Note 138 — Chapter IV

The basis on which the canon of the seven liberal arts was formed is indicated by a passage in Martianus Capella, who makes Apollo say in regard to the exclusion of medicine and architecture from it that “their attention and skill is given to mortal and earthly things, and they have nothing in common with the ether and the gods; it is not unseemly to reject them with loathing.” (Ed. Eyssenhardt, IV, 13). The Christian Isidore held much the same notion as the pagan Capella. He believed that the order of the seven liberal arts terminating in astronomy was one whose object was “to free souls entangled by secular wisdom from earthly matters and set them at meditation upon the things on high” (3, 71, 41). See also pp. 65, 77. It is plain enough that education in both the pagan and Christian spheres was strongly affected by the mystical tendency of the time, and it is not too much to say that the seven liberal arts stand not so much for the impracticality of a “gentleman’s” education as for that desirable in the education of a mystic.