Hi, I'm new to the group but have been catching up via the text and the videos and will be joining the Zoom this evening for Book IX.
Just curious--Augustine talks a lot about the "liberal arts." Did this term mean essentially the same to Augustine as it does to us in the modern day? If not, what did it mean to him?
See you tonight!
Thanks,
Thad Kirk
Hi Thad,
Welcome--I hope you enjoyed last night's session! I would venture to say that A.'s conception (and direct experience) of the liberal arts has little in common with what that signifies today. His program of education more or less ends in contemplation, not action. Inasmuch as it ends in action, it ends in rhetorical expertise. Such a program (despite the contemporary revival in "classical Christian education") is all but impossible to reproduce today. But by the end of his life A. perceived that grounding in the liberal arts was insufficient for ascending to the the truth, which was otherwise accessible through simple submission to the authority of the Catholic Church.
Excerpted from the article in Fitzgerald's Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia:
Liberal Arts
In the second book of De ordine, beginning with 12.35, St. Augustine describes the process by which ratio establishes the ordo studiorum, “whereby one can advance from corporeal realities to incorporeal” (retr. 1.3). This is the first attestation of the systematization of knowledge at two levels that will later be called the trivium and the quadrivium.
To the first level, made up of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, belong the tasks of developing the means of expression (grammar); discovering the logical structure of thought, which is the basis of correct reasoning (dialectic); and translating the logical operations of dialectic into a persuasive form that can arouse the interest and move the feelings of hearers (rhetoric).
To the second level belongs the task of beate contemplari, of leading human beings by way of recognition of truth to the experience of happiness.
This second step in the process is made possible by the mathematical disciplines that lead the person from sensible, material things—rhythms (music), geometrical figures (geometry), and the movements of the heavens (astronomy)—to intelligible numbers (arithmetic), which are an index universae veritatis.