After surviving persecutions during the first and second centuries, adherents of Christianity, who at the outset belonged predominantly to the poor and uneducated classes of society, rose to the most powerful offices in the Roman Empire during the third and fourth centuries. Their new authority and status prompted questions about the nature of Christians’ relationship to classical culture in general and to the liberal arts in particular. No longer was it possible for Christians to follow the Apostle Paul saying, “As for me brothers, when I came to you, it was not with any display of oratory or philosophy, but simply to tell you what God has guaranteed” [1 Corinthians 2: 1.] Many pagan citizens, educated in the classical tradition, regarded the upstart gospel as coarse and simplistic; and when the invaders from the east appeared on the horizon, they charged Christianity with undermining the moral strength and vigor of Roman civilization. Conversely, certain church leaders despised classical culture due to past persecutions and because pagan mythology offended them both morally and theologically.
This tension between Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian traditions was experienced and addressed by many Church Fathers, such as Jerome, who feared that his love of classical letters would subject him to the divine condemnation “you are a Ciceronian, not a Christian.”1 Other leaders of the Latin church invoked pagan and Jewish accounts of Plato visiting Egypt, as seen in Augustine’s selection, in order to support their claim that the liberal arts and all classical learning derived either directly from their Scriptures or from the Egyptians, who had learned it from the Hebrews. It was Augustine who expressed what would become the medieval resolution of this question in On Christian Learning by adopting the forms of classical erudition and legitimating their use for Christians at the same time that he met pagan critics on their own ground. The work was widely cited in the subsequent centuries and is included below.
By the close of antiquity at the end of the fifth century, church leaders had appropriated classical learning and were engaged in reconciling it with Christian doctrine. Through this effort at formalization and codification, a consensus was reached upon the number, identity, and general order of the septem artes liberales,2 as was expressed in three encyclopedic handbooks written by Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus, and Isidore of Seville. The latter two were church leaders, while the treatise of the first was a pagan work that Christians nonetheless purged, cited, taught, and finally claimed as their own. All three handbooks became textbooks in the schools as learning declined amid the political and social turmoil during invasions and migrations in the subsequent centuries.
Already in the fifth century, Jerome observed about the carnage: “If a few of us survive to this point, it is not to our merits but to the mercy of God that we owe it. Countless, savage barbarians have occupied all of Gaul. Everything between the Alps and the Pyrenees, the Rhine and the ocean has been destroyed by the barbarians. . . . Time has dried our tears, and everyone, apart from a few old men not born into captivity and warfare, no longer mourns the freedom that they never knew. For, who could believe what I say: that Rome no longer fights for glory, but for survival; in fact, not even fights, but ransoms her life with gold and jewels?”3
As a result, liberal education gradually retreated into private tutorials in the homes of noble families who still remembered the ideal of eloquent and virtuous learning; into parish and episcopal schools, though these flickered on and off; and above all, into monasteries which, being small, self-sufficient, and enclosed, were best suited to preserve liberal education during a period of political unrest and military invasion. In these sanctuaries, Christians transmitted the “seven liberal arts” over the next six centuries. At the same time, they adopted the representation of the arts in female form, and this representation had a variety of significations. Underlying all these significations, however, was the irony that women were largely excluded from liberal education at the same time that they were being portrayed as personifying the liberal arts. The countervailing implications of the female imagery of the liberal arts are found in the selections from Martianus Capella, Boethius, and Christine de Pizan.