things. Some practise their rude tongue at the alphabet and at words new to them. Others listen to the inflection of words, their composition and derivation; then by reciting and repeating them they try to commit them to memory. Others furrow the waxen tablets with a stylus. Others, guiding the calamus with learned hand, draw figures of different shapes and colours on parchments. Still others with sharper zeal seem to dispute on graver matters and try to trip each other with twistings and impossibilities (gryphis?). I see some also making calculations, and some producing various sounds upon a cord stretched on a frame. Others, again, explain and demonstrate geometric figures; and yet others with various instruments show the positions and courses of the stars and the movement of the heavens. Others, finally, consider the nature of plants, the constitution of men, and the properties and powers of things."
The Disciple is captivated with this many-coloured show of learning; but the Master declares it to be mostly foolishness, distracting the student from understanding his own nature, his Creator, and his future lot.[1]
These are examples, which might be multiplied indefinitely, of the pious mediaeval view that the artes, with a very little reading of the auctores, were proper for the educated Christian, whose need was to understand Scripture. Sometimes, stung, at least rhetorically, by fear of the lust and idolatry of the antique, mediaeval souls cry out against its lures, even as Jerome's Christianly protesting nature dreamed that famous dream of exclusion from heaven as a "Ciceronian." Alcuin, who led the educational movement under Charlemagne, gently chides one whose fondness for Virgil made him forget his friend—"would that the Gospels rather than the Aeneid filled thy breast."[2] Three hundred years later, St. Peter Damiani, himself a virtuoso in letters and a sometime teacher of rhetoric, arraigns the monks for teaching grammar rather than things spiritual.[3] Damiani speaks with the harshness of one who fears what he loves. In France, about the same time, our worthy sermon-writer, Honorius of Autun, liked the profanities well enough, and drew from them apt moral tales, which preachers might introduce to rouse drowsy
