Echoes from Eternity

“To ask or search I blame thee not, for heaven
Is as the book of God before thee set,
Wherein to read his wondrous works, and learn
His seasons, hours, or days, or months, or years—
This to attain, whether heaven move or earth,
Imports not, if thou reckon right—the rest
From Man or Angel the great Architect
Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge
His secrets, to be scanned by them who ought
Rather admire; or, if they list to try
Conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens
Hath left to their disputes…” The angel Raphael to Adam in Paradise Lost 8.66-77

The strange and fragmented transition from Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages is a difficult one to study. We move from a remarkably “homogenous” Roman culture across the Mediterranean into a historical era that feels more like shattered stained glass. New “romance” vernaculars begin to develop, new kingdoms emerge, wars are fought over territory, and new literature is forged.

Despite its manifold difficulties, this time period is extremely important for understanding everything else that follows, and my particular focus here is on literary matters as they formed an important part of the “world-picture” which will in turn inform our understanding of our educational history, if we are claiming to be “classical” in any way, or even to “return” to some prior understanding of education.

I have gained a good number of new subscribers in the couple of months since I started this Substack, so it may be worth summarizing what I have done so far. I have provided a summary of the whole idea of the Trivium, and an individual look at its three parts: grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. I also have a post where I dwell on the idea of “world-picture” and this present post is in part further exploration of “world-picture,” and a look into the historical bridge between antiquity and the Middle Ages, particularly in the realm of literature.

I also am convinced that literature and education are vitally linked. Educational philosophy does not develop outside of literature, and the world-picture advanced by literature is going to inform the educational priorities of its age.

In the 21st century Anglosphere, we must try to avoid a mechanistic understanding of educational philosophy when we study the history of education prior to the 18th-20th centuries. Our present mechanistic view of education is in part a holdover from John Dewey’s ideas, stated with rather nauseating bluntness in The School and Society in which humans are just parts in a larger machine whose purpose is to serve the idol of democracy. This world-picture determines our present educational priorities, and it is expressed everywhere and especially in our literature.

The Medievals, no less than the Ancients, had a world-picture derived from nature which they inherited from their intellectual predecessors and thus had to “adapt” to their own times, especially in the light of Christianity which was at that time spreading to the four corners of the earth.

That world-picture took on a very interesting shape because of the developments I outlined in my last post about the preservation of Latin literature, particularly the limitations on the texts that the intellectuals had access to. The texts that did exist and manage to survive had deep influence on the medieval world-picture that emerged.

I would like to highlight a little more of the “bridge” between antiquity and the Middle Ages. The reason I want to highlight the particular ideas I will explore below is because those ideas would have formed the central idea of intellectual life, and a core to which all literary and educational endeavor would have been striving.

This bridge between the time periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages is what C.S. Lewis calls the “seminal period” in The Discarded Image which was itself a seminal work in the study of medieval literature. This is what Lewis identifies as a time of transition, in which he identifies “the enduring effect of the old upon the new” (pg. 48).

Prior to this post, I have hopefully shown that the basis of education in antiquity was generally a literary one: it saw passing down the literature and language of the culture (Greco-Roman society broadly) as the main goal. Out of antiquity, the “liberal arts” emerge as a fairly accepted program of study, particularly their idea of the Trivium.1

The Trivium is at the very heart of language and thus also at the heart of literature, as a literature is inseparable from its language. A language and its literature will express the world-pictures, the ideas, and the longings of its authors particular to the times in which they lived.

And so for the rest of this post, I will explore Chalcidius, Martianus Capella, and Boethius, all of whom had tremendous influence on the intellectual world of the Middle Ages and hence its priorities.

The reason for this trifecta of authors is because these three each give a glimpse of the Medieval foundation in literature and the ideas that will drive educational philosophy as well, especially in a newly-Christianized world wrestling with its pagan past, as I discussed in my previous post.

The world of the Middle Ages interacts with the pagan past largely through the brilliant and profound “plundering of Egypt” that we find in authors like Boethius and through the few texts that manage to trickle through the gaps.

The earliest of my authors is the 4th century philosopher Chalcidius who may or may not have been a Christian as we know almost nothing about him except that he created a partial translation of Plato’s Timaeus and some commentary, which had a tremendous influence on the development of Medieval thought. Until the Renaissance any interaction with Plato meant Chalcidius’ translation of the Timaeus, even more so than Cicero’s Latin De Re Publica which did not survive except in fragments.2

For thinkers of the Middle Ages, Plato’s Timaeus via Chalcidius sets forth a beautiful picture of a creator (demiurge) who creates mankind after an eternal pattern, as a sub-pattern, or an echo of eternal patterns. This creator creates the human soul out of a combination of elements that strive towards harmony; when we are out of harmony is when we experience disease and distemper. Plato’s “artificer” (Demiurge) creates the world and the human soul out of the elements, which must be maintained in a proper balance. Humans have a glimmer of divinity in them, which connects them to the heavenly realm.

Chalcidius didn’t manage to translate the entire work, but only about half of it (up to 53b), but what he did manage to translate ran deeply through the literary veins of the Middle Ages.

On the nature of the soul, Chalcidius translates:

Et corpus quidem caeli siue mundi uisibile factum, ipsa [anima] uero inuisibilis, rationis tamen et item modulaminis3 compos cunctis intellegibilibus praestantior a praestantissimo auctore facta. 30a.

The body of heaven is visible, but the [soul] is invisible, and partakes of reason and harmony, and being made more eminent than all intelligible things by the most eminent author.

Humans are echoes of eternity. It becomes a little easier to see what the Christians saw in Plato, as Chalcidius certainly saw.4 This picture of the demiurgic creator spinning the world into existence amidst the music of the spheres was captivatingly beautiful, and it aligned well with the Christian world-picture of the creator God though it required theological “retuning.”

Here is a passage from Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Greek:

When the father creator saw the creature which he had made moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more like the original; and as this was eternal, he sought to make the universe eternal, so far as might be. Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its fulness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call time. Plato’s Timaeus 37c-d

Plato’s character Timaeus describes this beautiful picture of the creator god rejoicing in his creation, after patterning his creatures after the image of the “eternal gods.” We were given time in order to impress upon us the nature of eternity as a “moving picture” of sorts. It is this picture of humans as an imprint of the divine that is how Plato (via Socrates) can justify the philosophical pursuit of absolute justice and goodness. Because we can apprehend goodness in some part of our being, we must be echoing some transcendent pattern and so we are driven to seek these eternal patterns (which is where the ideas of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful come from).

This general picture of the world filtered down to the Medieval era through Chalcidius, while the rest of Plato would remain hidden away in the East until the Renaissance before Plato burst back onto the scene and began fighting with Aristotle all over again. But for a long time, Plato was merely an echo reverberating in the poets and philosophers.

Roughly contemporaneous to Chalcidius is someone whom C.S. Lewis characterizes as a true oddity in the world that also contains the “bee-orchid and the giraffe.”5 Martianus Capella is a strange one about whom we also know no biographical details. He was a Neoplatonist who wrote an enormous and very difficult Latin work called De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii or The Marriage of Philology and Mercury. It is sometimes titled The Seven Liberal Arts. For all its oddness, this book was enormously popular in the Middle Ages.

It is essentially a textbook on the classical liberals arts but with an extravagant and glitzy frame narrative; reading it gave me the same general sensation that I experienced while walking through a Rococo palace in Europe: the ornamentation is nauseatingly overbearing.

The frame story is the tale of how the god Mercury (the symbol of eloquence) falls in love with the studious Philology who rarely sleeps because she studies all the time. The union of the two represents perfect learning. Philology comes with seven handmaidens: Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry, and Music. At the betrothal ceremony, each handmaiden steps forward and provides an account of herself, explaining all the details about her art to the audience.

Grammar is portrayed as an old woman who trims the hair and nails of her subjects, the analogy for correcting their diction and pronunciation, and teaching them to speak correctly. Dialectic rehearses long, boring arguments while Rhetoric (who looks like a young, impressive goddess) overawes everyone with her exuberant speech-making.

This is the earliest formal listing of these seven subjects in that order, divided into the Trivium and the Quadrivium. All seven, however, represent the completeness of knowledge. That is, knowledge of these seven things (and the number seven is of course the number of completeness or perfection) is a symbol for all-encompassing knowledge.

Capella also dwells on the idea of celestial harmony which is attained through this liberal learning (“liberal” in the sense meaning it is not a “servile” art like architecture or ironmongering but one that belongs to the “free” or “liberated” person who has the leisure to study these things). The Trivium is the mastery of one’s own language(s) and literature as the foundation of one’s education, while the Quadrivium represents the life of contemplating abstractions: mathematical realities which can be represented on paper of course but are fundamentally imaginative in nature, as are the movements of the heavens or harmony.

In the end of the work, Capella shows the last handmaiden Harmony serenading the wedding party and demonstrating how poetry is the perfect union of all seven arts, and how their fundamental aim is harmony.

The underlying ideas that are coming to the fore in these two works (both of which were very widely and carefully followed through the Middle Ages) are the importance of harmony and balance, and the concern with looking outward and the human soul’s orientation to its place in the larger universe. One did not look inward for meaning, but outward to the heavens and the Maker of the heavens who gives all its meaning and purpose. The soul was created after an eternal pattern, and the Christian world could recognize that Plato had struck upon something true in his account of creation in the Timaeus, which is perhaps why that work in particular was preserved (I speculate, but it seems reasonable enough).

In the following century, one of the last great Roman polymaths wrote from prison shortly before his violent and undeserved death at the hands of Theodoric the Great. Boethius was responsible for an enormous body of work on all kinds of subjects: mathematics, music, logic, and theology. He understood that mathematics and music were inseparable, and he described three types of music: musica mundana (music of the spheres), musica humana (harmony of the human body and spirit), musica instrumentalis (instrumental music).6 He was well-read in Plato, of course, and certainly knew the Timaeus very well, and understood the Pythagorean musical and mathematical theorems. He sought to reconcile pagan philosophy with Christianity during his ordinary career.

His last great work, the Consolation of Philosophy, is a great exploration of the most pressing question of the universe: why do things happen the way that they do? In it, we see him wrestle with the creator in soul-wrenching strains of poetic music. The heights of his poetic and philosophical achievements are found in the pits of grief as he awaited his death in prison. So deep does his grief appear that some scholars think he gave up his faith altogether because he does not make explicit mention of Christ anywhere in the Consolatio though he refers to God.7

All of these threads that I have been tugging on throughout this article are found woven effortlessly together in Boethius. He expresses his emotional state in the poetic interludes after the prose segments, and in those poetic interludes we see the presence of the Creator compelling the world into celestial harmony, as a poet takes a whole chaotic world of words and compels them into order.

Poetry is the union of all the liberal arts: as a good poem has excellent grammar, advances some piece of dialectic in fitting rhetoric, while often appealing to the heavens (astronomy), and relies on the mathematical arts for its meter and musical qualities (music is math and math is music, after all), and it creates harmony when done well.

Thus poetry is the most fitting medium for Boethius to communicate the depths of his emotions while at the heights of human learning.

O stelliferi conditor orbis,
Qui perpetuo nixus solio
Rapido caelum turbine uersas
Legemque pati sidera cogis,
Ut nunc pleno lucida cornu
Totis fratris obuia flammis
Condat stellas luna minores… Book 1 Metrum V

"O founder of the star-bearing world
Who rests on an eternal throne
and turns the heavens with a swift wind
and compels the stars to endure your law
as at one time the moon hid the lesser stars,
reflecting the all the flames of her brother [the sun]…”

In this passage, he addresses the creator who wrested the world into harmony, not unlike the creator of the Timaeus who shapes the world into being, taking disparate elements and making them harmonize.

Quod mundus stabili fide
Concordes uariat uices,
Quod pugnantia semina
Foedus perpetuum tenent…
…
Hanc rerum seriem ligat
Terras ac pelagus regens
Et caelo imperitans amor.
Book 2 Metrum VIII

"Because the world with steady faithfulness
moves with varying harmonies
Because an eternal law binds together
warring seeds
…
Love binds this limit on things
ruling over lands and sea,
commanding heaven.

One finds this general imagery of disparate elements being woven together and bound by the Creator all throughout the Timaeus and through Martianus Capella.

In fact, this idea of “warring seeds” (pugnantia semina) also appears in the very opening of Martianus Capella’s Seven Liberal Arts: “…semina qui arcanis stringens pugnantia vinclis…” (“the one binding the warring seeds with ancient bonds…”). Boethius echoes this exact same idea in the Consolatio, using the exact same words.

The seeds of the world are “fighting” each other, which is a very interesting image, but they are held in balance. In the Boethius poem, eternal love (Amor) is what holds all together. In Martianus’ De Nuptiis, the love between Mercury (eloquence) and Philology (the love of learning and language) is the mystic love that binds all together.

The world was once in chaos and had to be brought into order. We look back again to the Timaeus and this remark:

οὕτω δὴ πᾶν ὅσον ἦν ὁρατὸν παραλαβὼν οὐχ ἡσυχίαν ἄγον ἀλλὰ κινούμενον πλημμελῶς καὶ ἀτάκτως, εἰς τάξιν αὐτὸ ἤγαγεν ἐκ τῆς ἀταξίας, ἡγησάμενος ἐκεῖνο τούτου πάντως ἄμεινον.

Wherefore also finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order, considering that this was in every way better than the other. Plato’s Timaeus 30a, trans. Jowett.

Chalcidius renders this passage:

…omne uisibile corporeumque motu importuno fluctuans neque umquam quiescens ex inordinata iactatione redegit in ordinem, sciens ordinatorum fortunam confusis inordinatisque praestare. 30a

”Every visible body tossing with improper motion and never lying at rest out of inordinate movement he restored to order, knowing

The demiurge/creator brings order out of disorder, and reconciles warring elements with each other to create celestial harmony, represented by the musica mundana, the music of the spheres which goes all the way back to Pythagoras as an idea.

The warring elements come to peace with each other, harmony is restored.

It is not hard, perhaps, to see the implications of these ideas on the minds of Medieval Christians. This is also the hope of the Christian Gospel: that Christ won peace by His death and resurrection, but that someday He will return and restore everything to perfect peace and harmony.

Until then, we strain to hear the faint echoes of the musica mundana, and await the final restoration and reconciliation.

“Now the point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of Majesty in heaven, a minster in the holy places in the true tent that the Lord set up, not man. For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; thus it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer. Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all , since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. For when Moses was about to go erect the tent, he was instructed by God saying, ‘See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.’ But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better since it is enacted on better promises.” Hebrews 8.1-6, ESV translation.