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Originally published in Classis<\/em> “Out of all the sciences above named, however, the ancients, in their studies, especially selected seven to be mastered by those were to be educated.\u00a0 These seven they considered so to excel all the rest in usefulness that anyone who had been thoroughly schooled in them might afterward come to a knowledge of the others by his own inquiry and effort rather than by listening to a teacher.\u00a0 For these, one might say, constitute the best instruments, the best rudiments, by which the way is prepared for the mind\u2019s complete knowledge of philosophic truth.\u00a0 Therefore they are called by the name trivium and quadrivium, because by them, as by certain ways (viae), a quick mind enters into the secret places of wisdom.”<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This is one of the many jewels in Hugh of St. Victor\u2019s Didascalicon<\/em>: De studio legendi<\/em> (On the Study of Reading), a twelfth-century work on theology and the liberal arts that marks a true high point in medieval thought.\u00a0 \u00a0Hugh drew on the vast resources of the ancient world and his Christian fathers in the faith as he discussed the various divisions of human knowledge.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0 His work reads like a card catalogue,<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> and while his categories are suspiciously Platonic and Aristotelian, his tome stands as a testimony to the immense learning and theo-centricity that characterized the medieval age.<\/p>\n The Didascalicon<\/em> does not address educational theory or pedagogy as we think of the terms.\u00a0 His work is a map to guide the earnest student on an ever-ascending path up to conformity to the Divine Likeness: \u201cThis, then, is what the arts are concerned with, this is what they intend, namely, to restore within us the divine likeness …\u201d<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n The observant reader will have a noticed an echo of Dorothy Sayers in the first-quoted passage (or rather a voice Sayers was echoing): \u201cFor the sole end is simply this:\u00a0 to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.\u201d<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n It is unfortunate that Sayers did not footnote her classic essay.\u00a0 Perhaps she had this very passage from Hugh in mind.\u00a0 Then again, perhaps it is best that Sayers left us to dig through the thick layers of medieval thought for ourselves.\u00a0 It is the role of a miner that I wish to play in this foray into the Didascalicon<\/em>. I sometimes feel that we in the Christian classical movement are all tunneling along through forgotten corridors and deserted halls. And so I have dug up Hugh of St. Victor and hold him up to the light for all to see.\u00a0 He does have some blemishes, indeed some cracks, but the light still dances splendidly in his words.<\/p>\n As I\u00a0 turn the Didascalicon<\/em> over in my hands, polishing here and marvelling there, I will be simultaneously appreciating and appropriating.\u00a0 I struggled with both of these terms in choosing my title, but I feel that \u201cappropriation\u201d is the more Biblical, and the most medieval, of the two.\u00a0 If something is worth appropriating, then it is first worth appreciating.\u00a0 And as Hugh appropriated Quintillian, Plato, Cassiodorus, and Boethius, I will appropriate him from a Protestant perspective, and endeavor to draw conclusions that would shed a little more light in this particular corridor of the medieval world.\u00a0 I hope that my conclusions will specifically benefit those involved in the revival of Classical christian education.<\/p>\n \u201cNot knowing and not wishing to know are far different things.\u00a0 Not knowing, to be sure, springs from weakness; but contempt of knowledge springs from a wicked will.\u201d<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/em>\u00a0 So begins the Didascalicon.\u00a0 With a typical medieval fascination for naming, Hugh prepares to take his readers through a brief summary of human knowledge. There are two ways to acquire knowledge: reading and meditation.\u00a0 \u00a0Hugh is concerned, primarily, with teaching students to read<\/em>.\u00a0 Three things are necessary in reading: 1) what to read, 2) in what order to read, 3) in what manner to read.\u00a0 Hugh divides his book into two parts.\u00a0 The first is concerned with the \u201creader of the arts,\u201d and the second with \u201cthe reader of the Sacred Scripture.\u201d<\/p>\n But why read?\u00a0 Is this not the perennial question?\u00a0 It is certainly one I\u2019ve encountered more than once in my teaching career: \u201cBut, Mr. Soderberg, why are we reading\/studying\/learning fill-in-the-blank?\u201d\u00a0 This is not the ancient question of why we Christians are reading pagan authors, or why we are reading witch-filled Narnia stories.\u00a0 For Hugh, the question of why one would want to read great books was nonexistent.\u00a0 Hugh assumed that his readers (unless they were lazy) would want<\/em> to read classical literature and, more importantly, the Bible.<\/p>\n Hugh\u2019s directions on reading flow out of his Christian worldview.\u00a0 In discussing man, he writes: \u201cIn man are two things–the good and the evil … The good … requires to be restored by active effort.\u00a0 The evil … requires to be removed, or … at least to be alleviated through the application of a remedy.\u00a0 This is our entire task–the restoration of our nature and the removal of our deficiency.\u201d<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Hugh\u2019s starting-point sets him apart from other medieval thinkers like William of Conches, who began his commentary on Boethius\u2019 s De consolatione philosophiae<\/em> with \u201cnatural knowledge\u201d (scientia<\/em>) and proceeds to parse the various parts of knowledge.\u00a0 William equates \u201cphilosophy\u201d with \u201cwisdom\u201d and finds the difference between the two only in etymology.\u00a0 One is a Greek word, and the other Latin, but beyond that, they both describe the realm of man\u2019s reason and knowledge.<\/p>\n As the translator and editor of the Didascalicon<\/em>, Jerome Taylor, notes in his introduction, \u201cFrom such naturalistic rationalism Hugh\u2019s thought is poles apart.\u00a0 For Hugh, Wisdom is the second person of the trinitarian Godhead, and philosophy is pursuit of that Wisdom …\u201d<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> William of Conche\u2019s starting point, then, is the autonomous realm of reason; whereas Hugh begins with a discussion of Wisdom, which he later brings into a more Trinitarian context:<\/p>\n “This, then, is what the arts are concerned with, this is what they intend, namely, to restore within us the divine likeness, a likeness which to us is a form but to God is his nature.\u00a0 The more we are conformed to the divine nature, the more do we possess Wisdom, for then there begins to shine forth again in us what has forever existed in the divine Image or Pattern, coming and going in us but standing changeless in God.”<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The end (telos<\/em>) of reading, therefore, is nothing less that the restoration of the imago dei.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The Didascalicon<\/em> stands squarely in the classical tradition.\u00a0 It is not a medieval treatise on how to teach the classics or the trivium, but a work following in the tradition of Christian didactic (didascalic<\/em>) literature which, \u201cbegins with Augustine and continues through Boethius, Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville, Bede, Alcuin, Rhabanus Maurus, and the late Carolingian masters, including John the Scot.\u201d<\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n He was most definitely not operating in a historical vacuum.\u00a0 One thinks even further into antiquity to Quintilian, that master of rhetoric, whose Institutio Oratoria<\/em> is a far-ranging tome on the mechanics and philosophy of rhetoric.\u00a0 But it is no mere handbook.\u00a0 It is a program for life.<\/p>\n Quintilian writes:<\/p>\n \u201cI on the other hand hold that the art of oratory includes all that is essential for the training of an orator, and that it is impossible to reach the summit in any subject unless we have first passed through all the elementary stages.\u00a0 I shall not therefore refuse to stoop to the consideration of those minor details, neglect of which may result in there being no opportunity for more important things, and propose to mould the studies of my orator from infancy …\u201d<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Quintilian is not interested in one rhetoric course sometime in high school or college.\u00a0 He is writing about the inculcation of a rhetorical worldview.<\/span>12<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n The medieval teachers imitated Quintilian in the scope<\/em> of their works.\u00a0 To speak of one thing, they realized, is to speak of all things.\u00a0 One cannot simply talk about mathematics without relation to the \u201cmusic of the human body\u201d, the nine openings in the human body, and the four progressions of the soul.\u00a0 Of course, one simply must<\/em> mention what Boethius or Capella said about the matter, and before we know it, we\u2019ve wandered into a Platonic theory of the soul and a theory of epistemology.\u00a0 The medievals understood that knowledge cannot be compartmentalized.\u00a0 In giving instruction to young readers, they were laying out a project for a lifetime of study.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n Cassiodorus follows Quintilian as he sets forth a program for the training of a monk, which in the medieval world was synonymous with a learned and well-read Christian.\u00a0 He summarizes Divine and Secular Letters as he presents his own reading plan for the monks in his scriptorium:<\/p>\n \u201cI was driven by divine charity to this device, namely, in the place of a teacher to prepare for you under the Lord\u2019s guidance these introductory books; through which, in my opinion, the unbroken line of Divine Scriptures and the compendious knowledge of secular letters might with the Lord\u2019s beneficence be related … since through them one learns the indicated origin of both the salvation of the soul and secular knowledge.\u201d<\/span>13<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Cassiodorus is an excellent early example of how Christians should appropriate the classics (in whatever field).\u00a0 In effect, he shows us how to plunder the pagans.\u00a0 Reading pagan authors is valuable, he and the other medieval teachers argue, but reading does not stop there.\u00a0 We must read beyond<\/em> the pagans as we read the Scriptures.<\/p>\n As Augustine put it,<\/p>\n \u201cStill we ought not to give up music because of the superstition of the heathen, if we can derive anything from it that is of use for the understanding of Holy Scripture … Nay, but let every good and true Christian understand that wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master; and while he recognizes and acknowledges the truth, even in their religious literature, let him reject the figments of superstition.\u201d<\/span>14<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Hugh follows in Augustine\u2019s wake in one of the most powerful metaphors in the Didascalicon<\/em>:<\/p>\n \u201cThe writings of philosophers, like a whitewashed wall of clay, boast an attractive surface all shining with eloquence; but if sometimes they hold forth to us a semblance of truth, nevertheless, by mixing falsehoods with it, they conceal the clay of error, as it were, under an over-spread coat of color.\u00a0 The Sacred Scriptures, on the other hand, are most fittingly likened to a honeycomb, for while in the simplicity of their language they seem dry, within they are filled with sweetness.\u201d<\/span>15<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The medievals were in love with naming the world.\u00a0 Most of the time, they simply repeated the labels and appellations of the classical authors, but they were so enraptured by the neatness of tidy divisions and exact terms, that we may indulge them.\u00a0 Hugh immediately begins cutting away in the Didascalicon<\/em>, and does not finish until he has left the world in a thousand pieces.\u00a0 He leaves us to put the jigsaw puzzle back together again.<\/p>\n He, like most medievals, was in love with numbers.\u00a0 There are 3 Powers of the Soul, 3 Manners of Things, 3 Works, 4 Progressions of the Soul, 4 Quadrivial Arts, 4 parts of Arithmetic, 3 parts of Music, 3 parts of Geometry, 7 Sciences, and so forth.\u00a0 It is important to realize that the medievals believed they were simply discovering the divine order inherent in creation.\u00a0 God, the Ultimate Mathematician, had placed numerous correspondences and patterns in the world, and it is our job to see and order them. Notice first that nothing is too trivial to be included in Hugh\u2019s grand summary of the arts.\u00a0 Hunting, fishing, and geometry, how marvelous is man\u2019s ingenuity!\u00a0 Rather, how marvelous is the world which God created, and we have discovered bit by bit.\u00a0 There are no knowledge-bytes in the medieval worldview, but a definite sense of building, block by block, a marvelous edifice of human understanding.<\/p>\n The Trivium is certainly included in this structure.\u00a0 Hugh summarizes the Trivium neatly: \u201cGrammar is knowledge of how to speak without error; dialectic is clear-sighted argument which separates the true from the false; rhetoric is the discipline of persuading to every suitable thing.\u201d<\/span>16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> He also discusses the Quadrivium at length.<\/p>\n But the Trivium and Quadrivium are not Hugh\u2019s concerns in the Didascalicon.\u00a0 For him, the primary distinctions are the Four Branches of Knowledge: Theoretical, Practical, Mechanical, and Logical.\u00a0 Within these genera, Hugh believes, all aspects of human art find their proper place.<\/p>\n It is at this point that a Protestant appropriation will part company with Hugh.\u00a0 He worries that readers will object to his placement of \u201cfood and drink\u201d under the art of Medicine, while he earlier placed them under Hunting.\u00a0 Hugh\u2019s world is entirely too tidy. The medievals erred in multiplying scholastic distinctions.\u00a0 Underlying Hugh\u2019s entire project, we will find a subtle Platonism.\u00a0 Thus he states that only theoretical<\/em> knowledge (theology, mathematics, physics) can rightly be called wisdom<\/em>, because \u201cit studies the truth of things.\u201d<\/span>17<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0 Solomon would have none of this.\u00a0 Undoubtedly wisdom has theoretical dimensions, but others have convincingly argued that the Biblical concept of wisdom is much more organic and earthy.\u00a0 Is it any wonder that the wisest men who walked the earth (Christ and Solomon) left us words about plowing, sowing, fishing, making love, and the endless cycles of seasons?\u00a0 Whether knowingly or not, the medievals must have felt the tension between their intellectualistic version of the faith and the Biblical texts, and so turned the Song of Solomon into a grand allegory (to take the most notorious example).<\/p>\n As a corollary of this incipient Platonism, we find in Hugh a denigration of the imagination<\/em>.\u00a0 After relating how the soul must \u201cdegenerate\u201d through the process of contact with \u201cbodily images,\u201d he states, \u201cImagination, however, is sensuous memory made up of the traces of corporeal objects inhering in the mind; it possesses in itself nothing certain as a source of knowledge.\u201d<\/span>18<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0 The Christian reader, then, must ascend out of the muck of imagination and bodily images into some sort of Platonic stratosphere.\u00a0 For Hugh, \u201cunderstanding is pure and certain knowledge of the sole principles of things–namely, of God, of ideas, and of prime matter, and of incorporeal substances.\u201d<\/span>19<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n To Hugh\u2019s credit, he saw himself as consistently Christian, but he was juggling chainsaws, and cut off more than one finger in the process.\u00a0 As Protestants, we must reject any hint of Platonism which, in education, tends to show up in Logic stage.\u00a0 (One could argue that the medievals remained primarily at the Logic Stage in philosophy and theology.\u00a0 However, until we can write poetry like they did, we should keep our mouths shut and learn a lesson or two).\u00a0 While we read Hugh in his more Platonic moments, we must remember that he saw his readers progressing through stages of knowledge and wisdom that mirrored God\u2019s wisdom and knowledge. Though his language is Platonic, his worldview is theocentric.<\/p>\n Hugh is not only concerned with Secular Letters.\u00a0 That is merely groundwork to prepare us to study Sacred Letters.\u00a0 There are three types of men who read the Scriptures:\u00a0 those who seek riches or honor and those who delight in the \u201cmarvels\u201d of Scripture, and the third group who read the Scriptures, \u201cso that they may forthrightly demolish enemies of the truth, teach those less well informed, recognize the path of truth more perfectly themselves, and understanding the hidden things of God more deeply, love them more intently.\u201d<\/span>20<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0 It is this sort of reader that Hugh wished his readers to be, and it is this sort of reader that Hugh himself strove to be.<\/p>\n To the patient and persevering reader, the Didascalicon<\/em> offers us a window into the medieval mind, and through that mind, a vista into the vast learning of antiquity.\u00a0 To those of us dedicated to \u201crebuilding the ruins\u201d and \u201crecovering the lost tools of learning,\u201d surely we should be eager to learn from one who was himself engaged in the same task. One day, may our children\u2019s children say of us as Hugh said of those who study Scripture \u201cprecisely\u201d: \u201cSurely the devotion of these persons deserves praise and is worthy of imitation.\u201d<\/span>21<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n “Now, therefore, let us ask Wisdom that it may deign to shine in our hearts and to cast light upon its paths for us, that it may bring us ‘to its pure and fleshless feast.'”<\/span>22<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n Featured image by Jan Antonin Kolar<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Originally published in ClassisVolume XIV, No. 5 “Out of all the sciences above named, however, the ancients, in their studies, especially selected seven to be mastered by those were to be educated.\u00a0 These seven they considered so to excel all the rest in usefulness that anyone who had been thoroughly schooled in them might afterward […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":715,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":" Originally published in Classis<\/em> By Gregory Soderberg<\/p> \"Out of all the sciences above named, however, the ancients, in their studies, especially selected seven to be mastered by those were to be educated.\u00a0 These seven they considered so to excel all the rest in usefulness that anyone who had been thoroughly schooled in them might afterward come to a knowledge of the others by his own inquiry and effort rather than by listening to a teacher.\u00a0 For these, one might say, constitute the best instruments, the best rudiments, by which the way is prepared for the mind\u2019s complete knowledge of philosophic truth.\u00a0 Therefore they are called by the name trivium and quadrivium, because by them, as by certain ways (viae), a quick mind enters into the secret places of wisdom.\"[efn_note]Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon<\/em>, ed. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia UP, 1961), 87.[\/efn_note]<\/p><\/blockquote> This is one of the many jewels in Hugh of St. Victor\u2019s Didascalicon<\/em>: De studio legendi<\/em> (On the Study of Reading), a twelfth-century work on theology and the liberal arts that marks a true high point in medieval thought.\u00a0 \u00a0Hugh drew on the vast resources of the ancient world and his Christian fathers in the faith as he discussed the various divisions of human knowledge.[efn_note]He writes, \u201cIn this little work I have designed to inquire only into the divisions and the names of things, so that the reader might thereby be established in some beginning of knowledge merely,\u201d 80.[\/efn_note]\u00a0 His work reads like a card catalogue,[efn_note]I am indebted to C.S. Lewis: \u201cAt his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems . . . . There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index,\u201d in The Discarded Image<\/em> (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1964), 10.[\/efn_note] and while his categories are suspiciously Platonic and Aristotelian, his tome stands as a testimony to the immense learning and theo-centricity that characterized the medieval age.<\/p> The Didascalicon<\/em> does not address educational theory or pedagogy as we think of the terms.\u00a0 His work is a map to guide the earnest student on an ever-ascending path up to conformity to the Divine Likeness: \u201cThis, then, is what the arts are concerned with, this is what they intend, namely, to restore within us the divine likeness ...\u201d[efn_note]Didascalicon<\/em>, pg. 62[\/efn_note]<\/p> The observant reader will have a noticed an echo of Dorothy Sayers in the first-quoted passage (or rather a voice Sayers was echoing): \u201cFor the sole end is simply this:\u00a0 to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.\u201d[efn_note]Dorothy Sayers, \u201cThe Lost Tools of Learning.\u201d[\/efn_note]<\/p> It is unfortunate that Sayers did not footnote her classic essay.\u00a0 Perhaps she had this very passage from Hugh in mind.\u00a0 Then again, perhaps it is best that Sayers left us to dig through the thick layers of medieval thought for ourselves.\u00a0 It is the role of a miner that I wish to play in this foray into the Didascalicon<\/em>. I sometimes feel that we in the Christian classical movement are all tunneling along through forgotten corridors and deserted halls. And so I have dug up Hugh of St. Victor and hold him up to the light for all to see.\u00a0 He does have some blemishes, indeed some cracks, but the light still dances splendidly in his words.<\/p> As I\u00a0 turn the Didascalicon<\/em> over in my hands, polishing here and marvelling there, I will be simultaneously appreciating and appropriating.\u00a0 I struggled with both of these terms in choosing my title, but I feel that \u201cappropriation\u201d is the more Biblical, and the most medieval, of the two.\u00a0 If something is worth appropriating, then it is first worth appreciating.\u00a0 And as Hugh appropriated Quintillian, Plato, Cassiodorus, and Boethius, I will appropriate him from a Protestant perspective, and endeavor to draw conclusions that would shed a little more light in this particular corridor of the medieval world.\u00a0 I hope that my conclusions will specifically benefit those involved in the revival of Classical christian education.<\/p> \u201cNot knowing and not wishing to know are far different things.\u00a0 Not knowing, to be sure, springs from weakness; but contempt of knowledge springs from a wicked will.\u201d[efn_note]Didascalicon, <\/em>43.[\/efn_note]<\/em>\u00a0 So begins the Didascalicon.\u00a0 With a typical medieval fascination for naming, Hugh prepares to take his readers through a brief summary of human knowledge. There are two ways to acquire knowledge: reading and meditation.\u00a0 \u00a0Hugh is concerned, primarily, with teaching students to read<\/em>.\u00a0 Three things are necessary in reading: 1) what to read, 2) in what order to read, 3) in what manner to read.\u00a0 Hugh divides his book into two parts.\u00a0 The first is concerned with the \u201creader of the arts,\u201d and the second with \u201cthe reader of the Sacred Scripture.\u201d<\/p> But why read?\u00a0 Is this not the perennial question?\u00a0 It is certainly one I\u2019ve encountered more than once in my teaching career: \u201cBut, Mr. Soderberg, why are we reading\/studying\/learning fill-in-the-blank?\u201d\u00a0 This is not the ancient question of why we Christians are reading pagan authors, or why we are reading witch-filled Narnia stories.\u00a0 For Hugh, the question of why one would want to read great books was nonexistent.\u00a0 Hugh assumed that his readers (unless they were lazy) would want<\/em> to read classical literature and, more importantly, the Bible.<\/p> Hugh\u2019s directions on reading flow out of his Christian worldview.\u00a0 In discussing man, he writes: \u201cIn man are two things--the good and the evil ... The good ... requires to be restored by active effort.\u00a0 The evil ... requires to be removed, or ... at least to be alleviated through the application of a remedy.\u00a0 This is our entire task--the restoration of our nature and the removal of our deficiency.\u201d[efn_note]Ibid.,<\/em> 52.[\/efn_note]<\/p> Hugh\u2019s starting-point sets him apart from other medieval thinkers like William of Conches, who began his commentary on Boethius\u2019 s De consolatione philosophiae<\/em> with \u201cnatural knowledge\u201d (scientia<\/em>) and proceeds to parse the various parts of knowledge.\u00a0 William equates \u201cphilosophy\u201d with \u201cwisdom\u201d and finds the difference between the two only in etymology.\u00a0 One is a Greek word, and the other Latin, but beyond that, they both describe the realm of man\u2019s reason and knowledge.<\/p> As the translator and editor of the Didascalicon<\/em>, Jerome Taylor, notes in his introduction, \u201cFrom such naturalistic rationalism Hugh\u2019s thought is poles apart.\u00a0 For Hugh, Wisdom is the second person of the trinitarian Godhead, and philosophy is pursuit of that Wisdom ...\u201d[efn_note]Ibid.,<\/em> 17.[\/efn_note] William of Conche\u2019s starting point, then, is the autonomous realm of reason; whereas Hugh begins with a discussion of Wisdom, which he later brings into a more Trinitarian context:<\/p> \"This, then, is what the arts are concerned with, this is what they intend, namely, to restore within us the divine likeness, a likeness which to us is a form but to God is his nature.\u00a0 The more we are conformed to the divine nature, the more do we possess Wisdom, for then there begins to shine forth again in us what has forever existed in the divine Image or Pattern, coming and going in us but standing changeless in God.\"[efn_note]Ibid<\/em>., 61.[\/efn_note]<\/p><\/blockquote> The end (telos<\/em>) of reading, therefore, is nothing less that the restoration of the imago dei.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p> The Didascalicon<\/em> stands squarely in the classical tradition.\u00a0 It is not a medieval treatise on how to teach the classics or the trivium, but a work following in the tradition of Christian didactic (didascalic<\/em>) literature which, \u201cbegins with Augustine and continues through Boethius, Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville, Bede, Alcuin, Rhabanus Maurus, and the late Carolingian masters, including John the Scot.\u201d[efn_note]Ibid.,<\/em>, 3.[\/efn_note]<\/p> He was most definitely not operating in a historical vacuum.\u00a0 One thinks even further into antiquity to Quintilian, that master of rhetoric, whose Institutio Oratoria<\/em> is a far-ranging tome on the mechanics and philosophy of rhetoric.\u00a0 But it is no mere handbook.\u00a0 It is a program for life.<\/p> Quintilian writes:<\/p> \u201cI on the other hand hold that the art of oratory includes all that is essential for the training of an orator, and that it is impossible to reach the summit in any subject unless we have first passed through all the elementary stages.\u00a0 I shall not therefore refuse to stoop to the consideration of those minor details, neglect of which may result in there being no opportunity for more important things, and propose to mould the studies of my orator from infancy ...\u201d[efn_note]Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria<\/em>, trans. H. E. Butler (London: Harvard University Press, 1920), I.Pr.3-5.[\/efn_note]<\/p><\/blockquote> Quintilian is not interested in one rhetoric course sometime in high school or college.\u00a0 He is writing about the inculcation of a rhetorical worldview.[efn_note]Quintillian quotes Cicero: \u201cIn my opinion no one can be an absolutely perfect orator unless he has acquired a knowledge of all important subjects and arts.\u201d II.xxi.14-17.[\/efn_note]<\/p> The medieval teachers imitated Quintilian in the scope<\/em> of their works.\u00a0 To speak of one thing, they realized, is to speak of all things.\u00a0 One cannot simply talk about mathematics without relation to the \u201cmusic of the human body\u201d, the nine openings in the human body, and the four progressions of the soul.\u00a0 Of course, one simply must<\/em> mention what Boethius or Capella said about the matter, and before we know it, we\u2019ve wandered into a Platonic theory of the soul and a theory of epistemology.\u00a0 The medievals understood that knowledge cannot be compartmentalized.\u00a0 In giving instruction to young readers, they were laying out a project for a lifetime of study.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p> Cassiodorus follows Quintilian as he sets forth a program for the training of a monk, which in the medieval world was synonymous with a learned and well-read Christian.\u00a0 He summarizes Divine and Secular Letters as he presents his own reading plan for the monks in his scriptorium:<\/p> \u201cI was driven by divine charity to this device, namely, in the place of a teacher to prepare for you under the Lord\u2019s guidance these introductory books; through which, in my opinion, the unbroken line of Divine Scriptures and the compendious knowledge of secular letters might with the Lord\u2019s beneficence be related ... since through them one learns the indicated origin of both the salvation of the soul and secular knowledge.\u201d[efn_note]Cassiodorus, An Introduction to Divine and Human Readings<\/em>, trans. Leslie Weber Jones, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 68.[\/efn_note]<\/p><\/blockquote> Cassiodorus is an excellent early example of how Christians should appropriate the classics (in whatever field).\u00a0 In effect, he shows us how to plunder the pagans.\u00a0 Reading pagan authors is valuable, he and the other medieval teachers argue, but reading does not stop there.\u00a0 We must read beyond<\/em> the pagans as we read the Scriptures.<\/p> As Augustine put it,<\/p> \u201cStill we ought not to give up music because of the superstition of the heathen, if we can derive anything from it that is of use for the understanding of Holy Scripture ... Nay, but let every good and true Christian understand that wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master; and while he recognizes and acknowledges the truth, even in their religious literature, let him reject the figments of superstition.\u201d[efn_note]Augustine, On Christian Doctrine<\/em> in Great Books of the Western World<\/em>, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 646.[\/efn_note]<\/p><\/blockquote> Hugh follows in Augustine\u2019s wake in one of the most powerful metaphors in the Didascalicon<\/em>:<\/p> \u201cThe writings of philosophers, like a whitewashed wall of clay, boast an attractive surface all shining with eloquence; but if sometimes they hold forth to us a semblance of truth, nevertheless, by mixing falsehoods with it, they conceal the clay of error, as it were, under an over-spread coat of color.\u00a0 The Sacred Scriptures, on the other hand, are most fittingly likened to a honeycomb, for while in the simplicity of their language they seem dry, within they are filled with sweetness.\u201d[efn_note]Didascalicon<\/em>, 102.[\/efn_note]<\/p><\/blockquote> The medievals were in love with naming the world.\u00a0 Most of the time, they simply repeated the labels and appellations of the classical authors, but they were so enraptured by the neatness of tidy divisions and exact terms, that we may indulge them.\u00a0 Hugh immediately begins cutting away in the Didascalicon<\/em>, and does not finish until he has left the world in a thousand pieces.\u00a0 He leaves us to put the jigsaw puzzle back together again.<\/p> He, like most medievals, was in love with numbers.\u00a0 There are 3 Powers of the Soul, 3 Manners of Things, 3 Works, 4 Progressions of the Soul, 4 Quadrivial Arts, 4 parts of Arithmetic, 3 parts of Music, 3 parts of Geometry, 7 Sciences, and so forth.\u00a0 It is important to realize that the medievals believed they were simply discovering the divine order inherent in creation.\u00a0 God, the Ultimate Mathematician, had placed numerous correspondences and patterns in the world, and it is our job to see and order them.
Volume XIV, No. 5<\/p>\n\n
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Wisdom and the Restoration of the Imago Dei<\/em><\/h3>\n
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The Classical Tradition<\/h3>\n
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Medieval Trivial Pursuit<\/h3>\n
When Hugh finally begins to discuss the Trivium and Quadrivium, he has established the following divisions among the arts:<\/p>\n\n
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Platonizing and Theologizing<\/h3>\n
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Volume XIV, No. 5<\/p>\u00a0<\/h3>
Wisdom and the Restoration of the Imago Dei<\/em><\/h3>
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The Classical Tradition<\/h3>
\u00a0<\/h3>
Medieval Trivial Pursuit<\/h3>
When Hugh finally begins to discuss the Trivium and Quadrivium, he has established the following divisions among the arts:<\/p>