ABSTRACT
Interest in a specifically Christian form of education became manifest in the fourth century, appearing in a number of places and in a variety of doctrines, although at no time in that century was secular instruction viewed as an essential function of the church. Basil was born of Christian parents in that important centre of literary and Christian culture of Asia Minor, Caesarea in Cappadocia. In Basil’s essay appears a slight encounter with another issue that was to become prominent: the Christian’s concern with the aesthetic quality of human experience. Basil was aware that man lives emotively and appetitively as well as morally and intellectually, that the environment yields satisfactions of an aesthetic nature, and, even further, that aesthetic satisfactions are produced at all levels, emotional, moral and intellectual. Jerome’s attitudes to education, derived from the ascetic ideal, suffuse all of his general writings.
