ABSTRACT
Christian character formation is indebted to both the Classical and the Hebrew traditions. The Greek idea of paideia was the foundation of Christian culture, but as people have argued Christianity also engaged with Jewish literature in the period of primitive Christianity from the 1st to 4th centuries. The first medieval philosopher to put forward a serious challenge to Augustine’s characterisation of virtues as gifts of divine grace was Peter Abelard. The discussion of virtuous character became a key theme in Christian ethics during the medieval period. Medieval schools were created to satisfy the needs of ecclesiastical recruitment, and these schools were largely in cities. The curriculum of the Middle Ages was a direct inheritance of the classical tradition even though there was an interruption between the ancient and medieval school. The ethics of early Christianity consisted of a loose amalgam of Jewish, Platonism, Stoicism, and popular tradition, and it is this background which the early medieval period inherits.
