The Church's Missionary Programme at the West Façade of Chartres Cathedral, 2

A number of years ago, I received a barrage of bullying messages on one of my social media platforms from leaders who have made their fame and fortune in anti-bullying campaigns.  I'm not sure they understood "irony," especially since they opted to descend upon a disabled person like me.

What garnered so much hostility was a simple, straightforward, historical fact that I dared to articulate:  That the Catholic Church invented schools.  Not 'education,' not 'schooling,' but schools as we have them now--with courses, class meetings, and professors.  More to the point, we also invented universities, a system of degrees, and faculties.  When I teach mediaeval ecclesiastical history to our permanent deacon-candidates, one unit is given entirely to the subject of education in the Middle Ages, which has been otherwise coloured by our post-Henrician Reformation, post-French Revolution societal bias.  One of the questions on my doctoral comprehensive examination touches upon the question of education between the years 500 to 1500, which I confess is something I also enjoy reading about "for fun."  In this vein, I prefer to pass the time with Boëthius, Cassiodorus and High of St-Victor while everybody else is watching Modern Family.

I can summarise the Church's invention of schools in one paragraph:  First, St Augustine thought it fit to retrieve classical learning--especially rhetoric and logic--for the Church's purposes, especially Biblical literacy; he says as much in his On Christian Teaching.  A short while later, the monk Cassiodorus 'codified' the Christian programme of learning in his Institutes, in which he gives us a synopsis of the seven liberal arts.  With the rise of the monastic movement especially after St Benedict of Nursia, monasteries began to to school their young monks in some of those liberal arts which Cassiodorus explained in order to fortify and enhance Bible reading; it was not until the Emperor Charlemagne, in the ninth century, that every monastery and every cathedral was required to have a school attached to it.  The eleventh century saw explosive growth of universities (the first being at Bologna, founded in 1088), followed by the "Twelfth Century Renaissance" in learning, to the zenith of mediaeval education in the thirteenth century, the same epoch when the Fourth Lateran Council ordered monastic and cathedral school to provide a free education for those who could not afford.  It was the universities that gave us, in addition to the seven liberal arts, the "higher disciplines" of theology, medicine, and law.  Finally, with the Council of Trent, finally, came the system of seminaries as we know them today.

So much for "the Dark Ages" we've been brainwashed to believe.

When I first visited Chartres Cathedral in 2017, my friend and fellow-pilgrim--himself a specialist in the history of the Middle Ages and soon to begin his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto's exclusive Centre for Medieval Studies--knowing my love for all things mediaeval and scholastic, pointed out to me the "South Portal" to the right of the doors whose tympanum we discussed in our previous blog post.  When my friend introduced me to it, I immediately fell in love with the sculpture and the imagery that was above the South Portal:  The Seven Liberal Arts tympanum, which you can see in the image at the top of this entry, itself a nod to the famous 'School of Chartres' that flourished in the high Middle Ages.

This tympanum over the South Portal shows two rows of figures with the outer archivolt showing feminine personifications of each liberal art (since the Latin term is ars libera, "ars" being second-declension/feminine) and one of the ancient writers whose claim to fame is a classical work on one of these arts.  The arrangement of the figures is like this:

Geometry          Arithmetic

EUCLID          BOETHIUS

Rhetoric                              Astronomy

CICERO                              PTOLEMY

Logic                                        Music          Grammar

ARISTOTLE                         PYTHAGORAS     PRISCIAN or

                                                                            DONATUS

I am always scandalized at how many grammar and junior/high school teachers do not know much about the seven liberal arts besides maybe naming them off; their ingenuity is that three of them--the trivium--are about order in the mind, namely logic (or dialectic), rhetoric, and grammar, and the remaining four--the quadrivium--are about order in the world, namely geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music.  I am even more scandalized that education in the liberal arts--with its concomitant hope of teaching young people the basic skills of careful and critical thinking, is almost entirely absent in current schooling.  As Revd Dr George Rutler recently observed:

The cruelest illiteracy consists in a pantomime education which commands what to think rather than how to think, and erases from a culture any memory of its tested and vindicated truths.  Technological literacy easily becomes a camouflage for cultural illiteracy.

And, more that, public narrative has come to replace knowledge, and not a few recent professors have lost their jobs precisely for refusing to be thus illiberal.

Frustration with this fixation on "pantomime education" where sociopolitical indoctrination replaces authentic learning is the raison d'être of grammar schools such as the New England Classical Academy and universities such as Thomas Aquinas College with their emphasis on the classical liberal arts.  As the word-play libera suggests, there is a certain libertas (liberty) that comes with reading libri (books).

It is also important to bear in mind that this is precisely why the Soviets, and later the Nazis rounded up and murdered intellectuals and university professors:  Because, as George Orwell predicted in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, "Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."  Currently, that translates into destroying statues of saints who instigated laws safeguarding the rights of Natives.

By now, I should hope, you are asking:  "What has this to do with the Church's missionary mandate?"

As I said in the previous post, the west façade of the Chartres Cathedral symbolizes the Church's confrontation with darkness--of both sin and ignorance.  More to the point, ignorance is a byproduct of sin, and four out of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit (which is my doctoral research specialization) are intellectual gifts which can be had only by those who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, giving us the ability to see things "as they are."  The logic and order discovered by the liberal arts points to a deeper, underlying Logic, namely, that "in Him all things hold together" (Col 1:17).  There's a reason that the Greek word for "logic" is logike, from which we derive Logos, the "Word," namely the Second Person of the Holy Trinity:

In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word [Logos] was with God, and the Word [Logos] was God.  He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.  In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men.  The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (Jn 1:1-5).

This, in turn, is reminiscent of that "Wisdom" described in the Old Testament:

 Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily: and sweetly doth she order all things (Wis 8:1, KJV)

The Church, facing east--symbolizing her fundamental Christ-ward orientation--sheds light on the world's darkness of, among others, ignorance and barbarism.  This is why the Seven Liberal Arts tympanum has the "Seat of Wisdom" motif at the centre:  The infant Christ, who is the Word or Wisdom embedded in Creation thanks to the Incarnation (cf Jn 1:14; 1 Jn 1:1-3), is enthroned upon the lap of the Virgin Mary, from which the Eternal Wisdom inherited both the wisdom of ancient Israel and the fleshliness of the human race.  By viewing Creation through the lens of the seven liberal arts, we come to see the innate order and structure of the universe and arrive at the God who gave it existence.  Christianity is not a 'layer' thrown over the world, but the articulation of the universe's meaning.  Why else did people like Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Lemaître make the discoveries they did, if not their friendship with Eternal Wisdom?

The Church's missionary programme is described by St Paul thus:

...for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds.  We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ... (2 Cor 10:3-6).