§ 1. From the fifth to the seventh year Aristotle wishes them to be spectators of the arts which they are to embrace. You will understand this in such a way that they nevertheless retain the exercises of a more tender age and are moved by some care for serious things. The things to be learned pertain partly to the mind, partly to external things. To the mind belongs the study of the virtues and liberal arts; to external things, exercises in all the arts which they call βαναυσικάς, mechanical. The duties of all these are necessary to the state, and I must treat of them in this place.
§ 2. As for the studies of piety and the virtues, these were treated at length in the second and first books, for this is the greatest and proper good of the human being. All arts, however despised, serve virtue, and all are made freeborn and liberal by so honorable a servitude. For such is the force of virtue that it makes servitude a kingdom, since to serve God is to reign. Behold PAUL the Apostle, the chosen vessel, teacher of kings and of the world, descending from the third heaven and sewing tents from skins, so that he may offer the Gospel without expense, so that those hands may supply nourishment, lest he burden the churches, lest he give occasion to slanderers, as though he sought not the salvation of peoples but his own advantage.
But piety and virtue have been discussed before. The state must take especial care that the worship of God flourish. Formerly this was difficult, when the gilded Capitol glittered and demons poured forth oracles from every temple. Now a people flooding to the churches and cities poured forth into piety commend piety to all and in a certain manner extort it. Let a prince be ashamed, in the midst of the Christian world, to take little or no account of piety when he reads that the trophies of the cross have been erected throughout the Indies, that barbarous peoples, devourers of human flesh, having put aside ferocity, suffer martyrdom and are inserted into heaven; that Cambayans, Japanese, and Chinese come from the east, Ethiopians from the south, Brazilians, Mexicans, and Floridians from the west, and sit with Christ in the kingdom of God, while the sons of the kingdom, whose ancestral possession is religion, are cast into outer darkness. Matthew 8.
§ 3. The cause of so great an evil is the neglected education of the tender age. Frost burns tender trees and the first shoots of leaves; youth is easily corrupted unless raised up by sacred teaching. Let the infant be taught the most holy faith and morals from tender years. Let the tender infant pray at his father’s table, and let the trembling little girl babble the laborious words of the creed. Let the entire affection of the parents be joined to the half-sounding words of their children. Let the sweet utterances of divinity be inscribed upon those pure tablets, stained by no uncleanness and gleaming from the spiritual laver.
Let them recognize their Father in heaven; let them learn that this mortal life is a road to the heavenly life; let them understand that they are candidates for the eternal kingdom. Let them dread vices more than specters and demons, and let them not be ignorant that they contend daily for life. Jerome, whom I cited, explains these things, Epistle 7: “Let her immediately learn what other grandmother and what aunt she has; for what Emperor and what army the little recruit is being nourished; let her long for them and threaten you that she will depart to them. Let her very habit and dress teach her to whom she has been promised. Take care not to pierce her ears; do not paint a face consecrated to Christ with white lead and rouge; do not press her neck with gold and pearls; do not load her head with gems; do not redden her hair and thus augur something of the fires of Gehenna for her. Let her have other pearls, by selling which she will afterward purchase the pearl of greatest price. Praetextata, once a most noble woman, at the command of her husband Hymettius, who was the paternal uncle of the virgin Eustochium, altered her habit and adornment and dressed her neglected hair in a worldly manner, desiring to overcome both the virgin’s resolution and the mother’s desire. And behold, that same night she saw in a dream an angel come to her, threatening punishments in a terrible voice and thundering these words: ‘Have you dared to prefer a husband’s command to Christ? Have you dared to handle the head of God’s virgin with your sacrilegious hands? They shall wither even now, so that, tortured, you may understand what you have done; and when the fifth month is ended, you shall be led to hell. But if you persevere in the crime, you shall at the same time be deprived of husband and children.’ All things were fulfilled in order, and a swift death sealed the wretched woman’s late repentance. Thus Christ avenges violators of his temple; thus he defends gems and precious ornaments.”
§ 4. Let every foul thing in images and words be absent. Let anyone who can harm also be absent. The law of the Athenians’ schools for boys was: “Let teachers not open the school before the sun has shone forth, nor close it before the sun has set; and while the boys are in school, let no one who has passed the age of boyhood be permitted to enter unless he is the teacher, the teacher’s son, or the husband of his daughter.
But if anyone enters contrary to that prohibition, let him be punished with death. Let the gymnasiarchs also not permit any one of those who are older to be mingled in sitting with the boys in any manner; but if they admit him and do not drive him from the gymnasium, let the gymnasiarch be guilty of corrupting the freeborn.”
Juvenal indeed rightly consults the chastity of others, but his books should also have been kept from an honorable threshold by the same law. Satire 14:
Let nothing foul to say or see touch these thresholds, Within which there is a boy. Far hence, far hence be the girl Of pimps and the songs of the parasite who revels through the night. The greatest reverence is owed to a boy.
Because what Jerome writes to parents is not dear to very many parents, I write it to the state. Epistle 7. Eli the priest offended God on account of the vices of his children. A man who has luxurious, unsubmissive sons cannot be made a bishop. But conversely it is written of a woman that she will be saved through the generation of children if they continue in faith, charity, sanctification, and chastity. If a perfect age, under its own right, is imputed to parents, how much more a nursing and fragile age, which according to the Lord’s sentence does not know right hand from left—that is, the difference between good and evil? If with solicitude you provide that your daughter not be struck by a viper, why do you not provide with the same care that she not be struck by the hammer of the whole earth, that she not drink from the golden cup of Babylon, that she not go out with Dinah and wish to see the daughters of a foreign region, that she not play with her feet or trail tunics? Poisons are not given unless wrapped in honey, and vices do not deceive except under the appearance and shadow of virtues. “And how,” you will say, “are the sins of fathers not repaid to children, nor those of children to parents, but the soul that has sinned shall itself die?” This is said of those who can understand, concerning whom it is written in the Gospel: “He is of age; let him speak for himself.” But he who is a little child and understands as a little child—until he comes to the years of wisdom and the letter Y of Pythagoras leads him to the fork—both his good and his evil are imputed to his parents.
§ 5. I am reluctant to depart from the best teacher of piety. He says in Epistle 2: “Let the female sex be joined to its own sex. Let her not know—indeed, let her fear—to play with boys. Let her know no immodest word; and if by chance amid the tumult of the household running about she hears something, let her not understand it. Let her regard her mother’s nod in place of words and admonitions, and in place of command. Let her love her as a parent, be subject to her as mistress, fear her as teacher. But when the seventh year has overtaken the little girl, unformed and toothless, and she has begun to blush, to know what she should keep silent, and to hesitate about what she should say, let her learn the Psalter by memory; and until the years of puberty let her make the books of Solomon, the Gospels, the Apostles, and the Prophets the treasure of her heart. Let her not go forth too freely in public, nor always seek the crowds of the churches; let her have all her delights in her chamber. Let her never see young men, never men with curled hair. Let sweetnesses of voice that wound the soul through the ear and the wantonness of girls be repelled; the more freely these approach, the more difficult they are to avoid, and what they have learned they teach in secret, and by the talk of the crowd they violate Danaë though she is enclosed.”
Remarkable is the perversity of human talent: it does not always obey an adviser; the harshness of some is equally obstinate against blandishments, reasons, and threats. No care of instructors and masters could correct Alexander’s deed or Achilles’ drunkenness. Seneca educated Nero in vain, for Nero, offended by his innocence, compelled him to die after falsely accusing him. Heliogabalus closed off the cares of all his masters by his wickedness. How much did David do that Absalom might not turn out wicked? How many excellent parents have obstinate sons? I confess it is so, and that a vicious and savage nature is restrained with great labor and becomes fiercer when it has passed into its own power and independent disposition. Yet education must not for that reason be withdrawn from a good or middling disposition; indeed, not even from the worst and most depraved. While there is life, there is hope of better fruit; and if not all, nevertheless some part of impiety is avoided.
§ 6. What remedy, therefore, is there for hard, malicious, and obstinate dispositions? The Brahmans of India applied a cruel medicine: after inspecting the offspring at two months, if they disapproved its disposition, they either exposed it in the forests or killed it openly. The Lacedaemonians displayed the same savagery in exposing children, for they sent them away to the chasm of Taygetus. It was plainly barbarous, cruel, and indeed foolish, for the course of a future life cannot be gathered from the inclinations of little children. Physiognomy is an investigator of affections, but it must be practiced only by the judgment of the most skilled, whose highest prudence must nevertheless consist in this: that from those traces and promptings of nature they do not pass judgment concerning the will. Natural human appetites which twist minds toward vices are strong in some, milder in others, and present in some degree in all. Education and habit, however, bring it about that serious affections and temptations are resisted; zeal, shame, and before all things divine grace correct corrupted nature.
And indeed many are brought by education not only to civil and tolerable morals but even to remarkable and holy ones. Pericles advanced through familiarity with the Clazomenian. By the instruction of Socrates, Alcibiades, although he did not put aside his enormous vices, nevertheless restrained them a little so that he might not harm his fatherland still more. Philostratus was brought to good conduct by one speech of Polemon. How great were the vices when the Apostles brought in the Gospel? Read Romans 1:28: “And as they did not approve of having God in their knowledge, God delivered them to a reprobate sense, so that they do the things that are not fitting: filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness; full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity; whisperers, detractors, hateful to God, insulting, proud, haughty, inventors of evils, disobedient to parents, foolish, disorderly, without affection, without covenant, without mercy.”
And 1 Corinthians 6:9: “Do you not know that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: neither fornicators, nor servants of idols, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor those who lie with males, nor thieves, nor the avaricious, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers shall possess the kingdom of God. And such indeed you were; but you have been washed, but you have been sanctified, but you have been justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”
Therefore let the state press on and not despair of the success of a work which God especially favors. And it was wisely said by Fabius, book 1, chapter 16: “Whatever can be done is shamefully despaired of.” I do not listen to those voices: “The labor is futile when nature struggles against it.” The human mind comprehends and accomplishes such remarkable and difficult things in the arts, learns so many languages, and through knowledge traverses the entire world. How, therefore, could it not learn good morals, toward which nature has an inclination? Virtue is the proper good of our mind, and nature is capable of its own good.
The work therefore requires the greatest force: let the prince take care that the morals of boys
be formed. They easily learn good things; with the greatest difficulty they unlearn bad ones. Yet I confess that it is difficult to preserve right morals. It is easier to conquer provinces than to guard them after conquest. Victory comes by one assault; it must be preserved by manifold art. But in morals a return is difficult. An evil at its birth must be restrained, otherwise it grows to immense magnitude:
Τὸ πολυχρόνιον ἦθος ἀμήχανον μεταθέσθαι.
A habit of long duration is most difficult to remove. What has become inveterate is more easily dissolved than restored.
Extinguish the flame at its birth, Lest late remedies return after the dangers have grown.
Horse-breakers correct obstinacy, rearing, winking, and jolting in young horses; and will you neglect the vices of youth? Especially when the single vice of a single person can afflict the state with great injury? In sick bodies physicians leave nothing that may harm. You must cure diseases of minds.