Brian Welter has just published the first volume of his study of Christian education, Christian Paideia. A History of Christian Education to 500 AD. This work traces the origins of the Western educational system, rooted in Classical tradition and Christian theology, with the emergence of the trivium and the quadrivium (the seven liberal arts) in the Middle Ages.
Please support the valuable work of Mr. Welter by purchasing a copy of this fascinating book.
Reason and Contemplation
The close interaction of the four quadrivial disciplines dates back to at least Pythagoras, who pointed out their metaphysical character. The Pythagoreans valued both grammar and mathematics. They revealed the link between the linguistic and numerical sides of the liberal arts. The logos, the language principle, formulates through words the numerical harmony of the cosmos, thereby uniting harmony and logos. Grammar and music unite the seven liberal arts into a harmonious whole. This is to say that “the ‘art of sounds’ and the ‘art of letters’ that, with ‘rhythm’ and ‘meter,’ constituted for centuries the base of what was known as the ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία [enkyklios paideia],” which inspired encyclopedic education. Logos can be defined as analogy, study, word, reason or logic, and mathematical rapport. The entire logic of the liberal arts is the expression or achievement of this harmony. The ultimate harmony is the micro-macro relationship, which is perceived through contemplation. While the ancient Greek and the modern worlds agree that the created order is based on numbers, modern societies exploit this in a utilitarian spirit. The Pythagorean orientation is interpretative and contemplative. The modern world has no notion of microcosmic and macrocosmic harmony.
The disciplines of the quadrivium are mathematical, not scientific. They are not founded upon empirical observation. Having only superficial parallels with the Galilean-Newtonian sense of science, the disciplines encourage contemplation of the cosmos as God’s handiwork. Mortimer Adler in Dialectic notes, “Empirical thinking is to be distinguished from mathematical thinking by this condition, among others, that the former submits its rational processes to the judgment of validity in terms of extrinsic criteria, facts, experiments, etc., whereas the latter submits its rational processes to the judgment of validity in terms only of intrinsic criteria, consistency, demonstration, etc…. In the one case, thinking is controlled throughout by a truth reference to entities beyond its own processes; in the other, thinking is controlled by rules of truth or valid demonstration whose entire reference is exhausted within the processes of thought itself.” The quadrivium elevated the status of reason among Christian educators based on the view that reasoning leads to comprehension of the truth through the contemplative disposition that it fosters.
This contemplation is possible, and encouraged, because it is contemplation of the truth. The quadrivium asserts this truth. Boethius was only one of many who noted that the abstract nature of such thinking prepares young minds for future studies in philosophy and theology, both of which demand even higher abstract thinking because they concern higher aspects of reality than the four mathematical disciplines. Platonism envisions a hierarchy of abstraction inherent to each discipline, and among the disciplines. The higher disciplines on the ladder of being are more abstract and theoretical than the lower ones. Many Christian thinkers, including Boethius, adopted this perspective for their Christian pedagogy. This scheme situates mathematics at a middle level on the scale of being and theoretical knowledge, higher than the natural sciences yet lower than both metaphysics and theology. This Christian Platonism emerged from pagan antecedents. In the third and early fourth centuries AD, the Neoplatonists Plotinus, Porphyry of Tyre, and Iamblichus had already focused on the ontological nature of number.
The unity of the quadrivium, which reflects the unity of the universe itself, had obvious ramifications for education. Even in its pre-Christian form, the quadrivium was a propaedeutic for philosophy and theology based on the belief that by expressing ontological truths, numbers express truths about creation. Nicomachus of Gerasa asserted the pre-existence of numbers in the thought of the demiurge and their central place in the world’s construction.
This explains the relationship between the study of numbers and the study of being. This view also supports the Biblical outlook. The quadrivium’s exploration of the mind of God is reflected in the book of Wisdom: “Thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.” Yet it was not the book of Wisdom that gave impetus to this among the pagans of the first through fourth centuries AD, but Pythagorean theory and its compatibility with Neoplatonism, the dominant philosophy of the time. Christianity accepted and took over what was already well-established.
Neoplatonism strongly influenced numerous Christian thinkers, most famously Augustine because, paralleling Christianity, its main reference was transcendent and other-worldly. In this sense, there seemed to be a convergence between the development of Platonism and the advent of Christianity. Christ’s claim that his kingdom is not of this world reflected in important ways Plato’s claim about the realm of ideas. Parts of Plato’s Timaeus were widely read in the Middle Ages. In the dialogue, Socrates, the Pythagorean philosopher Timaeus, the Sophist politician Critias, and the politician and military leader Hermocrates, first discuss politics before turning to cosmology and the origins of the world. The dialogue does not stop with speculations on physics, but addresses Plato’s foundational ideas. These include the sensible versus the intellectual, time and space, and the nature of God. The Timaeus’s vision of God features numerous elements that Christians found familiar and sensible and therefore appropriated. Christianity accepted much of Platonism’s theory of the structure of the spiritual world even with the Platonist belief that a person did not need God’s grace to rise to a vision of God, but could achieve this without any help, through the mind’s rational ascent to the world of ideas.
The integrated and holistic view of reality found in the Timaeus would be accepted and developed by Christians. “Inseparable from the doctrine of the Logos is the cosmological view of the rerum natura, the whole, as a continuum, at once a network of natural causes and an ordo naturae whose least pattern expresses analogically a divine message.” Augustine would make this a key to his own paideia. For him, the trivium and quadrivium describe this order, and the Christian life exists within it. Disorder, conversely, is evil. The main subject of the Timaeus, the most influential of Plato’s works in the ancient and medieval West, is the natural order. The Greeks’ concept of the logos often supported Christian educational goals. However, one significant distinction between the god envisioned in the Timaeus and the Christian God is that the former creates the universe out of pre-existing matter, and is therefore an artisanal god, whereas the Christian God creates ex nihilo. Such theological conflict was smoothed over, with revelation overriding Plato, when beliefs clashed.
Featured: Teacher and students, funerary relief from Neumagen near Trier (ca. 180-185 AD).
