86 Shank
usually treated knowledge of nature in terms borrowed from the Greek.
Vitruvius (d. 25 BCE) used the terms physica (natural [philosophy]) and
physicus (natural [philosopher]) to denote the theory and the theoreti-
cians of nature. While philosophia usually encompassed the acquisition
and evaluation of all theoretical knowledge, Vitruvius specifi cally asso-
ciated the word with the inquiry into nature: “philosophia explains the
nature of things, which in Greek is called physiologia.”^7
Some intellectuals in late Roman antiquity thought of philosophy in
loftier terms—as a goal to which lesser disciplines could lead. Augustine
(d. 430 CE) wrote De ordine, a treatise on the seven liberal arts or, as he
called them, “disciplines,” that is, “sciences” (Latin translated episte ̄me ̄,
the Attic Greek word for the highest form of knowledge and still the
modern Greek word for “science,” as both scientia and disciplina). After
passing through the verbal disciplines (grammar, logic, and rhetoric),
the student seeking enlightenment ascended in abstraction from musical
theory through astronomy and geometry, presumably to the pinnacle of
arithmetic, the simplest discipline, which required no sense perception.
The mathematical disciplines were thus the highest rungs on the ladder to
philosophy, leading eventually to the true Neoplatonic goal, “the One.”^8
All this no doubt seems very abstract and remote from the study of
nature. But for Augustine and his Neoplatonist contemporaries, the four
mathematical disciplines did deal with the natural world. Music and as-
tronomy treated the ratios of harmony and the celestial spheres, while
number and “continuous quantity” (the subjects of arithmetic and ge-
ometry) were among nature’s fundamental elements. After converting to
Christianity, Augustine touted these disciplines as handmaidens (ancillae)
useful for understanding scripture. His later grappling with creation shows
more esteem for the problem of understanding the natural world than did
many of his philosophical contemporaries.^9 His conviction that the Cre-
ator had implanted the seeds of natural causality in all things makes his
brand of Christianity look downright empirical among the ethereal Neo-
platonisms, Gnosticisms, and mystery religions of his contemporaries.^10
In Martianus Capella’s famous “pagan” encyclopedia, The Marriage of
Philology and Mercury (ca. 400 CE), the liberal arts also served as hand-
maidens, this time to Eloquence (Philologia). Throughout the early Middle
Ages in particular, this work offered a valuable elementary introduction to
the four mathematical disciplines.^11 The Roman valuation of eloquence
inspired many treatises on grammar and rhetoric, leaving Latin introduc-
tions to the other liberal arts or to philosophy in shorter supply. No one
felt more keenly than Boëthius the urgency of addressing this defect, but
by then it was almost too late. Hoping to translate all of Plato and Ar-