Nobody Really Cares About the Liberal Arts: Part 1

The 'humanities' is a problematic term . . .

Since we don't know what the humanities are, it is natural to suggest in their place the hallowed and venerable liberal arts.

The arts are seven in number, as every schoolboy used to know, comprising the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Nitpickers love to point out the arbitrary selection - famously the Roman polymath Varro seems to have included medicine and architecture to bring the total to nine. This canon had no discernible effect, beyond giving ammunition to bores and pedants from the time of our Vandal Renaissance man Martianus Capella to the present. The fact is that these seven arts were always privileged, and given the status of the number seven in Pythagorean and broader Hellenistic culture, we were probably foreordained to have seven, a three and a four.

These liberal arts form the basis of most forms of western education from the Roman through to the twentieth century, although often considered merely propaedeutic. The Romans thought that the other arts were propaedeutic to rhetoric, and rhetoric ultimately to statesmanship and law; the medievals, like Hugh of St. Victor, thought of the liberal arts as propaedeutic to the sacra pagina. 

We can imagine the liberal arts both vertically and horizontally.

The horizontal model is perhaps the older one - it is this model that informs Martianus' De nuptiis, or On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury, perhaps the greatest of all works which fewer than three dozen people in the world have read since the year 1992. Mercury, Profitable Seeking, as it were, wants to get married - but all the best catches are already taken. Fortunately, he gets his fourth choice, the maiden Philology - who has seven handmaids, who hymn the bridal couple on the way to their marriage bed, that is, the seven liberal arts. If the seven arts lead anywhere for Martianus, they lead to consummation of the union of Profitable Seeking and Love of Language. Jupiter is rather eager for their children, but there is no notion of what their children might be. The conclusion is probably something like a late-Roman version of courtliness - quickness combined with learning leads to certain type of cultivation appropriate to a gentleman. With reason did C. S. Lewis observe that the cosmos "which has produced the bee-orchid and the giraffe" has brought forth "nothing stranger than Martianus Capella."

To find the vertical arts, we need to turn to the Middle Ages. One could point to the most famous example, Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus, which in so many ways should be considered instead an Antimartianus, but I find Alan's turgid mannerism tiresome. A better example is the De exilio animae et patria, 'On the Soul's Exile and Homeland,' ascribed to Honorius Augustodunensis, which depicts a journey through seven cities, each commanded by a great authority, the City of Grammar commanded by Donatus, et cetera. The end of the journey, the homeland, is the study of sacred scripture itself. That precise allegory can be found visually, for example, in Biagio d'Antonio da Firenze's (15c) allegorical painting, now in the Musée Condé in Chantilly.


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D'Antonio was coming at the end of an era. I happened to come across this example of a wedding chest (in true Martianian fashion) in a museum in Birmingham, Alabama, ascribed to workshop of Francesco Pesellino, a slightly younger contemporary of D'Antonio:

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In terms of their figural components, these two depictions are exactly the same: both depict the virginal Ars with its corresponding master, Tubalcain for Music, for example, or Donatus for grammar. The difference is that they are all in row in Peselli's- if any interpretation of progression is possible, the centrality of Astrologia provides it, who alone gestures upwards, and who can seeming be reached either through the trivium or the other three arts of the quadrivium.

So the Renaissance returns to the horizontal conception of the arts. If they aim at anything, it is anchored in a totalizing conception of antiquity, an antiquity worth recovering for its sake, and which serves actively as a model for contemporary life. Succeeding generations survived only on the fumes of this enthusiasm - occasionally, perhaps, one needed to defend why Latin verse composition should take up so many waking hours of a twelve-year old boy's life, but in general no apology was needed. The arts were taught because that's what education was for. Someone might go on to the higher studies of divinity, or the lower studies of law - but neither were considered a determinative final cause for the study of the liberal arts.

At the same time, the arts narrowed. The delicate balance of the other six maidens was always in danger of being overwhelmed by the overwhelming height and girth of Donatus' mistress, the maiden Grammar. Grammar, broadly understood to include the study of literature, one by one dispatched the other arts of the quadrivium, reducing them to dilettante pursuits, suitable for airy old vicars and eccentrics, and perhaps the occasional specialists, but only necessary for the young in very, very small doses. The trivium fared better, and rhetoric held out the longest, given its connection with political and civic life.

Such are the conditions under which the modern (American) liberal arts college - which from its beginning, was really little more than a liberal art college, with its various faculty mostly specializing in one branch of grammar or another-English literature, ancient languages, modern languages and literatures, criticism, even composition, wrenched from the dying grasp of rhetoric, all branches of grammar traditionally understood. Oddly, history was its only serious competitor, even though venerable antiquity did not consider it a liberal discipline at all.

Certainly, they would have the odd math or science requirement, maybe a little fine arts, maybe even a stiffening of servile disciplines - but in no sense did they expect their graduates to really be masters of anything but Grammar.

It is no surprise then that the liberal arts colleges don't teach the liberal arts in their entirety, and certainly do not ensure that their bachelors are firmly grounded in all seven. Even laudable developments, like the slow spread of Great Books programs, accomplish little more than cementing the absolute dominance and centrality of Grammar in liberal arts education.

So if the liberal arts colleges don't really care about the liberal arts, does anybody? Will any one of the liberal arts' staunch defenders seriously maintain that these seven arts alone should serve a unique role in the formation of character? Will anyone propose a new verticality for our scattered and neglected arts?

Nothing has really changed since the Vandal Renaissance. If our liberal arts colleges aim at anything, it is once again a certain curious specimen of courtliness - an ability to listen to NPR and nod intelligently along, to become suitably breathless at the latest novel every one is talking about, and excited about what new device Apple will come out with next, a musical taste refined enough to appreciate the occasional underappreciated classic like Telemann and to sneer at Pachelbel's Canon, tapping one's foot assiduously to the latest folk-rock crossover album to come out of Sweden. Maybe even enough culture to whip out a smartphone on a starry night, to get those old constellations highlighted in red.

That is our courtliness - and for better or worse, it's the best our liberal arts education has to offer.