The liberal arts as we know them did not begin to emerge in their familiar
form in Christian Europe until the work of the polymath Boethius (480– 525 AD),
the Roman Christian whose treatises on arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and
music are foundational for what he himself wasfirst to call thequadrivium.^12
Grammar, rhetoric, and logic—thetrivium—had been standard for some time.
But Boethius, though a layman, was himself also a biblical theologian, author
offive majoropuscula sacra, and these, with hisConsolation of Philosophy,
make of him one of the last Roman thinkers to standfirmly astride two
worlds, Roman and Christian. Culturally speaking, his Lady Philosophy is
both a reincarnation of Athena and of Dame Chokma in the biblical Wisdom
books. Though in hisConsolationthe epistemological object is a recollection
of human dignity and freedom, the transcendent wisdom Lady Philosophy
personifies is an ontological presence of transcendent Being.
From thence onward to the nineteenth century it is difficult tofind a major
European humanist whose intellectual formation was not in some way
grounded in study of the sacred page. Hugh of St Victor considered this legacy
from his vantage point as a master in the cathedral schools that were growing
up in France, and which would be the chief institutional means by which
monastic scholia were within a century to be supplanted in intellectual
importance by the rise of universities.^13 For Hugh, in his magnum opus on
liberal education, theDidascalicon, the‘seven [arts] to be studied by beginners’
were assigned thus by the ancients not merely because they found them of
‘higher value’, but principally as‘the best tools, thefittest entrance through
which the way to philosophic truth is opened to our intellect’.^14 This instru-
mentalist approach regarding the arts presupposes a still higher intrinsic good;
Richard of St Victor, one of his students, comments that‘All arts serve the
Divine Wisdom, and each lower art, if rightly ordered, leads to a higher one.
Thus, the relation existing between word and thing requires that grammar,
dialectic and rhetoric should minister to history’.^15 We can still hear Augustine’s
voice; the liberal arts function like signs in a meta-language which it is neces-
sary to learn if we want a full bodied engagement with human wisdom as it
comes to us, both in history and ultimately in sacred history, of which, on the
Christian view, all other story is either anticipation or refraction.
A century later, Bonaventure takes the whole instrumental hierarchy of
learning here implied and turns it round so that all of the arts are both a means
of common grace and, in each case, a trace (vestigium) of that Divine Wisdom
(^12) On Boethius see Maria Colish,Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
(^13) Hugh of St Victor,Didascalicon de studio legendi, trans. Jerome Taylor asThe Didascalicon
of Hugh of St Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts(New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).
(^14) Didascalicon3.3. The notion of the seven liberal arts as pillars of wisdom (cf. Prov. 9:1)
rather than wisdom itself—that is, as a corpus of instrumental goods—is persistent.
(^15) Richard of St Victor,Doctrinale17.31.
Scripture in theStudiumand the Rise of the Humanities 169