Liberāles Artes
The origin of the liberal arts is to be sought in the school education of the Greeks. As
early as the time of Solon, the distinction between
γυμναστική, the training of the body, and
μουσική, the training of the soul, is to be met with. Out of
μουσική was gradually developed the body of studies which embraced as its chief
content the so-called liberal arts. By the time of Aristotle (B.C. 384-322) the educational
doctrine of the Greeks reached its highest development, and his references to the liberal arts
may be taken as exhibiting this doctrine in a representative and authoritative manner. He
defines the liberal arts (
Politics, viii. 1) as the proper studies for freemen
who seek intellectual and moral excellence in general rather than what is immediately
practical as the end of their education, thus drawing a distinction between liberal and
technical education, and perhaps foreshadowing in his identification of liberal with general
culture the contrast between a general and a specialized training.
No exclusive list of seven or any other definite number of arts is to be found in any Greek
writer, nor any reference to seven as the proper number of the liberal arts. However, it is
plain that grammar was the inevitable first study in the list, and that it was followed by
instruction in rhetoric and dialectics (logic). After these came the study of one or more of
the following subjects: Arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy. Yet besides these seven, which
long afterwards came to be known as the seven liberal arts, we find mention of medicine
as a liberal art and of architecture as a liberal art, while philosophy, which was the goal
and completion of all the arts, is sometimes styled the liberal art
par
excellence (Aristot.
Met. i. 2).
By the time of Varro (B.C. 116-27) and Cicero (B.C. 106-43), the liberal arts of the Greeks
had become the recognized ground-work for the education of the Roman
liber
homo, or gentleman, and were commonly known as
artes liberales, studia
liberalia, liberales disciplinae, or
liberales
scientiae— terms which are not always identical in meaning, but which were
used loosely to indicate the school studies of the Greeks. Of these expressions,
artes liberales is the chief. The repository of information for the Romans
regarding the Greek studies was Varro's monumental work, now lost, entitled
Libri Novem
Disciplinarum. According to Ritschl (
Opusc. iii. 371), Varro's nine
“disciplines” were grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic,
astrology, music, medicine, and architecture. Astrology, of course, answers to astronomy, and
Varro's list accordingly embraces medicine and architecture in addition to the seven arts
previously enumerated.
Passing on to the time of the early Empire, the course of the liberal arts may be traced
with considerable clearness in the writings of the younger Seneca (B.C. 4-A.D. 65) and
Quintilian (A.D. 35-95), and in Philo Iudaeus. By this time the liberal arts had become
closely coördinated as a body of school instruction known as
ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία, or “encyclical education;” and although
we have no evidence that their number was then consciously limited to seven, it is quite
possible that Alexandrian influences were beginning to operate towards such a limitation.
With the promulgation of Christianity the history of the liberal arts entered on a new
phase. In the Western Church particularly there was a strong spirit of antagonism at the
first, which gradually passed into qualified tolerance, and finally changed to active
encouragement of the liberal arts on the ground that they ministered to higher spiritual
truth. This transition is to be clearly seen in the writings of Augustine (A.D. 354-430), and
it is also interesting to notice that although Varro is Augustine's great authority in all
matters pertaining to the history of the liberal arts, he does not adhere to Varro's number of
“disciplines.” Instead of Varro's nine, we find that Augustine's
enumeration embraces only seven and yet without expressly limiting the arts to that number. In
the famous treatise of Martianus Capella of Carthage, written before A.D. 439 and entitled
De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, we find for the first time an express
limitation of the arts to seven, though without attaching any significance to that number. The
book of Martianus was a popularized account of Varro's nine disciplines, and from this list of
nine Martianus explicitly excludes medicine and architecture on the ground that they were not
liberal but utilitarian studies (Eyssenhardt's edition, pp. 332, 336). No mention of the
number of the arts is to be found in Boethius (A.D. 480-525), although the name
quadrivium for the four later studies of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy
appears in his writings, and it is possible that the word
trivium as the
name for the three earlier studies—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics—dates
back to his time. Cassiodor(i)us (A.D. 480-575), in his work
De
Artibus ac Disciplinis Liberalium Litterarum, not only follows Martianus in limiting
the arts to seven, but finds a mystical hint of their excellence in the text,
“Wisdom hath builded her house; she hath hewn out her seven pillars”
(
Prov. ix. 1). The liberal arts thus became the seven supports of
Sapientia, the higher spiritual philosophy. Isidore of Seville (died A.D. 636)
copies after Cassiodor(i)us and expressly recognizes the arts as seven. Alcuin (A.D. 735-804),
in the preface to his
Grammatica, presses the interpretation of the text
suggested by Cassiodor(i)us and finds the liberal arts in the Scriptures as a matter of direct
interpretation. Alcuin's pupil, Rabanus Maurus, in his book
De Clericorum
Institutione (iii. 27), written in the year 819, after a full description of each of
the seven arts, calls them
septem artes liberales, apparently the first
instance in history of the use of this term. The
septem artes liberales
are thus the ancient
artes liberales Christianized, and to the end of the
Middle Ages they remained the substance of school instruction, not being disturbed until the
Renaissance.
Grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics, which composed the
trivium, were
also named “arts” as distinguished from the four
“disciplines” which made up the
quadrivium. The term
artes sermocinales, or the arts pertaining to expression, is another
name for the
trivium, and
artes reales, or the
substantial sciences, another name for the
quadrivium. Still another name
for the
quadrivium is “mathematics.” Moreover,
inasmuch as the seven arts culminated in the higher study of philosophy, it is clear that the
ancient and mediæval world not only entertained the distinction between literary
studies, on the one side, and sciences, on the other, as well as the notion that both find
their goal and completion in philosophical studies, but that in so doing they likewise laid
down the lines upon which European university education was to be subsequently modelled.