St. Bonaventura: On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology. Zachary Hayes translation. St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute of Bonaventure University, 1996.
Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth. In Craig W. Kallendorf, ed.: Humanist Educational Treatises. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Having secured their position in the remains of the Roman world, Christian thinkers needed to come to terms with substantial achievements of that world—perhaps especially its philosophy, which inclined toward skepticism concerning ‘the gods.’ Christians were of course equally skeptical, indeed scornful, of pagan deities and the religious practices and institutions supporting their worship. But they surely could not tolerate skepticism directed at the God of the Bible. What other pre-Christian philosophic motifs, and what other pre-Christian arts, including the liberal arts, could be taken up without threatening one’s salvation?
Early in the third century AD, the Carthaginian theologian Tertullian answered, ‘not much’— a least when it came to philosophy. As he put it, famously, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” A millennium later, however, Thomas Aquinas thought otherwise, deploying Aristotelian philosophy to understand much of God’s creation, the natural world, while subordinating that world, and that philosophy, to God and His revelation. His friend, Bonaventure (born Giovanni di Fidanza in the early 1220s) took at different route, in effect sacralizing all the arts, including the liberal arts, by explaining them as pathways to God. He calls this “reduction” by which he does not mean diminishment, as ‘we moderns’ tend to mean. Quite the opposite: He means tracing all the arts back to their origin in God. As translator Zachary Hayes puts it in his helpful introduction, “none of the arts, including philosophy, ought to be allowed to stand as an independent and self-sufficient discipline.”
Born in Italy and educated at the University of Paris, where he joined the faculty, “The Seraphic Doctor” eventually became General Minister of the Order of St. Francis. He was by all accounts a capable administrator as well as an accomplished theologian, so his interest in practice as well as theory, and thus in the arts, came readily to him. And both theory and practice are rightly sacralized because, as the Apostle James writes, “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the God of Lights.” Multiple gifts to mankind come from a single Source, “the fontal source of light.”
This brings Bonaventure to the first of his many divisions of his topic. There is exterior light, “the light of mechanical art”; inferior light, “the light of sense perception”; interior light, “the light of philosophical knowledge”; and superior light, “the light of grace and of Sacred Scripture.”
Mechanical light illuminates the forms of artifacts. Following Hugh of St. Victor [1], Bonaventure considers such “servile” knowledge to include weaving, armor-making, agriculture, hunting, navigation, medicine, and drama. This may seem a decidedly heterogeneous list, but they are linked together by their purposes. “Every mechanical art is intended either for our consolation or for our comfort,” banishing “either sorrow or need,” and is accordingly “either useful or enjoyable.” The strict subordination of poēsis to philosophy, seen in Plato, remains in Bonaventure.
Sense knowledge “provides light for the apprehension of natural forms.” It takes the five forms provided by the five senses. He endorses St. Augustine’s account of the senses, which holds that sight is the purest form of inferior light. If mixed with air, this light becomes sensible to hearing; if mixed with vapor, smell; if mixed with fluid, taste; and if with “the solidity of the earth,” touch. Sense knowledge is physical, “thriv[ing] in the nerves, whose nature is to be clear and penetrable.” That is, the nerves provide accurate information and the information they provide comes from the outside, in. “Because of the well-defined nature of each sense, no apprehension would be possible without a certain similarity and correspondence between the sense-organ and the object.”
It is with the interior light of “intelligible truths” that philosophy deals. Bonaventure divides philosophic inquiry into three fields: rational, “the truth of speech”; natural, “the truth of things”; and moral, “the truth of conduct.” In terms of what we call academic ‘disciplines,’ rational philosophy “enlightens the mind,” enabling it to discern “the principles of understanding”—the discipline of logic; natural philosophy enlightens the mind to discern “the causes of being”—physics, but also mathematics and metaphysics; and moral philosophy enlightens the mind respecting the order of things, which is moral or practical philosophy. Each of these kinds of philosophy guides a certain human capacity or power. Rational or “discursive” philosophy directs the interpretive power; natural philosophy “directs itself“; and moral philosophy directs “the motive power.” Physics deals with “the generation and corruption of things; mathematics deals with “abstract forms in terms of their intelligible causes,” and metaphysics deals with “the knowledge of all beings according to their ideal causes, tracing them back to the one first Principle from which they proceeded, that is, to God, in as far as God is the Beginning, the End, and the Exemplar.” Moral philosophy concerns the lives of the individual, the family, and the political community.
Rational or discursive philosophy has three aims: “to reveal one’s thought,” in which case it pertains to grammar; “to move another to greater faith,” the act of teaching, in which it pertains to logic; or “to arouse love or hatred in another,” in which it pertains to rhetoric. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric are of course three of the liberal arts; this is why for Bonaventure philosophy ranks among the ‘arts.’ Grammar enables the reasoner to apprehend; logic enables him to judge; rhetoric, to persuade. “Reason apprehends through appropriate speech, judges through true speech, and persuades through eloquent speech.”
The exterior, inferior/sensual, and interior/intelligible forms of knowledge are all subordinate to the “superior light,” the salvific truth of sacred Scripture as given to us by the God of light. Scripture can be understood literally and spiritually. There are three ways in which it may be understood spiritually: the allegorical way, which teaches us what to believe, and whose masters are Augustine and Anselm; the moral way, which teaches us how to live, whose masters are Gregory and Bernard; and the anagogical way, which teaches how to “cling to God,” whose masters are Pseudo-Dionysius and Richard of Chichester. “But Hugh [of St. Victor] excels all three” of these pairs. At the end of times, all the lesser forms of knowledge will be destroyed, along with the world to which they pertain, followed by the new Heaven and the new Earth prophesied in the Book of Revelation. The lesser knowledges stem from God because the heavens and the earth as we know them were created by God. “All those lights had their origin in a single light” and “all these branches of knowledge are ordered to the knowledge of sacred Scripture,” “contained in it,” “perfected by it,” and “ordered to the eternal illumination by means of it.” Of them, the anagogical way of understanding Scripture brings us closest to God.
This means that even the lowest form of knowledge, the knowledge of those who practice the mechanical arts, bring men closer to God. “Every artisan who fashions a work does so in order to derive, praise, benefit, or delight from it,” serving a “noble, useful or agreeable good.” “It was for these three reasons that God made the soul rational, namely, that of its own accord, it might praise God, serve God, find delight in God, and be at rest; and this takes place through charity,” through agapic love. “Behold,” then, “how the illumination of the mechanical arts is a path to the illumination of sacred Scripture,” manifesting as it does “true wisdom” on its own level. Accordingly, “sacred Scripture quite rightly makes frequent use” of similitudes derived from the mechanical arts. The same is true of the higher-level light of speech, reason, and persuasion—philosophy. In terms of natural philosophy, it points to the Son of God as the “art of the Father,” as Augustine calls Him, “the union of the rational soul with the material body,” the “Word of God as begotten and incarnate.” In terms of moral philosophy, which “is concerned principally with rectitude,” the rectitude of the will, its central term, right, has “three meanings.” First, it can mean something in the center of two “extreme points.” By this, Bonaventure doesn’t refer to Aristotle’s doctrine of virtue as the ‘mean between two extremes’ of deficiency and surplus but rather to God as the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega, with Christ as the “Mediator between God and humanity,” both divine and human “so that this mediator might lead humanity back to God.” Second, the right conforms “to that by which it is ruled.” “That person…lives rightly who is guided by the regulation of the divine law,” aligning his will with God’s will, God’s commands. Finally, “something is called right when its summit is raised upward, as in the case of a human being with its upright posture.” Morally, this means the condition in which “the apex of the mind itself” is “raised aloft,” toward God. “This is what actually happens when our rational nature assents to the first truth for its own sake and above all things, when our irascible nature strives after the highest generosity, and when our concupiscible nature clings to the good.” Such a nature achieve union with God, “a union which takes place through charity.” Without charity, “all knowledge is vain because no one comes to the Son except through the Holy Spirit who teaches us all the truth, who is blessed forever.“
The Renaissance Humanists take a noticeably different approach to the liberal arts and, by implication, to the arts generally. At the same time, they are not to be confused with Machiavelli, who is sometimes lumped in with them. The Humanists do not sharply separate secular and spiritual life from one another, as Tertullian and Machiavelli both do, although for radically different purposes. Nor do they attempt to thoroughly integrate secular and spiritual life in the manner of Bonaventure.
Professor of logic at the University of Padua, papal secretary, secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, Pier Paolo Vergerio published The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth in 1403. The free-born youth was Ubertino du Carrara, whose family ruled Padua. Vergerio recalls that Ubertino’s grandfather, Francisco the Elder, “the wisest man of his time in general knowledge,” identified “three ways that parents could help their children”: to call them by an honorable name; to settle them in a renowned city; and to instruct them in the liberal arts. Ubertino’s father had met the first two obligations, and Vergerio would assist him in the third, deploying a wise pedagogical strategy. He brings Ubertino into the liberal arts by treating like a teacher showing him the reasons for his own education.
Of those obligations, “instruction in the honorable arts and liberal disciplines” is the most important because it enables even children of “obscure family origins and humble homelands” to overcome those disadvantages. Conversely, “if someone,” however well-born, “is not educated from youth in the liberal arts, or if he is infected with illiberal training, there is little hope that in later years, of his own accord, he can just cast aside the latter or take up the former without difficulty”; “the foundations for living well” must be laid “in youth,” the mind “trained to virtue while it is young and impressionable,” “preserv[ing] throughout life the impressions it takes on now.” A man of “lofty rank…cannot say or do anything in secret,” and so will be exposed as dishonorable if illiberal. Echoing Aristotle’s account of the great-souled or magnanimous man, Versilio tells Ubertino, “it is only fair that those who wish all the greatest things to be due themselves, be themselves obliged to excel in the greatest things.” “There is no more firm or solid rationale for ruling than this: that those who rule be judged by all to be the worthiest to rule.” Thus, Vergerio firmly links liberal education to aristocratic honor; unlike Machiavelli, a century later, he is far from advising a prince to learn “how not to be good.” On the contrary, he would have a young man who is an aristocrat ‘by convention,’ by inheritance, to aspire to become an aristocrat in Aristotle’s sense: among the few genuinely virtuous rulers.
The allusion to Aristotle is telling. Vergerio fixes his student’s attention on the classical more than the Christian virtues. Persons are “composed of soul and body”; “strength of body and intellect are “due to nature,” to which one should be grateful, “cultivat[ing] them through the right sort of studies in the liberal arts.” We, but “especially those to whom nature has given an intellect worthy of free men,” should “turn our attention particularly to those studies for which we are naturally inclined and suited, and to devote ourselves entirely to them.” Free men “should not be allowed to languish in sloth nor be caught up in illiberal affairs.”
What, then, are “the signs of a liberal temper”? A man of liberal temperament hungers for praise, being “inflamed by love of glory”; Vergerio does not expect that the young aristocrat will be a philosopher, inflamed by love of wisdom. As Plato and Cicero teach, the love of glory is “the next best motive” after the “wondrous longing for wisdom.” The young aristocrat obeys his elders, taking “good advice” from them, understanding that the young “lack experience in life and are unable to grasp rationally the true good of virtue and the face of moral rectitude.” He “always love[s] to do what is right” and, as Socrates observes in Plato’s Republic, his “naturally well-constituted mind…does not hate or scorn anyone but puts the best construction on whatever is said or done,” even as a good bodily constitution “digests everything easily and turns it into nourishment.” Indeed, Vergerio cites Socrates, who advised young men to “look at their own image in the mirror,” not in Narcissus-like self-absorption but with a mind either to make a homely appearance “attractive through their virtues or to avoid dishonoring a good appearance with vices.” Better still, he can gaze at “a living mirror,” emulating “the behavior of someone else of high character.” For their part, “older men in general should maintain at all times a consistent pattern of gravity and discretion, but especially in the presence of their juniors.” As John Locke would tell the father of the “Young Gentleman,” two centuries later, “ill patterns are surer to be followed than good precepts.”
Youths “who are good should be strengthened and assisted through practice and precept,” while “those who are bad and blameworthy should be corrected.” Some youths of bad character “are only following their nature,” while “others lack experience” and still others “suffer from both deficiencies.” In addressing Ubertino, Vergerio particularly remarks that the young “are especially generous and liberal by nature because they have not experienced need and have not sought wealth for themselves by their own effort; it is unusual for one who has amassed wealth by his own efforts to waste it rashly,” but you, scion of Paduan lords (he implies) have obviously not expended any such efforts. Do not, therefore, confuse liberality with lavishness. Nor should you confuse magnanimity with high-spirited arrogance, becoming “rule to others, while exalting” yourself. Such youths “are quick to reveal secrets” because “they want to be seen as in the know”—lacking the discretion they will need if they are to become prudent rulers. “And because they are inexperienced at the same time, they think they tell the truth but are deceived in many things.” For these reasons, young men “should be discouraged most of all from the vanity of lying,” attempting “to get around old men with their deceptions.” Better that they “say little and to speak seldom, unless bidden to do so.” This will save them from “speaking at the wrong time” and from exposing their ignorance.
With their lack of experience, the young are “excessively credulous.” They change their opinions easily, “since their humors are in motion due to growth and they have in abundance the heat which is the principal cause of motion,” “follow[ing] their passions above all” because “the rational powers and prudence that could moderate their desires are weak.” Accordingly, “we must take care that our young people are kept pure for as long as possible, for premature sexual activity weakens both bodily and mental strength.” Keep them busy, physically and mentally, “for leisure makes young people inclined to lust and every intemperance”; “solitude…caresses a weak mind with constant thoughts about such things and prevents it from finding diversion elsewhere.” Keep them away from wine, as well, but “above all”—and here Vergerio at last invokes piety—it is “proper for a well-educated youth to respect and practice religion and to be steeped in religious belief” (while not being “carried away into old wives’ tales”) “from his earliest youth.” But even this has a ‘humanist’ aims: “What human thing will be worthy of respect to one who holds the divine in contempt?” Warn young men against “utter[ing] curses against holy things” or “hold[ing] up sacred names to scorn” or “swear[ing] lightly of their own accord, for those who swear rashly usually swear often.” (As, one might add, also do liars.)
Youths should learn to accept criticism and admonishment. This advances self-knowledge. And “people who won’t listen to anything they dislike are the ones most vulnerable to deception,” surely a fatal flaw, especially among rulers. “Excessive parental leniency has generally softened and enervated young people,” a phenomenon “manifest in those who have been brought up in luxury under widowed mothers.” It is better to follow “the custom among certain nations” of bringing up children “outside their city, or at any rate among relatives and friends outside the home,” since “living in someone else’s home makes them less unruly and more inclined toward the better studies that we call liberal.”
By concentrating a young aristocrat’s mind on how to educate a young aristocrat, Vergerio aims at hastening the youth’s maturation. Having thus prepared his student for a liberal education by inclining him to want one, he turns to what liberal studies are.
“We call those studies liberal…which are worthy of a free man: they are those through which virtue and wisdom are either practiced or sought, and by which the body or mind is disposed towards all the best things.” Through liberal study, “people customarily seek honor and glory which for the wise man are the principal rewards of virtue,” even as “profit and pleasure are laid down as ends for illiberal intellects.” Vergerio thus defines the purpose of liberal studies ‘aristocratically’— presenting wisdom as the quest for honor and glory, as befits the likely inclinations of his student. (It should be noted that the Carraresi family had been a major patron of the arts generally, including the liberal arts as taught at the University of Padua.) “We will not be, I say, wise in old age unless we have first begun to be wise in youth.” As an example, Vergerio cites the exchange between an old man and a young man. The old man jibed, “one who is so wise in his youth will inevitably be senile in his old age,” to which the youth replied, “So you must have been remarkably wise in your youth.” Wisdom begins with wit.
It won’t begin at all if suppressed “by threats and floggings.” “Excessive freedom unhinges good qualities” but “sharp unrelenting criticism saps intellectual energies and quenches the little fires that nature lights in children,” who “will dare nothing” if they “fear everything.” Special care should be taken with students inclined to melancholy; “it is a good idea to give them their head to enjoy freedom and fun.” As Aristotle and, later, Robert Burton knew “a great many clever people have this sort of complexion.”
In keeping with the aristocratic ethos, the arts “that have the greatest affinity with cultivating virtue and obtaining glory” are the liberal arts and the arts of war. Your father, he tells Umbertino, wanted him to study only the arts of war (as Machiavelli would advise). But “you have embraced both with such tenacious diligence and zeal that you have left your contemporaries far behind,” not to say your ancestors, as you attempt “to add new renown in letters to your family’s old glory in arms.” You aspire not only to patronize the liberal arts but to practice them. Here, Vergerio displays his own mastery of rhetoric, carefully separating his student from his student’s father, in effect becoming his new father. While an “old Roman emperor” called the liberal arts “a poison and a public plague,” political communities “would be far more blessed, Plato says, if philosophers ruled or if their rulers happened to be philosophers,” and while “to be sure, it is true that the disciplines of letters take away neither madness nor wickedness,” they “are a great help to those who were born for virtue and wisdom, and they often provide the means for uncovering stupidity or more destructive kinds of wrongdoing,” which Socrates’ dialectical questioning indeed did. Vergerio now begins to point his student beyond the love of honor, beyond the claim that wisdom aims at glory. Indeed, “the pursuit of knowledge gives birth to wondrous pleasures in the human mind and in due course bears the richest fruits,” including a respite from the troubles of the life of ruling. “When we are alone and free from all our other cares, what better thing can we do than resort to our books.”
“What has been entrusted to books endures forever.” Sculpture, painting, architecture—the arts Renaissance rulers prized and paid for—cannot really “describe the times,” as histories can, or “readily disclose motivation in all its variety.” But it is literature that “not only renders speech but also distinguishes styles of speaking and represents people’s thoughts.” As Socrates taught, a regime might readily be seen in a polis, but it is also present in a soul. A regime is a way of life, and “what way of life…can be more delightful, or indeed more beneficial, than to read and write all the time: for moderns to understand things ancient; for present generations to converse with their posterity; and thus to make every time our own, both past and future?”
“What a happy family books make! Absolutely honest and well-behaved,” with no “fussing, shouting, rapacity, voracity, stubbornness in the face of authority.” Perhaps the family of books is more congenial than the Carrari?
It may be that a compromise can be worked out. The study of good books might enhance the family name. Those of “truly noble mind” and those “who are obliged to involve themselves in public affairs and human communities,” can attend primarily to history, moral philosophy, and rhetoric (“which is a distinct part of civics”). Moral philosophy can provide students with “correct views”; eloquence can enable them to win over “the minds of the masses”; history “helps us with both.” History teaches “things worth knowing from many centuries,” enabling us “to produce an example to illuminate every situation,” even as Aristotelian ethics guides us to considering right conduct in every situation. Of these arts, rhetoric is the one that “has now fallen almost totally into disuse,” not only in the law courts, where advocates now content themselves and the judges merely by citing laws against one another, but also in political communities, whether of the one or the few, in which princes and lords “want an opinion explained in few words and arguments brought nakedly into council, or in republics, where “the most brilliant speakers are thought to be those who speak artlessly and at great length.” Today, “in making speeches, nearly everyone uses those arts which may be more properly described as contrary to art.”
Beyond the public realm, many more liberal arts beckon. Poetics and music, closely related, were much esteemed by the ancient Greeks, who considered no one “liberally educated unless he knew how to sing and play the lyre.” And rightly so: “not all movements of the soul, but those which accord with reason, contribute to a harmonious life,” and “the use of musical modes is highly effective in relaxing the mind and calming the passions,” if it is used for that purpose. It can also be used for the opposite purpose, as the warlike Carrari surely know.
More comprehensive than knowledge of the human things, “knowledge about nature is especially appropriate to an in conformity with the human intellect, for through this knowledge we understand the principles and processes of natural things, along with “the causes and effects of the motions and transformations of those thing which are contained in heaven and on earth.” With arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, “we are able to explain many things that generally seem miraculous to the vulgar.” As for “the divine science,” metaphysics, Vergerio gives it rather short shrift.
Each of these studies “could absorb all a man’s efforts.” It is best “to be content with modest learning,” just as it is best to be content “with modest wealth.” A man should “embrace the study most suitable to himself,” since some souls “are abstracted from sensible and material things, and more suited to understanding immaterial substances and universals,” while others incline to “busy themselves with particulars,” being “suited to practical wisdom and natural science.” (“Aristotle, indeed, being concerned with the active, civic life, believed one should not over-indulge in the liberal arts nor linger over them in pursuit of perfection,” becoming “of little use to his city.”) “People should follow the studies appropriate to their natural bent,” while selecting only the best books within their field of study. Do not attempt to “take in everything at the same time,” rendering yourself incapable of retaining anything in particular. In this and in other matters, “the easiest person to deceive is yourself.”
Vergerio concludes with advice concerning non-liberal arts which, if properly managed, need not be illiberal but can support liberal studies, now reaffirming the authority of Umbertino’s father while effectively putting him in his place. Your father “glories most in his capacity for toil,” exhibiting praiseworthy physical courage. “One must believe he fears nothing—except, perhaps, the possibility that he might die an old man.” And indeed “we should not care overmuch for life,” “bear[ing] all things with equanimity and accept[ing] death calmly, whenever it comes, even hastening to meet it when circumstance or necessity demands.” “We ought not to fear that we have perchance lived too little, but rather that we have lived too little of the life we have lived.” Teach children “from their first years the capacity to dare great things and endure difficulties.”
As to leisure: music, yes, since singing and percussion are “quite seemly,” although “whistling is less suitable to a gentleman”; dancing exercises the body but often makes young men “lustful and vain”; chess is more consonant with manliness, offering “a semblance of fighting and hostile contest,” but dice “either fosters a greed unsuited to a free person or a softness unbefitting a man.” There will be times, however, when “one needs to do absolutely nothing and be entirely free from work, so as to meet once again the demands of work and toil.” As Charles de Gaulle asked his friend, “Malraux, do you know how to do nothing?” [2]
“I have written the foregoing for you, Ubertino, as I promised at the beginning, not to remind you that you should be doing something, but to show you to yourself.” If you “follow nature’s lead,” cultivating your “native gifts,” you will not “fail yourself” but proceed to fulfill the “brilliant promise” that I see in you. “Do not be false to those outstanding qualities you possess.”
As it happened, Ubertino had little chance. Two years after this book was written, the Carrara family was hurled from rule of Padua. His father and older brothers were killed, and it is unclear what became of Vergerio’s student. What is clear that, as Vergerio hints in his encomium to books, the Character and Studies endured far longer, enjoying many printings in the fifteenth century and after. Deprived of his professorship by the conquering Venetians, Vergerio found employment with the pope.
Notes
- On Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon, see “Reading with Hugh of St. Victor” on this website, under the category, “Philosophers.”
- “It isn’t easy for a man to force himself into a discipline of idleness, but it essential. Life is not work: to work without stopping sends a man mad. Remember that. And to want to do so is a bad sign: those of your colleagues who could not stop working were by no means the best.” Charles de Gaulle, quoted in André Malraux: Felled Oaks: Conversation with De Gaulle. Irene Clephane and Linda Asher translation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p.41.
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