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The Emergence of Religious Education

This chapter deals with an innovation in ancient culture: the concept of religious education. Christian thinkers sought to develop an emphatically religious education in critical engagement with classical ideals of learning. Key authors of the fourth and fifth centuries tried to define a genuinely Christian way of intellectual and moral upbringing: the Greeks Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom, and the Romans Augustine and John Cassian. Focusing on education as process, they considered formative techniques and activities rather than the specific subjects to be studied. The four ecclesiastical authors not only reoriented paideia by tying it to Christian doctrine and morality but redefined every educational act as an inherently religious practice, comparable to a religious ritual. Education was thus conceptualized as a totalizing demonstration of religious identity leaving no space for independent secular learning. This idea distinguished Christian educational conceptualizations from pagan ones, despite shared elements in other areas. It is because of this fundamental reinterpretation of paideia that we can speak of the emergence of ‘religious education’ in the strong sense.