The Seven Liberal Arts
When Rome dissolved in the sixth century,
Roman genius emerged as the Universal Christian Church, an inspired
religious sect grown spontaneously into a vehicle which invested
ultimate responsibility for personal salvation in the sovereign
individual. The Roman Church hit upon schooling as a useful adjunct, and
so what few schools could be found after the fall of Rome were in
ecclesiastical hands, remaining there for the next eleven or twelve
centuries. Promotion inside the Church began to depend on having first
received training of the Hellenic type. Thus a brotherhood of thoughtful
men was created from the demise of the Empire and from the necessity of
intellectually defining the new mission.
As the Church experimented with schooling,
students met originally at the teacher’s house, but gradually some
church space was dedicated for the purpose. Thanks to competition among
Church officials, each Bishop strove to offer a school and these, in
time to be called Cathedral schools, attracted attention and some
important sponsorship, each being a showcase of the Bishop’s own
educational taste.
When the Germanic tribes evacuated northern
Europe, overrunning the south, cathedral schools and monastic schools
trained the invading leadership—a precedent of disregarding local
interests which has continued ever after. Cathedral schools were the
important educational institutions of the Middle Ages; from them derived
all the schools of western Europe, at least in principle.
In practice, however, few forms of later
schooling would be the intense intellectual centers these were. The
Seven Liberal Arts made up the main curriculum; lower studies were
composed of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Grammar was an
introduction to literature, rhetoric an introduction to law and history,
dialectic the path to philosophical and metaphysical disputation.
Higher studies included arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
Arithmetic was well beyond simple calculation, entering into descriptive
and analytical capacities of numbers and their prophetic use (which
became modern statistics); geometry embraced geography and surveying;
music covered a broad course in theory; astronomy prepared entry into
physics and advanced mathematics.
Between the eleventh and the fourteenth
centuries, an attempt to reduce the influence of emotionality in
religion took command of church policy. Presenting the teachings of the
Church in scientific form became the main ecclesiastical purpose of
school, a tendency called scholasticism. This shift from emotion
to intellect resulted in great skill in analysis, in comparison and
contrasts, in classifications and abstraction, as well as famous verbal
hairsplitting—like how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
Scholasticism became the basis for future upper-class schooling.
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