The Cosmic Nature of an Enchanted Education
In the Middle Ages all thought, all reality, was seen as existing in a cohesive whole. No branch of knowledge was severed from all the others. This conclusion came from the assumption that the whole cosmos is ordered by God toward the end of revealing himself to us. This meant that everything from the movement of the planets to base material of the earth were interconnected. And so, to study, for instance, medicine, as Hidegard of Bingen did in her Physica, meant that moral and spiritual realities were taken into consideration when healing wounds and illnesses. While the science that was produced from this assumption did not always work (which Hildegard often explains as simply being part of the will of God), and was certainly in continued need of refinement, this assumption that all things are connected throughout the cosmos is an assumption from which an enchanted education begins.
While most know Dante Alighieri for his magnum opus, the Divine Comedy, this is not the only work wherein he attempts to unite something cosmic and physical with some other branch of reality. In his Convivio, written before the Divine Comedy, Dante argues that the seven liberal arts, as well as the higher sciences of physics, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and theology, can be mapped onto the medieval understanding of the cosmos. Let me explain.
Going back at least to Eudoxus, the conception of the universe that reigned supreme through the Middle Ages looked something like this. At the bottom of the cosmos sat the Earth. This “geocentric” model as it is often called did give the earth pride of place. Rather, it sat the earth as the physical point furthest away from God. The lights of the morning and evening sky were then divided into two categories: the wandering stars and the fixed stars. The wandering stars were those lights whose movements, while predictable, moved without a fixed relation to any other star. These would be known as the planets (from the Greek for wanderer). There were seven planets according to this system going out from the earth as follows: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. After the seven wandering stars came the realm of the fixed stars. These are primarily noted by the constellations of the zodiac, but include all “non-wandering” stars. According to the medievals, these all existed in one expansive sphere together. After the fixed stars came a sphere sometimes referred to as the Primum Mobile (first moved) or the crystalline sphere. It could not be seen, but its existence was inferred from the fact that all the other spheres moved. With this ninth sphere the physical cosmos comes to an end. But there is something that can be said to be beyond it which also encompasses the physical cosmos, the Empyrean, Heaven itself. While in the Divine Comedy, Dante would have his pilgrim travel through these 9 spheres and out into the 10th, in his Convivio he does something different.
As noted above, he aligns the various sciences or arts with these cosmic spheres. The moon he associates with grammar, Mercury with dialectic or logic, Venus with Rhetoric, the Sun with arithmetic, Mars with music, Jupiter with geometry, and Saturn with astronomy. Here ends the seven liberal arts, but Dante knows there is more to the heavens and that there is more to human knowledge. So he continues. The fixed stars he associates with both physics and metaphysics, the Primum Mobile with moral philosophy, and finally, the Empyrean, heaven itself with theology. Dante’s reasons for associating the spheres with the specific arts is interesting, but not to the point here. What is fascinating is this. In most ancient and medieval stories where the main character goes through the heavens, they are given a new perspective. In the ancient world, that perspective is the tininess of human achievement. But in the medieval world, it is an inversion.
When the pilgrim gets to the Primum Mobile in the Divine Comedy, he is given a vision of reality. But he is confused. He sees the center point, which should be earth, but the planet revolving around it is moving too fast. Beatrice helps the pilgrim see that he’s looking at the universe’s true center. The true starting point of the universe is not the earth, but God, the Empyrean. From here all other spheres spin out. In fact, it is the love of God which moves the first moved (Primum mobile) sphere, whose movement then causes the movement of all the others. So while the journey through the heavens had to be taken by starting at the Moon and working upward, when we reach the end, we discover it is truly the beginning and all other stages must now be re-interpreted in light of this final, truer perception of reality.
Dante’s understanding of education works in precisely the same way. Yes, we must begin with grammar, logic, and rhetoric, the tools of learning itself. Then and only then can we progress to the quadrivium the arts of number and shape and motion. From there we can ascend to a purer physical motion1, as well as the even purer motion of substances.2 Once these kinds of motion are understood, we can begin to understand how a man might move from baseness to virtue in moral philosophy. Finally, we turn to the divine science of theology, the study of God himself. Then comes the turn. For only by understanding God, especially as triune, incarnate, as Love himself, can we understand the purpose of virtue. Virtue in turn allows to be the kind of men and women to draw the right conclusions about physical and metaphysical motion. And so education is seen in a new, inverted light all the way down to grammar the foundation of language and therefore thought itself, seen in a new light when reflected on from the viewpoint of theology.
We might assume at this point that education is a flat circle, but it is not. It is a spiral. Think of the arts as lights shining on an inclined plane. At first, we assume those lights begin on the ground, and so we ascend to find them and bask in them. But as we get higher, we realize our assent is not merely upward, but curved. As we reach what we believe to be the end, we notice the light we just left is shining in front of us again. So we continue climbing upward, ever upward, but encountering the same lights again and again and again, but each time they are brighter, stronger, newer. This is education. If we do not leave its path, we do not leave behind what has come before, but bear it with us and encounter it anew.
1 Physics was divided into three kinds of motion, locomotion, motion of alteration, and motion of growth.
2 Metaphysics and the incorruptible.
