Humanism
Sophists (Isocrates)  - Ciceronian Humanism - Patristic Humanism
Grammarians - Rhetoricians
vs.
Dialecticians (Socrates), Logicians (Aristotle) - Scholasticism
Schoolmen - Moderni

In his essay, "An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America," McLuhan attempts to untangle the origins of a philosophic controversy in America between the Ciceronian humanists, like Robert Hutchins, and the pragmatists, like John Dewey and William James (bold emphasis is mine):

Behind this contrast in basic postulates between Hutchins and his opponents there is a long history. What makes the explanation of the conflict rather difficult is the fact that while the position of Hutchins is recognizably that of Isocrates and Cicero, the position of men like Dewy is not like that of Plato and Aristotle. Nevertheless, I think it can be shown that Dewey and the experimentalists are lineally descended from Plato and Aristotle via William of Ockham and Peter Ramus. My explanation of the modern quarrel is in terms of the old quarrel between the grammarians and rhetoricians on the one hand and the dialecticians on the other hand. It is the quarrel begun by Socrates against the Sophists, from whose ranks he came. However, the Church Fathers, notably St. Jerome and St. Augustine, made Ciceronian humanism basic training for the exegetist of Scripture. Patristic humanism subordinated dialectics to grammar and rhetoric until this same quarrel broke out afresh in the twelfth century when Peter Abelard set up dialectics as the supreme method in theological discussion. Abelard's party was opposed by the great Ciceronian humanist John of Salisbury, whose Metalogicus, as the name implies, was aimed against the logicians, who were called the Schoolmen, or moderni.

(To avoid confusion with modern usage it might be helpful to explain that the etymology of 'grammar' is the Greek word gramma, which means simply 'letter' or 'writing.' I.e., the Greeks did not separate the technique of writing or oration from content. The two activities were inseparable: to write or speak was to think.)

The Ciceronian concept of doctus orator and of eloquence as a kind of wisdom, as knowledge in action, became the basic charter for medieval education thanks to Augustine. But Augustine, an eminent professor of rhetoric, did not deliver this Ciceronian charter to the middle ages as a speech program for pulpit oratory. As Marrou states the matter in his great study, "la culture chretienne, augustinienne, emprunte moins a la technique du rheteur qu'a celle du grammairien." In a word, ancient grammatica and philologia were encyclopedic, linguistically oriented programs which Augustine took over for the Doctrina Christiana. It was not so much preaching as it was the understanding and expounding of the sacra pagina for which Augustine co-oped the word grammatica. And just a Hajnal has shown how mere writing and the preaching of grammar could be completely one with pronunciatio or oratorical delivery, so Marrou shows how it could happen that ancient grammatica became the basis the study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. [The Gutenberg Galaxy]

And, as McLuhan points out in a quote from Beryl Smalley's "Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages," the collective wisdom of the ages was preeminently Biblical:

"Teachers in the Middle Ages regarded the Bible as a school book par excellence. The little clerk learned his letters from the Psalter, and the Bible would be used to teach him the liberal arts. Hence Bible study is linked with the history of  institutions from the very beginning." [The Gutenberg Galaxy]

McLuhan traces the cultural schism back to the Hellenistic world and the Sophists:

It is unfair to suppose that the Sophists were merely cynical power and money gluttons. They claimed also to teach the means to wisdom; for wisdom, as well as eloquence, was thought by them, as by Cicero, to be the by-product of erudition. It was this claim which most annoyed Plato and against which he directs his dialectical refutations in the Gorgias and elsewhere. But Plato and Aristotle were far from successful in severing rhetoric from wisdom. Isocrates proved a most formidable exponent of the doctrine that eloquence and wisdom are one, and he compelled Plato and Aristotle to make practical compromises. [An Ancient Quarrel In Modern America]

Or as John Keats echoed it several centuries later, "Truth is beauty, beauty truth." In verbal discourse, wisdom is constitutionally (or naturally) eloquent, i.e. truth and eloquence are two words for the same thing. Cicero's emphasis on an encyclopedic education provided the foundation for a kind of operational wisdom, i.e. applied wisdom for the existential here and now.

For the Ciceronian program of education, as outlined in the De Oratore of Cicero (and no less in the Courtier of Castiglione), looks primarily to man in his social and political aspect. In fifth-century Greece this had been the aim of the Sophists, whose work we know through the hostile medium of Plato. Cicero received it via the great Stoic tradition, and having consolidated and exemplified it, provided the Church Fathers with their charter of Christian education which held the field undisputedly until the time of Anselm and Abelard in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. (It is only recently that Gilson has shown that until the twelfth century the tradition of classical humanism is unbroken, unabridged, and unchallenged in the Church.) Scholastic theology was the anomalous innovation, not the characteristic mode of Christian theology. [The Southern Tradition]

Quoting still another classic scholar (S. F. Bonner) in a Gutenberg Galaxy article, McLuhan describes the origins of scholasticism during the Roman principate, and its revival in the twelfth century under the 'schoolmen' or 'moderni.'


The rise of the schoolmen or Moderni in the twelfth century made a sharp break with the ancients of traditional Christian scholarship

We have seen how Marrou had shown that, thanks to Augustine, Bible study incorporated the ancient egkuklios paideia or encyclopedic program of grammatica and rhetorica as it reached definition at the hands of Cicero. Thus it was scriptural exegesis that ensured the continuity of classical humanism in the monastic schools from Augustine to Erasmus. But the rise of the universities in the twelfth century constituted a radical break with the classical tradition. The program of the new universities was much centred in dialectica or scholastic method which had had a heyday at Rome as we read in S. F. Bonner's Roman Declamation (p. 43):

Under the Republic, oratory had been essential for success in public life, and the whole subject was alive and keenly debated; but under the principate it had lost much of its political value. It was not so much that the courts had lost a great deal of their power; there were still civil and criminal cases to attract the advocate. It was rather the lack of assured success in public life, which the good orator in Republican days could naturally expect. Under the principate, so much depended upon Imperial and Court patronage; and it became necessary to choose one's words rather too carefully when speaking in public for the practice to be a popular one. Writing under Tiberius (if not Caligula) the elder Seneca could look back upon the Augustan Age as a time when there was 'so much liberty of speech'; but even then that freedom which the author of the Dialogues and the philosopher in Longinus consider so essential for good oratory, was fast disappearing from Roman public life.

And so oratory betook itself to the safer arena of the schools, where a man might air his Republicanism without fear of consequences, and where one might be recompensed for the loss of political prestige by the plaudits of one's fellow-citizens. The term scholastica came into vogue—a 'school-oration' as opposed to the genuine public speech, and the exponents of these display-speeches became known as 'schoolmen'—scholastici.

The break between political oratory and scholastic or academic disputation, then, took place long before the Middle Ages. [The Gutenberg Galaxy]