Abstract
The period in which Willmann was active as a philosopher and educator was still under the deep influence of the Enlightenment. Education was no exception.
The exponents of the Enlightenment disdained the Middle Ages, looked on the thoughts of the time as 'ancilla theologiae', and proclaimed themselves as the givers of illuminating new light. Cutting, thus, the historical continuity, they abandoned the precious moral and spiritual heritage of the past. They made man and his subjective reasoning the highest norm of all judgments. In promising man's intellectual liberation and development, they fell into a quagmire of self-delusion, opening the way to individualism, subjectivism, naturalism, relativism, secularism and materialism, etc.
Otto Willmann devoted his whole life as philosopher and educator to fight against the world-view of the Enlightenment, i.e. present Nominalism and its influence on educational ideologies. Starting from the individualistic education of Herbert and tracing backwards up the stream of history, Willmann reached on the opposite side of the Enlightenment, namely the heights of the Greco-Christian idealistic world-view and educational Ethos. The Greco-Christian Idealism is not like German subjectivistic idealism seen in Kant, Fichte, Schilling and Hegel. This Idealism is the Idealism of Logos founded and developed by Plato, Aristoteles, St. Augustinus and St. Thomas Aquinus. The Greco-Christian Idealism according to Willmann possess the eternal creative life and substance (teaching of everlasting values (μεγιστον μαθημα, unum necessarium)) and leads man toward eternal God. Therefore, it is 'philosophia perennis' and 'paedagogia perennis'.
