Antonine University

The monastery in Lebanon has always been a school. For centuries, Lebanon has owed to the Church in general and monasteries, particularly its cultural and educational development, its didactic art, and its spiritual, literary, and artistic heritage.
The Church was the central protagonist in the Nahda, the renaissance in Arab thought. The role of ecclesiastical institutions was decisive in reviving the Arab language and literature after a prolonged state of torpor known as Inhabitat or decadence. The 1736 Synod of Mount Lebanon commanded not only free education but also free clothing and food.
Since its foundation towards the end of the seventeenth century, The Maronite Antonine Order has always regarded teaching and educating the youth as a mission and a sphere of its parochial activity. A school was almost always geographically linked to each of the monasteries. Antonine University would like to locate itself amid this famous ecclesiastical tradition. Being an heir to such a glorious past, it aims to maintain a secular, salutary, and civilizing mission.
In the past, education had a global character. There was no differentiation among disciplines. The boundaries between school and university were not clear, and the same applied to the differentiation among faculties and courses. The same instructor used the same book for almost all courses to teach all the students in the same institution.
This is how the monasteries of Baabda, Mar-Chaya, Ghazir, Deir-el-Kalaa, and Kattine taught their students grammar and languages and philosophy, theology, music, law, and jurisprudence. Higher learning in the East gradually became classified into independent disciplines. The same applies to the allocation of different courses to different faculties. The specialty was increasingly imperative at the level of the institute, the instructor, and the student.
The Lebanese state also gradually improved higher learning legislation.
Throughout this differentiation process, The Antonine Order committed itself never to confine its educational mission to one field. To that end, the order has continued for decades to prepare its staff members in the most reputed universities in Europe and elsewhere to assume their academic and administrative responsibilities at its university.
Meanwhile, the Antonine Order has witnessed several developments at the level of organized higher learning. Throughout those stages, we have been preoccupied with meeting the growing needs of the middle and the lower classes and contributing to Lebanese society's development.
In 1979 and following the agreements signed with Belgian universities, Lebanese students started their studies at the Antonine Institute. They completed them in Belgium, where they graduated with Belgian diplomas.
The majors ranged from applied sciences to medicine and dentistry. Engineering students did two years in Baabda, followed by three in Belgium; medical students did the first three years in Baabda. They then went to Belgium for another four years, and dentistry students had to spend four years in Baabda before going to Belgium to do their fifth year and obtain the Belgian state diploma in surgery-dentistry.
From the beginning, the Antonine students have demonstrated remarkable achievements at The University of Liege, The Free University of Brussels, The Catholic University of Louvain, where they graduated with official diplomas. At present, those graduates have successful careers in addition to having a legal status in their country. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the Antonine Order had a pastoral concern; due to the war, many young Lebanese people, especially Christians, left the country searching for university studies abroad.
The results and the validity of that education were uncertain and questionable. Host countries were not adequate milieu for them, and many were lost irremediably. This constituted a real hemorrhage at the human and financial levels, and the young had to face many economic, cultural, linguistic, ethical, and human problems. Many people opted for East European countries. They came back with debatable academic standards and professional competence, especially with an ideology that is hardly commendable for our society.