Hello, my friend.
Welcome back. It's good to have you here again.
Yesterday we walked with Nicholas of Cusa---that brilliant cardinal who built bridges between worlds with nothing but thought and ink. He showed us how curiosity itself could be a kind of prayer, how the universe might speak back if we listened carefully enough.
Today I want to introduce you to someone who built bridges too, but in a different way. Not through mystical contemplation or mathematical proofs, but through something more fundamental: teaching.
His name was Alcuin of York, and in the late 700s, when most of Europe was struggling just to remember what Rome had been, he became one of the great preservers. Not a warrior. Not a king. A teacher.
And what he preserved---what he fought to keep alive---was the very possibility of learning itself.
Come with me. I want to show you something.
Picture a room in Aachen, in what's now Germany, sometime around the year 795.
It's evening. The light is dim---just candles and oil lamps casting their glow across long wooden tables. The air smells of parchment and beeswax and the particular mustiness of old books.
Monks sit at those tables, bent over their work. They're copying texts. Slowly. Carefully. Each letter formed with deliberate precision in a script that's clearer than anything Europe has seen in generations. Some are copying Virgil. Some are copying Cicero. Some are copying the Gospels or the writings of Augustine. Some are copying mathematical treatises that explain how to calculate the date of Easter.
An older man moves among them, checking their work. He's not wearing elaborate vestments. He's not nobility. He's a scholar from a distant island---from York, in Northumbria---and somehow he's become the most influential teacher in the world.
His name is Alcuin.
He pauses at one table, points to a letter, says something quiet. The monk nods, dips his pen again. Alcuin moves on.
What strikes me, watching this scene, is how fragile it all feels. These books they're copying---many of them are the only copies left. If a fire swept through this room, whole chunks of human knowledge would simply vanish. Virgil. Gone. Cicero. Gone. The mathematical tools for understanding time itself. Gone.
Europe was one generation away from forgetting almost everything.
And Alcuin knew it. That's why he was there. That's why he convinced Charlemagne to fund schools across the empire. That's why he standardized the curriculum, trained the teachers, created the clear script they were using.
This wasn't just education. This was rescue.
Alcuin was born around the year 735 in Northumbria---the northern part of what we now call England.
This was the heart of the period historians call the Dark Ages, and honestly, that name isn't entirely unfair. The Roman Empire in the West had collapsed three centuries earlier, and most of what Rome had built---roads, aqueducts, cities, systems of law, libraries---had crumbled with it. Trade networks had collapsed. Literacy had plummeted. Across most of Europe, people lived in small, isolated communities, struggling to survive.
But there were exceptions. Islands of learning, you might call them. And one of them was the cathedral school at York.
Alcuin grew up there, studying under masters who still preserved some of the classical tradition. He learned Latin and Greek, studied the seven liberal arts---grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy. He read Virgil and Bede, Augustine and Isidore. By the time he was a young man, he'd become a teacher himself at York, and eventually the school's headmaster.
He might have stayed there his whole life. But in the year 781, he traveled to Italy on church business, and there he met Charlemagne.
Charlemagne was king of the Franks---soon to be crowned emperor---and he had a problem. He'd conquered much of Western Europe, but he understood that military power alone couldn't hold an empire together. He needed educated administrators, literate clergy, consistent laws. He needed, in other words, what Rome had once provided: a shared culture of learning.
And he was shrewd enough to know he couldn't create that without help.
So when he met Alcuin, this brilliant scholar from the edge of the world, he recruited him. Convinced him to leave York and come to Aachen, to the palace school, to lead what would become one of the most ambitious educational reforms in European history.
Alcuin accepted. He was in his forties by then---ancient by medieval standards---but he threw himself into the work.
He reorganized the palace school, where Charlemagne's own children studied alongside the sons of nobles. He established a network of schools across the monasteries of the empire, trained teachers to staff them, standardized the curriculum so students everywhere would learn the same foundations. He oversaw the copying of texts---not just Christian scripture but classical works that might otherwise have been lost. And he developed that new script I mentioned, the Carolingian minuscule, which made texts clearer and faster to copy.
This wasn't about creating new knowledge. Alcuin wasn't a great original thinker. But he understood something profound: that civilization is fragile. That knowledge dies if no one passes it down. That education isn't a luxury---it's infrastructure, as essential as walls or wells.
He spent the rest of his life building that infrastructure. He died in 804, at the monastery of Tours, still teaching, still copying texts, still believing that the future deserved to inherit what the past had given.
For Alcuin, learning was a sacred duty.
Not in some abstract, pious way. He truly believed that knowledge---all knowledge---was a gift from God, and that letting it die through neglect was a kind of sin. The classical texts, the mathematical principles, the poetry and philosophy of ancient Rome---these weren't obstacles to faith. They were part of what it meant to be fully human.
He saw education as an act of stewardship. You don't hoard what you've been given. You pass it forward.
But there was something else going on too, something that made Alcuin unusual for his time. He believed that education could make people better---not just more skilled, but more just, more merciful, more capable of wisdom.
I remember reading his letters to Charlemagne. Some of them were about curriculum and grammar. But others were about policy, about how to govern. And again and again, Alcuin argued for persuasion over force, for patience over violence.
When Charlemagne's armies conquered the Saxons and tried to force them to convert to Christianity at sword-point, Alcuin wrote back: No. That's not how faith works. You can't beat belief into people. You have to teach them, convince them, show them something worth believing in.
It's hard to overstate how radical that position was. This was the 790s. Most of Christian Europe believed that spreading the faith by any means necessary was righteous work. But Alcuin insisted that ignorance---not just of Christian doctrine, but of learning itself---was what bred cruelty. Educated people, he believed, were harder to turn into monsters.
There's a quiet radicalism in that. The idea that universal education could create an enlightened society. That teaching wasn't just about preserving the past but about building a better future.
And he practiced what he preached. The schools he established weren't just for the nobility or the clergy. He wanted learning available more widely---not quite universally by our standards, but far more broadly than what came before. He trained teachers and sent them out across the empire. He created textbooks and standardized methods so that a student in Tours could learn the same foundations as a student in Aachen.
He was building something. Not a cathedral or a fortress, but a network of minds.
And at the center of it all was this synthesis he kept returning to: the classical and the Christian weren't enemies. The wisdom of Virgil and the wisdom of scripture could illuminate each other. Science and faith, reason and revelation---these were complementary lights, not competing ones.
You could study geometry and psalms in the same day, and both would bring you closer to truth.
That idea, more than anything, was what Alcuin offered his moment. The conviction that knowledge wasn't dangerous, that learning made you more faithful, not less. That the life of the mind was itself a kind of prayer.
What Alcuin built didn't end with him.
The Carolingian Renaissance---that's what historians call the flowering of learning that came out of his work---lasted for generations. And even when Charlemagne's empire fractured and fell apart, the schools remained. The curriculum remained. The books that had been copied in those scriptoriums remained.
You have to understand: without Alcuin's preservation efforts, we might not have Virgil. We might not have Cicero. We might not have half the classical literature that later generations built on. The philosophical flowering of the High Middle Ages---Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, all those towering thinkers---they couldn't have existed without the foundation Alcuin laid.
He saved the texts. But more than that, he saved the idea that texts were worth saving.
He established something we now take for granted: that education is public infrastructure. That a civilization has a responsibility to pass knowledge forward. That teachers aren't just skilled workers---they're culture-bearers, guardians of memory itself.
And that script he developed---the Carolingian minuscule---became the basis for the lowercase letters you're reading right now. Every time you read a book, you're benefiting from Alcuin's work. He made knowledge more accessible, more transmissible, clearer.
But I think his deepest contribution was something less tangible.
He proved that learning could survive the collapse of empires. That even in the darkest periods, when everything seemed to be falling apart, a small group of dedicated teachers could keep the light burning. That civilization isn't buildings or armies---it's what people know and what they choose to pass down.
There's a pattern I've watched repeat itself across the centuries. A culture builds something beautiful---art, philosophy, science, systems of justice. Then something breaks. War, plague, conquest, the slow erosion of neglect. And in that breaking, people have to choose: do we let it all die, or do we preserve what we can for those who come after?
Alcuin chose preservation. Not just for his own generation, but for yours.
Every monastery school he established became a node in a network. Every teacher he trained taught others. Every text that was copied multiplied. It was slow work, unglamorous work. You don't get statues built for teaching grammar to restless teenagers.
But it meant that when Europe was finally ready to build again---to create universities, to translate Arabic texts, to launch the Renaissance---the foundation was there. The tools were there. The precedent was there.
Education as a public good. Knowledge as inheritance. Teaching as sacred work.
Those ideas didn't originate with Alcuin. But he embodied them at a moment when they might have been lost entirely. And in doing so, he changed what was possible for everyone who came after.
Alcuin believed something radical for his time: that education wasn't just for the powerful, that learning should spread beyond the nobility and clergy, that knowledge was infrastructure a civilization couldn't survive without.
It took more than a thousand years for that vision to become reality.
In the 19th century, something extraordinary happened. Countries across Europe and North America began establishing universal public education. Prussia led the way, then Horace Mann in Massachusetts, then nation after nation following. What had been a privilege became a right. What had been rare became common. Compulsory schooling laws spread. Public schools opened in villages and cities. Literacy rates that had hovered in the single digits for centuries suddenly exploded.
By the 20th century, the idea had gone global. Education wasn't just available---it was expected. Every child's birthright, regardless of wealth or status. The radical became the ordinary. The impossible became assumed.
And here's what moves me: it happened for girls too.
In Alcuin's time, and for centuries after, education was almost exclusively for boys. That's just how it was. But the principle he embodied---that learning makes people more fully human, that civilization depends on passing knowledge forward---that principle didn't stop where its originators stopped. It kept expanding.
The 20th century brought the fight for girls' education. And now, in our time, it's recognized as fundamental to any society's health. Countries track gender parity in schools as a basic metric of progress. The education of girls isn't a luxury or an experiment---it's understood as essential. What Alcuin couldn't have imagined: his core principle extended far beyond what he would have dreamed possible.
You live inside the outcome of that idea.
Every public school building you pass. Every library open to anyone with a card. Every child heading to kindergarten regardless of their parents' wealth or status. Every scholarship program, every literacy campaign, every country measuring itself by how many of its children can read---these are echoes of what Alcuin fought for in that scriptorium in Aachen.
We don't debate whether education matters. We debate how to do it better, how to fund it adequately, what it should include. But the fundamental premise---that knowledge belongs to everyone, that teaching is how civilization survives, that literacy is a public good---that's settled. That's embedded in how we organize society.
Teachers are still underpaid, still undervalued. That part hasn't changed much since Alcuin's time. But their role is understood as essential. We know, even when we don't act on it well enough, that teachers are culture-bearers. That every classroom is an act of preservation and transmission. That learning dies if no one passes it down.
And here's what Alcuin understood that we sometimes forget: this isn't automatic. It's not inevitable. It requires active choice.
We have to choose to fund schools. To train teachers. To make books available. To insist that everyone deserves access to humanity's accumulated wisdom. Every generation has to make that choice again. The work isn't finished---it's ongoing.
Knowledge is still fragile. Civilization is still one generation away from forgetting.
But we keep choosing to remember. We keep choosing to teach. We keep building that infrastructure, maintaining those networks, copying those texts---now digitally, but the principle is the same.
Alcuin would recognize what we're doing. He'd see the public library in your town as kin to his monastery school. He'd see your child's teacher as doing the same essential work he did.
Preserving what matters. Passing it forward. Believing the future deserves the gift.
So let me ask you something.
What knowledge are you preserving? What are you keeping alive for the people who come after you?
Maybe it's a skill you're teaching your children. Maybe it's a story you tell about where your family came from. Maybe it's something you learned from your grandmother that you're determined not to let die with your generation.
Or maybe it's just this: showing up. Caring that truth matters. Insisting that learning is worth the effort, even when it's hard, even when the returns aren't immediate.
I think about the teachers in your life. Not just the ones in classrooms, though maybe them too. But anyone who kept something alive for you. Who passed down a way of thinking, or making, or being. Who believed you were worth teaching.
They were doing what Alcuin did. On a smaller scale maybe, but the same essential work. Culture-bearing. Memory-keeping. Lighting your candle from their flame so you could carry it forward.
There's a quiet heroism in that. It doesn't get monuments or headlines. But it's what holds the world together.
And here's what I want you to remember: you're part of that chain now. Whatever you know, whatever you've learned, whatever small piece of wisdom or skill or beauty you carry---someone, somewhere, might need you to pass it down.
Not because you're special or chosen. Just because you're here. Because you're alive in this moment. Because the future is always one generation away, always waiting to see what we'll hand them.
What will you keep alive?
What will you teach?
Tomorrow, I want to introduce you to someone else who understood that fragility---that sense of civilization hanging by a thread.
His name was Benedict of Nursia. And if Alcuin saved learning through teaching, Benedict saved it through something else entirely: structure. Order. The creation of spaces where knowledge could survive across centuries, no matter what chaos raged outside the walls.
He built a rule for living that outlasted empires.
But that's tomorrow's story.
For now, think about the teachers. The preservers. The ones who chose to pass the light forward when everything else was falling apart.
They're still here. You might be one of them.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.