The Bible and the Liberal Arts

Whenever I visit Chartres Cathedral, the very second thing I do (after gazing upon our beautiful Mother at the Verrière window) is visit the south bay of the Royal Portal on the west façade, whose tympanum sculpture features the Sedes Sapientiae (cf Is 7:14; Mt 1:23) at the centre and the "Seven Liberal Arts" in the archivolts.  The image at the top of this post shows it rather well:  Each "discipline" or ars libera is personified by a woman teaching (since ars libera is in the feminine) in the inner archivolt, with a figure from antiquity whose claim to fame was one of these arts in the outer archivolt.

Starting from the viewer's left and working upward to the apex, dialectic (or logic) is accompanied by Aristotle, rhetoric is accompanied by Cicero, and geometry is accompanied by Euclid near the apex.  Then, going down to the viewer's right and working up again is music with Pythagoras, grammar with either Donatus or Priscian, astronomy with Ptolemy, and near the apex again is arithmetic with Boëthius.

Why is there something apparently secular on an obviously Christian temple?  For two reasons:  First, learning--depicted on the south bay--was intended to accompany evangelisation--depicted on the north bay--thus representing the two "fronts" of the Church's mission to the world.  Second, the west facade of Gothic churches, generally, faced the orientation of sunset and, therefore, darkness; by evangelisation and by learning, the Church sought to enlighten the world about the Gospel (evangelisation) and Creation (learning).  By placing the Sedes Sapientiae at the centre of the tympanum, the "Chartres School" intended to show how, at the Incarnation, God inserted himself in the world as man among women and men, and that the tools of learning--the trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, with the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, astronomy, and geometry--are valid tools to explore the consistency of the cosmos which, in turn pointed to the glory of the Creator who took to himself creaturely body, soul, and mind in Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

In the year of Our Lord 789, then-king Charlemagne took the Scripture of Matthew 12:37 as the rationale for his educational reform:

For it is written: "Either from thy words thou shalt be justified or from thy words thou shalt be condemned." For although correct conduct may be better than knowledge, nevertheless knowledge precedes conduct. Therefore, each one ought to study what he desires to accomplish, that so much the more fully the mind may know what ought to be clone, as the tongue hastens in the praises of omnipotent God without the hindrances of errors. For since errors should be shunned by all men, so much the more ought they to be avoided as far as possible by those who are chosen for this very purpose alone, so that they ought to be the especial servants of truth.  For when in the years just passed letters were often written to us from several monasteries in which it was stated that the brethren who dwelt there offered up in our behalf sacred and pious prayers, we have recognized in most of these letters both correct thoughts and uncouth expressions; because what pious devotion dictated faithfully to the mind, the tongue, uneducated on account of the neglect of study, was not able to express in the letter without error.  Whence it happened that we began to fear lest perchance, as the skill in writing was less, so also the wisdom for understanding the Holy Scriptures might be much less than it rightly ought to be. And we all know well that, although errors of speech are dangerous, far more dangerous are errors of the understanding. Therefore, we exhort you not only not to neglect the study of letters, but also with most humble mind, pleasing to God, to study earnestly in order that you may be able more easily and more correctly to penetrate the mysteries of the divine Scriptures. 

When the Frankish king (he would not be Emperor until Christmas Day, 800) spoke of "letters," he had in mind the trivium, in which the structure of sentences in grammar, the logic of words and ideas in dialectic, and the patterns of persuasion in rhetoric served as the basic building-blocks of Biblical literacy.  It was not enough to be able to read; modernity's boast of a low illiteracy rate is scarcely meaningful when most people evade even the basic norms of logic and--as evidenced by the gullibility of the masses when they listen to the mainstream press--being unable to spot marketing, spins, or verbal sleight-of-hands for having absolutely no ability in rhetorical analysis.  Charlemagne wanted truthfulness to season the speech of believers, and the trivium to enable that, with the Bible as the springboard.

The idea of the "seven liberal arts" reaches back to Cassiodorus, who lived about two centuries prior to Charlemagne, and whose book de Institutione first classified the subjects of ancient learning into the seven we have now, on the basis of how frequently "seven" appears in the Bible.  When, during the Carolingian Reform, Benedict of Aniane was tasked with bringing all monastic houses of Europe into the observance of the Rule of St Benedict, a "homogenization" took place in which the scholarly tradition of Celtic monasticism and the legacy of Cassiodorus was absorbed into Benedictinism which placed great stress on a careful, meditative reading of the Scriptures and who operated (rural) "monastic schools" which later had spin-offs in the (urban) cathedral schools.  These schools were required, by Charlemagne, to offer learning even for students who could not afford tuition, a mandate reiterated by the magnificent Pope Innocent III.

Cassiodorus only counted the number of the liberal arts; Augustine had already identified these subjects, once the boast of pagan learning, and claimed them for Christ as tools for Bible-reading.  In Book II of his de doctrina Christiana, Augustine explains these tools and lists not only what we now call the "liberal arts," but also the "mechanical arts" and the study of history, though he placed greater stress on "eloquence" (rhetoric), "dialectic," and grammar" for a more unified purpose:  Exploring things and signs in the Bible:

All teaching is teaching of either things or signs, but things are learnt through signs...  These are things, but they are at the same time signs of other things.  There are other signs whose whole function consists in signifying.  Words, for example:  nobody uses words except in order to signify something.  So every sing is also a thing, since what is not a thing does not exist.  But it is not true that every thing is also a sign [...] (de doctrina Christiana, II.4, 5).

In effect, Augustine "married" the study of the arts to semiotics.

Later, a canon who would earn the sobriquet of "The Second Augustine," namely Hugh of St-Victor, was a Master (Magister, in the classical sense of the Latin word, means "teacher") at the Abbey School of Saint-Victor in Paris, an institution that represented a mature development of the cathedral schools and almost--but quite yet--an early form of the university.  Early in his de Sacramentis, a theological textbook, Hugh retrieves Augustine's semiotics and refines the application of the trivium, the quadrivium, and other subjects to Biblical exegesis.  After pointing out that "To pronunciation alone grammar applies, to meaning alone, dialectic applies; to pronunciation and meaning together rhetoric applies."  He goes on to say:

Therefore, it is clear that all the natural arts serve divine science [= "knowledge"], and that the lower wisdom, rightly ordered, leads to the higher.  Accordingly, under the sense of the significance of words in relation to things of history is contained, which, as has been said, is served by the three sciences:  grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric.  Under that sense, however, consisting in the significance of things in relation to mystical facts, allegory is contained.  And under that sense, consisting in the meaning of things in relation to mystical things to be done, tropology is contained, and these two are served by arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy, and physics.  Besides these, there is above all that divine science to which the Divine Scripture leads, whether allegory or tropology; one division of this which is allegory, teaches right faith, the other, which is in tropology, teaches good work.  In these consist knowledge of truth and love of virtue; and this is the true restoration of man (Hugh of St-Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith [Ex Fontibus Company, 2016], 5-6, emphases added).

So foundational was the liberal arts to the study of Scripture, in fact, that students who aspired to become a professor in theology was required, at the University of Paris at least, to have three baccalaureate degrees:  Baccalaureus artium in the liberal arts, Baccalaureus Biblicus in the Scriptures, and finally Baccalaureus Sententiarum in the  Four Books of the Sentences of Peter Lombard.

Not only did the Bible render the liberal arts needful, it also served as a surrogate for "secular" learning, since these arts likewise supplied the skills which, in turn, gave rise to mechanics, the physical sciences, and the like.

It should be added that the seven liberal arts, but especially the trivium, was not the exclusive domain of "professional" theologians; it was also widely used by monastics (and later, mendicants) in the prayerful, meditative reading of the Bible, since it supplied them with  mental tools to mine the deep riches of the Word of God in view of contemplative nearness to God.  This was the overarching theme of Jean Leclerq's classic and still-standard work The Love of Learning and the Desire for God.  Complementing this is Professor Beryl Smalley's epoch-making The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages.

One final note.  There is a word-play in the word ars libera, since liber, Latin for "book," is tucked in libera, from which we get the Latin word liberalis, "a free person."  Literacy and liberty go together, especially in Biblical literacy:  "For freedom, Christ set us free!" (Gal 5:1).

This post is dedicated to my good friend and fellow-priest,
Dom Cassian Elkins OSB of Subiaco Abbey, Arkansas,
with fraternal affection.