The Grammar of My Morning Coffee

If you have spent any time in classical education circles over the past few decades, you will have encountered Dorothy Sayers. Her essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” holds a canonical position in renewal of classical Christian education. Sayers directed us to look back in time, back to the medieval trivium, as a model of sorts to emulate. Her essay is an exposition of the historical trivium together with her imaginative proposal for aligning the trivium to the stages of a students’ maturity.

The trivium that Sayers puts forward is, she claims, the trivium we find in history—the trivium that prevailed in “the medieval scheme of education—the syllabus of the schools.”¹ To be sure, there is more to Sayers’ essay than her historical claims (most notably, her common-sense insights about the phases of childhood development). Yet her historical claims do figure prominently in her program. Thus she invites a question: Is the trivium that Sayers describes the trivium we find in history? To answer this question, we need to lay Sayers’ formulation of the trivium alongside witnesses from the past. As we will see, such a comparison exposes an important confusion in the way Sayers construes the trivium. My aim in this paper is to meet her confusion with clarity.

Here is where Sayers’ confusion lies. Historically, the arts of the trivium were construed to be linguistic in nature. The liberal arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric concerned language and how language works. But Sayers’ presentation obscures the trivium’s orientation around language.

In order to see Sayers’ confusion, we need to review a distinction that was important to ancient and medieval educators. This is the distinction between things and signs, between matter on the one hand and words on the other—more technically, between res and verba.²

To illustrate: the item on the left is a sign, whereas the item on the right is a thing.

dog                             

The word “dog,” on the left—the sign—is a linguistic object, whereas the actual dog on the right is a material object. (Suppose for our purposes that what you see on the right is an actual dog rather than a picture.) The object on the right—the thing—is the material object that the sign on the left signifies. We humans fashion signs in order to describe reality, and our ideas about reality, as we communicate with one another about things. Things, then, are the reality itself (or our ideas about reality); whereas signs, or languages, arise from our effort to describe that reality.

This distinction between things and signs may seem esoteric, but ancient and medieval teachers thought it was important. Augustine is a case in point: he organized his seminal work on education, On Christian Teaching, around the distinction between things and signs.³

The arts of the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—are linguistic arts. They deal with signs, and not so much with things.⁴ It is the peculiar business of these three arts to consider words in all their proper arrangements and meanings. It is because these three arts share a linguistic orientation that we group them together into a trivium.

So if we want to recover the medieval trivium, and we should want to, then we need to reckon the arts of the trivium as linguistic arts.

Sayers, to her credit, captures this thrust in the early paragraphs of her essay. She rightly associates the art of grammar with language, and she highlights the Latin language.⁵ But later in her essay she muddles the distinction between things and signs, and begins treating grammar as though grammar pertains to things. When Sayers mentions “the grammar of history,” she is not pointing to the linguistic aspects of history, not to the interpretation of historical texts; she points instead to the things of history—to battles, dates, people, events, and the like.⁶ Such items comprise the facts of history, or the constituent elements of history, but they are not the grammar of history—at least, not according to the historical sense of grammar.

Similarly, when Sayers refers to “the grammar of mathematics,” she has in view the things of mathematics—numbers, quantities, sums, and multiples. She is not treating mathematics linguistically, as grammar would. Sayers might have considered symbolic languages of Arabic and Roman numerals, of leibnizian and newtonian notation, or other signs that refer to mathematical ideas. Instead, she refers to actual mathematical things.⁷

When Sayers presents the trivium, she vacillates between, on the one hand, the study of language and meaning, and on the other, the study of facts and things. This confusion has led many of Sayers’ readers to disassociate the arts of the trivium from language study. This marks a departure from the historical trivium, though it arises from a natural reading of Sayers.

Douglas Wilson is an example. Wilson is one of Dorothy Sayers’ most important interpreters, and today’s resurgence of classical education owes a great debt to him.⁸ Note that Wilson follows Sayers when he treats grammar as substantive rather than linguistic. “First we have grammar—the accumulation of factoids,” he writes. “Then comes dialectic—the sorting out of facts into truth and goodness. Then rhetoric is the presentation of that truth and goodness in a lovely form.”⁹ For Wilson, grammar is not about language and its meaning, at least not primarily; rather, it is “the accumulation of factoids.” It could be factoids about anything. When Sayers refers to the grammar of all subjects, she might just as well point to the grammar of auto mechanics, the grammar of offensive schemes in football, or the grammar of my morning coffee. When Wilson turns his attention to logic, because logic deals with the arrangement of facts, he removes language syntax from the domain of grammar, where authorities in earlier eras had placed it, and relocates it to the domain of logic.¹⁰

To show how this formulation departs from the historic trivium, we need to call upon some historical witnesses. Due to limited space, I will focus our attention on the art grammar, just as Sayers does, though a similar historical survey could just as well be mustered around the other arts of the trivium, logic and rhetoric.

We open our historical survey with Quintilian, the greatest of the Roman educators. Speaking of grammar, he writes, “This subject comprises two parts—the study of correct speech and the interpretation of the poets.”¹¹ For Quintilian, grammar concerns language. Studying grammar nurtures a student’s facility with language—whether he builds with language or interprets language—and thus grammar involves both verbal and written composition, together with the interpretation of texts.

Another witness is Cassiodorus. It was Cassiodorus who helped settle the roster of liberal arts into the familiar seven we now know.¹² We can also credit him with transforming early monasteries into institutions for learning and preserving texts. Here is Cassiodorus’ formulation of grammar: “Grammar is the skill of speaking stylishly gathered from famous poets and writers; its function is to compose prose and verse without fault; its purpose is to please by the impeccable skill of polished speech and writing.”¹³ For Cassiodorus, as it had been for Quintilian, grammar is concerned with language, and it involves composing language well and interpreting language well. Cassiodorus emphasizes the fact that grammar deals with the interpretation of texts, for, he says, it treats language that is “gathered from famous poets and writers.” We find similar formulations of grammar in other early educators, including Boethius, Alcuin, and Isidore of Seville.

The same notion of grammar carried forward into the scholastic period, the heyday of Europe’s great cathedral schools. Here too we see that grammar deals with words and how words connect to one another in order to carry meaning. Hugh of St. Victor is a representative voice of the scholastics. “Grammar, simply taken,” Hugh writes, “treats of words, with their origin, formation, combination, inflection, and all things else pertaining directly to utterance alone.”¹⁴ Again, the primary concern of grammar is less with facts and information; like the other arts in the trivium, grammar is concerned primarily with language.

For the sake of historical completeness, we can extend our cloud of witnesses to the educators of the early modern era. This brings us to the humanities curriculum promoted by leading educators in the Renaissance. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini is a prominent representative. He writes, “Grammatica, as Quintilian says, means “literature” when translated into Latin, and has three parts: the science of correct speech, the explanation of the poets and other authors, and composition.”¹⁵ I could just as well cite other luminaries from the same era, including Vergerio, Bruni, and Guarino, as well as notable educators of the reformation era, including Philip Melanchthon, Johann Sturm, and Jon Amos Comenius. I could also extend the survey up through the Puritan William Ames. My central point is this: the prevailing witness of great educators in the western tradition, dating back to the classical era and extending well into the Christian era, is that the study of grammar is fundamentally about language. Grammar has less to do with facts and more to do with meanings and linguistic associations. Returning to Augustine’s educational categories, grammar is less about things and more about signs.

Does this have any bearing on the way we teach? –or on what we teach? To illustrate how it does, I will highlight one medieval text on grammar, a text by Alcuin, an educational leader who flourished at the turn of the 9^th century. Alcuin held an influential position in Charlemagne’s court, where he developed an educational program that became a model throughout Europe (or more precisely, across the civilization that was beginning to take shape as Europe). A key source for Alcuin’s program is a work known as the Disputatio Pippini. Alcuin composed this text in dialogue form; it is an instructional conversation between Alcuin himself, in the role of teacher, and his young pupil, Pippin, who was Charlemagne’s son. Alcuin prepared this text and circulated it as a model to show what teaching grammar actually looks like. Here is how the dialogue opens: ¹⁶

Pippin: “What is a letter?”

Alcuin: “The guardian of history.”

Pippin: “What is a word?”

Alcuin: “The revealer of the mind.”¹⁷

Pippin: “What forms a word?”

Alcuin: “The tongue.”

Pippin: “What is a tongue?”

Alcuin: “A whip of breath.”

The opening lines indicate that the dialogue offers instruction in grammar, for it begins with grammar’s most basic building blocks, letters and words. From the outset, the dialogue addresses language and meaning. Let’s keep reading:

Pippin: “What is a day?”

Alcuin: “The impetus to labor.”

Pippin: “What is the sun?”

Alcuin: “The splendor of the world, the beauty of the sky, the grace of nature, the dignity of day, the giver of hours.”

Pippin: “What is the moon?”

Alcuin: “Eye of the night, generous with dew, the seer of storms.”

Pippin: “What are the stars?”

Alcuin: “A painting of the heavens, the steersmen of sailors, the elegance of night.”

Notice that grammar deals with more than just the parts of speech (although grammar includes parts of speech); grammar also considers associations and meanings. Here we see how the study of grammar, as Alcuin conceived it, cultivates a student’s intuitions about language—that is, about proper and improper associations, about meanings, about sense and nonsense. Put another way, the art of grammar is about storytelling in the broadest sense; it teaches students to tell a true, good, and beautiful story about the world. See again how this orientation continues to play out in the dialogue.

Pippin: What is rain?

Alcuin: The conception of the earth, the mother of crops.

Pippin: What is fog?

Alcuin: Night during the day, the eyes’ toil.

Pippin: What is the wind?

Alcuin: A disordering of air, flowing of waters, drought of the earth.

Here the student receives instruction in categories, associations, and meanings. These meanings are remarkably thick and rich, the stuff of beautiful instruction. It even gets better.

Pippin: What is life?

Alcuin: The joy of the fortunate, the despair of the downtrodden, the expectation of death.

Pippin: What is death?

Alcuin: An inevitable event, an uncertain journey, the tears of the living, the crux of covenant, the thief of man.

Pippin: What is a man?

Alcuin: A slave of death, a passing wanderer, a guest in this realm.

In these passages we witness a striking contrast to Sayers’ notion of grammar, a notion that reduces grammar to things or factoids considered in themselves. In Alcuin’s vision, grammar deals primarily with signs, with language, and with the way language carries meaning. (I recognize that things are not altogether out of the picture in grammatical study. For signs invariably relate to things, as it is the nature of a sign to gesture to a thing. So signs and things are always connected. Though they are connected, we should nonetheless distinguish them from one another.)

This linguistic orientation of grammar helps us see why early educators insisted that grammar is elementary instruction suited to poets, storytellers, and philosophers. This notion of grammar, unlike what Sayers presents, secures grammar as one of the liberal arts. As an art, grammar is a type of productive reasoning, and what a grammatical artist produces is verbal meaning. Because grammar builds up a student’s facility with meanings and associations, educators of the past saw grammatical study as a pathway to wisdom. This is why Alcuin’s dialogue, elementary as it is, looks a whole lot like wisdom literature.¹⁸

John of Salisbury, the great 12^th-century scholastic, echoes this philosophical vision for grammar in his introduction to the topic. “Grammar is the cradle of all philosophy,” he says,

and in a manner of speaking, [grammar is] the first nurse of the whole study of letters. It takes all of us as tender babes, newly born from nature’s bosom. It nurses us in our infancy, and guides our every forward step in philosophy… [Grammar] is the first of the arts to assist those who aspire to increase in wisdom. For it introduces wisdom both through ears and eyes by its facilitation of verbal intercourse. Words admitted into our ears knock on and arouse our understanding….This art [i.e., grammar] accordingly imparts the fundamental elements of language, and also trains our faculties of sight and hearing. One who is ignorant of it cannot philosophize any easier than one who lacks sight and hearing from birth can become an eminent philosopher.¹⁹

For John of Salisbury, grammatical study places students on the road to philosophy.

John’s sentiment brings us back to Alcuin’s Disputatio Pippini. As we approach the end of the dialogue, we see the student, Pippin, growing mature. Now that Pippin is trained in grammar, he grasps how language works, how language carries meaning. The student is well on his way to wisdom. Alcuin sets up the final exchange by reflecting on names and naming.

Alcuin: How can something exist and not exist?

Pippin: It exists in name and not in actuality.

The difference between names and actuality, which is underscored here, echoes the distinction between things and signs. Notice also that the student is now the one who is answering the questions. Pippin, is maturing as a student; he is becoming like his teacher. He is coming to understand signs.

Alcuin: “What is the silent messenger?”

Pippin: “It is what I hold in my hand.”

Alcuin: “What do you hold in your hand?”

Pippin: “Your letter, teacher.”

Alcuin: “Read joyfully, son!”

This is how the dialogue finishes. Recall that the dialogue had opened with questions about the building blocks of language, “What is a letter?” and “What is a word.” Now it concludes by pointing to what those building blocks form into: a complete text. In this case, the text takes the form of a letter, an epistle written by the teacher and given to his student. The letter is now in Pippin’s hand; a complete text is now in the student’s possession. Thus our student has received a gift, the gift of understanding of texts, together with a capacity to search out their meaning.

This linguistic orientation presents a much richer vision for grammar than Sayers’ material notion of “the grammar of all subjects.” The preceding survey of grammar, though brief, offers enough historical testimony to lay alongside Sayers so that we see the contrast. Sayers has exchanged a linguistic understanding of grammar with a rather novel construction of grammar as the study of things—the study of basic facts, or the study of rudimentary information. A similar confusion extends to other two arts of the trivium, logic and rhetoric, which I will leave for another day.

Why should we care about this? Does it matter that we understand grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric to be linguistic arts? I offer four reasons why it matters, though there are probably more.

First, when we restore a linguistic understanding of the trivium, especially grammar, we more securely connect early instruction to stories—stories about people and about the world. This is because grammar teaches students to see meaning. This is how grammar, linguistically understood, shapes their intuitions and affections.

Second, because the trivium deals with meanings and linguistic connections, it is organically tied to the classical idea of memory. To form one’s memory is to form connections and associations. When we remember something, what happens is this: a certain image, or a sign, calls up another idea to our mind. Those of you who are familiar with memory palaces are acquainted with the classical practice of storing images against backgrounds in your mind. Memory is essentially a manipulation of signs, and grammar teaches students how memory works.²⁰ Sayers was right to associate memory with grammar. Had she construed grammar as a linguistic art, she might have brought out this association more richly.

In the third place, when we restore a linguistic understanding of the trivium, we place language and texts at the center of instruction. If you ask most premodern Christian educators, “What is the preeminent function of grammar?” They would answer that grammar serves the proper interpretation of scripture. The study of grammar addresses questions such as, How can Jesus be a lamb? And if Jesus is a lamb, how can he also be a good shepherd? And if he is a good shepherd, how can he also be a bridegroom? Such questions point to ideas that are deeply true, yet they are true not in a literal or factual sense; rather, they are true grammatically, for grammar deals with meanings and proper associations.

We classical educators cherish texts in our instruction, and we cherish the scriptures above all other texts. Just as it was for our medieval predecessors, so our own commitment to texts should lead us to embrace a linguistic understanding of the trivium. Such a historically-informed understanding of the trivium will help us tighten the relationship between scripture and our everyday instruction. Augustine, Cassiodorus, and Hugh of St. Victor would certainly approve.

Fourth, a linguistic understanding of the trivium places the trivium on a secure theological footing. It reminds us that all words are Christocenric, for Jesus Christ is the incarnate Word of God; He is the foundation for language. And because Jesus is both divine word and divine substance, and because by Him all things were made, and in Him all things hold together, Jesus is the basis for all meaning. Jesus establishes and secures the meaningful relationship between things and signs (cf. Colossians 1:15-20).

As we turn from Christology to anthropology, we also recognize that a language-oriented trivium underscores the role of language as a key tool in human hands for taking dominion. Man is God’s image-bearer who gave names to the animals. From this foundation we can establish a biblical basis for culture. To build culture is to produce works of human artistry that are imbued with meaning—faithful meaning, which is faithful naming.²¹

I am grateful to Dorothy Sayers for directing us back to the historical trivium. In conversations about educational philosophy, I position myself as an ally of Sayers, and in important ways I am a living product of her insights. One thing I appreciate about Sayers’s essay is how deeply she cares about categories and definitions. I think she would welcome my call for clarity in how we understand the trivium, and how we talk about it, and especially when that clarity arises from historical witnesses. The result is not a wholesale departure from Sayers’ understanding of the trivium, but an important clarification that corrects against her tendency, and that of her followers, to disassociate the trivium from language study.

Notes