthy young would learn Greek language, poetry, rhetoric, philosophy from Greek teachers; rhetoricians and philosophers performed. Greek teachers in Rome radically changed Latin prose after Cicero. Students were noisy, often desperately keen; young Seneca pursued a Greek philosopher during his teaching breaks to beg for more philosophy. Eventually Rome instituted public libraries and performance-based literary competitions; in both, as in education, Greek was at least equal to Latin. In their villas outside Rome, Romans could read Greek works with tame (well, tameish) Greeks to explain and discuss; they made their libraries atmospheric, with inspiring busts of authors, mostly Greek.”15

The great scholars of the early renaissance were veracious in their pursuit of decaying scroll fragments, obscure scribbles, enlightened manuscripts, chips of clay tablets, temple walls, and every other place man has used to record his ideas. At first they discovered the Latin classics, which were the more available, and thus they found “sapia” or sapience. As the Greek writings began to be discovered however, they found an ancienter form of the word: “Σοφία” or “Sophia” in Latin characters. While sophia is not used to mean wisdom in English today, it is used as a popular feminine name and it is the root word for both philosophy and sophistry. Both were opposing schools of thought in Greece and they would both claimed to be wise. Aristophanes in his play “The Clouds” claimed that they dealt in right and wrong logic16 or that philosophy taught truth and sophistry the appearance of truth. The seeker of wisdom, sapience, and sophia will always be imitating God and is made of gold, but while one man seeks truth, the other seeks only the raiment of truth. Do we learn in order to get the recognition of men or do we learn in order to have God recognize us as His and of Him?

Education is the refinement of the sapience required to become like God and it can be geared to deliver the respective bronze, silver, and gold qualities. Despite the clarity of this statement, very few realize this truth and fewer can act on it. The Romans of late antiquity dissolved into barbarism. The majority of the Americas, Africa, and Australia have spent the prior three millenniums in a bronzed stupor. For the last forty years schools and universities have only created silver plated professionals without producing any true visionaries. Ninety percent of the golden men that do come along turn out to be evil conspirers.

History is littered with those who preferred to live basely and no moonless night can hide their mis-achievements. From the beginning of humanity’s career we can see indolent peoples live and die without learning or doing anything and all we have left for an inheritance is trash and bones. We can see warlike peoples sacrifice their wealth and kin into the fires of battle. We can see the bones of the dead, eternally locked in the act of their last abomination before they died. We can see bloated kingdoms full of the ruins of bloated kings who dissipated the wealth of their people on pointless public monuments. We can see once great civilizations suddenly go feral and crumple. All are dark images, I know, but I write these thing only to show the gravity of our dualistic position, but be not afraid for no starless sky can hide the glories of noble men. We can see the industry of hard working people built as ancient tools and clay granaries. We can see the tombs of old men who were well beloved by their peoples. We can see the bones of noble men cut down while nobly defending their home from invasion. We can see prosperous countries thrive as their cultural influence exponentially expanded. We still have the same countries on the earth that have existed for eons. The earth will not hide the light of what we do and what we learn. The land plainly testifies who were noble and just and who were just not worth the 1130 cubic centimeters17 of space inside their skulls.

¹⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_Roman_Empire#Greek

¹⁵ http://blog.oup.com/2013/11/greek-and-roman-literary-influence/

¹⁶ The Clouds, Aristophanes 

¹⁷ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size