Author: Lesley-Anne Williams

Categories
Advent Augustine Story Telling

An Advent Image Is Worth a Thousand Words

This season, we’re invited to see symbols of the Nativity not as quaint supplements to doctrinal truth but as robust invitations to faith.

LESLEY-ANNE DYER WILLIAMS|

INDONESIAN

Image: Allkindza / Getty

Every night since she was two, my three-year-old daughter has proclaimed, “I want to be a shepherd girl.” The towel goes over her head, and she gathers her sheep. She then sets them out to pasture—“Here, little sheep, eat”—or seeks for them because they are lost. After the game is over and we finish her bedtime routine, my husband or I tuck her into bed with “lambie,” her most precious possession.

As a parent, I see this imagery of sheep and shepherd as the first way that Christ is revealing himself to my daughter. But as a scholar of medieval theology and literature, I see it more broadly as an example of how images help convey an ancient gospel in the present moment. In other words, our understanding of Scripture often hinges on verbal and visual pictures, not merely exegetical prose. This is especially true in the Advent season, with its rich and diverse imagery—plywood nativity scenes in front yards, bulletin covers showing shepherds and angels, Christmas pageants with crying babies and crawling sheep.

When we disciple our kids in this season and every other, we teach them general principles for everyday life: “Jesus loves you,” “God made you,” “God is good.” As we should. But we often forget that images and the imagination are central to religious education. This idea holds true not just for teaching Scripture to small people but to big ones, too. The beauty of verbal and visual images is that they can stick with us even when we don’t have the ability to appreciate their significance, because they are “goods” in themselves that point us to higher truths.

Think of it this way: There is a difference between cracking a nut to eat it and planting that same kernel to let it grow. When we think about images as nuts that need cracking, we can discard the shell because we’ve gotten to the meat. We don’t need the story anymore because we have the moral: God is love. If a story is a seed, however, its significance develops over time and cannot be fully grasped at first go.

Under this paradigm, a Bible story—whether historical or parabolic—needs first to be enjoyed and understood as a story, because the meaning cannot be reduced to a simplistic moral. Rather, as the story or image is understood over time, its meaning unfolds.

By way of illustration, my daughter can delight in the images and stories of the Bible without always appreciating their full significance for her life, but when the time is right, as long as the seed has been properly buried and “watered,” its meaning will unfold as she grows older. For now, she plays the “shepherd girl” game and listens to Bible stories about shepherds and lost sheep. Over time, these theologically rich images are kernels that have the power to grow and be nourished.

The image of the shepherd and sheep is what Augustine would have called a “metaphorical sign.” A rhetorician can be very technical about different kinds of metaphorical signs; allegory, metaphor, typology, and symbolism are different kinds of metaphorical signs. When Augustine speaks about metaphorical signs, however, he’s talking about something more basic that affects the way an interpreter needs to approach reading. “As far as metaphorical signs … are concerned,” writes Augustine, “wherever readers find themselves stuck because of their unfamiliarity, they need to investigate them partly by a knowledge of languages, partly by a knowledge of things.”

If we apply this principle to shepherding and sheep metaphors in Scripture, then interpreting these passages requires learning about actual shepherds, actual sheep, and the historical circumstances surrounding shepherding. Even the best reader of Hebrew and Greek cannot understand passages concerning sheep and shepherds without knowing something about actual sheep and shepherds.

For example, all of us, scholars and laypeople alike, need to know that shepherding was not a respected job in the ancient world and was often relegated to a younger sibling. We need to know that it was common, dull work. David tended sheep. Moses. Jacob and his sons. Isaac. Rachel. Abraham. Abel. As readers who know the end of the story, it is easy to think they were occupied in a respected profession in the ancient world, but that is because Scripture has cultivated our cultural imagination. Now we need to see how this biblical insight was and is countercultural.

We also need to know that Scripture’s attention to shepherds often concerns those who haven’t done their duty. The prophets throughout the Old Testament decry the prevalence of unfaithful shepherding resulting in the scattering of the sheep (2 Chron. 18:16; 1 Kings 22:17; Ezek. 34:5; Jer. 10:21; Ezek. 34:5–6 and 21; Jer. 23:1–2; Zech. 13:7; Isaiah 13:14). With this scriptural background in mind, it should not be surprising that Christ is often portrayed as the Good Shepherd that sees the scattered sheep and has compassion (Matt. 9:36, Mark 14:27, Matt. 26:31, John 10:12).

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In sum: When we understand biblical images as things in history and in the world, then we begin to understand the words of Scripture, suggests Augustine.

When I first realized in graduate school the significance of Augustine’s words, I began to marvel, and then I began to despair. I marveled because it occurred to me that God had chosen images that were relatable to most people throughout history: water, gardens, wheat and weeds, grapes, candles, oil, marriage, animal husbandry, and the building of edifices. I then despaired because I realized that most of us living in modern Western society can’t relate to the many agricultural metaphors in Scripture, and almost all of the marriage metaphors are difficult to comprehend as well. Reading Wendell Berry (for the first) and attending all the marriage seminars in the world (for the second) aren’t enough to fix the problem.

And then I saw my daughter playing “shepherd girl.” Of course, her play-acting is not the same as that of a little boy or girl who has actually done real-world shepherding. Nonetheless, God has given her an imagination that enables her to understand this thing to some degree so that one day, when she is old enough, she can unpack its meaning for her life. I also marveled at this realization: God has given humans the capacity to imagine and play at things we’ve never experienced, and the power of his Word comes through in those imaginings.

“Who are you?” I asked my daughter as she put a towel over her head one night. “I’m Mary,” she replied as she collected her sheep again. I suppose she saw that Mary’s head was covered just like the shepherd’s head and then presumed that Mary was a shepherd girl. I didn’t correct her. Her imagination, like my own, needs to be formed over time.

While at the moment she sees primarily the nurturing side of being a shepherd girl who mothers her lambs with food and puts them to bed, I hope one day she will also see the humility it takes to say yes to God, even when it means the world despises her. For both the shepherds and Mary were despised by the world. The shepherds because their profession was lowly, and Mary because the world presumed she had sinned when she had not. They were not appointed religious or political leaders, but God used them, because when he spoke, they listened. I pray my daughter will listen, too.

This Advent and Christmas season, we are invited to see images of the Nativity not as quaint supplements to doctrinal truth but rather as invitations to form and reform our imagination. We can join the little children in their playful engagement with the images of the Christmas story without rushing so quickly to exegesis. And we can slow down and enjoy the repetition, waiting to hear, like Mary, what God might speak to us.

This article is excerpted from my publication for Christianity Today. Get the full story here.

[ This article is also available in Indonesian. ]

Categories
Medieval Platonism

Plato, Mathematician and Myth-Maker

Pisano, Giovanni, 1240?-1320?. c.1284. Siena Duomo: det.: Plato. Place: Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (Siena, Italy). https://library-artstor-org.proxy.library.nd.edu/asset/ARTSTOR_103_41822000532257.

The Republic, The Symposium, The Phaedrus, The Apology, and The Phaedo––these are just a few of the works of Plato that were not widely available throughout most of the Middle Ages. No extended depiction of the most just city in the Republic. No discussion of love in The Symposium and The Phaedrus. No self-defense for Socrates at his trial as found in The Apology, and no final dialogue before his suicide as found in The Phaedo. For lovers of great texts, especially Plato, such news can be shocking. What kind of Plato does a person know if they don’t have these key works? How much of Socrates’ life and Plato’s philosophy could even be known? These are the questions that many medieval scholars of the Latin Platonist tradition have dedicated their lives and careers to answering, and the answers can be quite surprising.

One aspect of this research that ought to be appreciated by the wider reading public (outside of the narrow confines of medievalists) is that Plato’s Timaeus wasthe most widely available Platonic work throughout most of the Middle Ages. In fact, examining the text of the Timaeus and why itwas such one of the few Platonic texts preserved reveals how peculiarly modern our current canon of Platonic literature is.

What we value in Plato was not necessarily what late antique or medieval readers valued, and yet, their ability to read well meant that they understood a lot more than might be supposed. An attention to the reception history of Plato’s Timaeus can give modern readers of Plato a better appreciation for the importance of both mathematics and poetry in Platonic philosophy.

The Timaeus is Plato’s work on the origins of the universe. It begins with a dialogue between Timaeus, Socrates, Hermocrates, and Critias, in which Socrates expresses a desire for a “moving image” of the city they had been talking about the day before. The summary of the previous day’s discussion appears to bear some resemblance to the conversation found in the Republic although scholars are divided over whether this summary perfectly matches the Republic that we now possess. Regardless of its accuracy, this summary would have been the closest a medieval reader would have had to a taste of the Republic. The opening dialogue covers all sorts of fascinating topics from Solon’s visit to Egypt, oral culture, the mythic origins of writing, and the myth of Atlantis, but the bulk of the work features a narration about the origins of the universe recounted by the Pythagorean, Timaeus.

The Timaeus was received in the Middle Ages through three main channels of Latin translations: the translation of Calcidius (which ends at 53b), the translation of Cicero (available but not widely used or even known, which ends at 42b), and the excerpts from the Ciceronian translation of the Timaeus that can be found in Augustine’s City of God. Although it does not contain the whole text of the Timaeus, Calcidius’ translation is much more complete than Cicero’s: rather than giving merely the speech of Timaeus like Cicero’s translation does, it includes the opening dialogue (even though the commentary itself ignores it).

Most modern Plato scholars would probably not choose The Timaeus as theone and only work they could save from destruction for all time. But, a better understanding of who Calcidius was and why he wrote the commentary on the Timaeus suggests that the preservation of the Timaeus in the Latin West was not an accident of fate. Rather, the results of Gretchen Reydams-Schills’ lifelong study of Calcidius give a plausible reason for why Calcidius’ commentary may have been the Platonic work of choice for many late antique philosophers.

Reydams-Schils argues that Calcidius wrote his commentary as an introduction to the Platonic corpus, essentially reversing the Middle Platonic curriculum, which traditionally ended with the Timaeus. One major piece of evidence for this theory is that Calcidius’ commentary often reserves discussion of harder philosophical concepts for the end of the commentary.Furthermore, unlike the Neoplatonists, Calcidius did not read the Timaeus synoptically and believed strongly in the importance of sequential reading of the Platonic corpus. In Calcidus’ Platonic curriculum, the Timaeus came first with its teachings on natural justice, then the Republic with its teaching of positive justice, and finally, the Parmenides came with its teaching of the forms and intelligible realities. Calcidius believed that a thorough understanding of mathematics was necessary for understanding of almost all of the Platonic works, which is why his commentary on the Timaeus turns out to be something like a crash course in Pythagorean mathematics.

Thus, although the Timaeus was one of the only Platonic works available throughout the early Middle Ages, Calcidius’ commentary gave readers some introduction to the entire Platonic corpus as well as a great deal of Pythagorean mathematics. Perhaps there might be good reason for a philosopher to save The Timaeus (especially a copy with Calcidius’ commentary)from a burning building!

Plato; Chalcidius (translation). Timaeus. Manuscript. Place: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, <a href=’http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/’>http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/</a>. https://library-artstor-org.proxy.library.nd.edu/asset/BODLEIAN_10310768399.

Medievalists who study the textual reception of the various translations of The Timaeus have been able to identify a shift in kinds of interest in Plato over time. The primary Latin translation of the Timaeus used until the eleventh century was Cicero’s. Medieval scholars used to assume that the revival of Calcidius began with the twelfth century Platonists, but Anna Somfai has demonstrated that the proliferation of copies of Calcidius’ text and commentary began in the eleventh century when championed by Lanfranc of Bec (c.1050). The late twelfth-century actually experienced a decline of copying the Timaeus as interests shifted towards other texts.

What motivated the eleventh-century interest in Calcidius appears to have been the mathematical content of the Calcidian commentary because, by the Carolingian period, much of the actual content of the quadrivial arts had been lost, and scholars in the Middle Ages attempted to piece together what scraps of it remained from a variety of sources. Calcidius’ commentary on the Timaeus appears to have been particularly valued as a source text for the quadrivial (or mathematical) arts. As my two previous MI blogs have explored here and here, medieval thinkers in the traditional liberal arts tradition recognized that the quadrivial arts were the foundation for philosophical thought, even if they had few textual sources for actually studying them.

And although some of the interest in the kinds of mathematics found in the Timaeus and Calcidius’ commentary may have declined after the twelfth century, it was by no means lost completely. As David Albertson has demonstrated, the mathematical interest in Plato found in the work of the twelfth-century scholar, Thierry of Chartres, would eventually be picked up by the fifteenth-century scholar, Nicholas of Cusa, and many scholars have noted resonances of Cusa’s quadrivial agenda in the thinking of Leibniz, the founder of calculus:

It seems that God, when he bestowed these two sciences [arithmetic and algebra] on humankind, wanted to warn us that a much greater secret lay hidden in our intellect, of which these were but shadows. (Leibniz as quoted by Albertson, p.2)

Bernardus Silvester. Liber fortunae, also known as Experimentarius.. Manuscript. Place: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, <a href=’http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/’>http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/</a>. https://library-artstor-org.proxy.library.nd.edu/asset/BODLEIAN_10310765350.

This blog post is excerpted from the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute Research Blog.

Categories
Quadrivium

Poetry as a Quadrivial Art?

“That ‘Poetry is the cradle of philosophy’ is axiomatic”(John of Salisbury, Metalogicon I.22).

Coëtivy Master (Henri de Vulcop?) (French, active about 1450 – 1485), Philosophy Presenting the Seven Liberal Arts to Boethius, Google Art Project.

It is a truth generally acknowledged that in the Middle Ages a liberal arts education consisted of the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy). Poetry –what we might call “literature”– was primarily taught by grammarians and rhetoricians in the Middle Ages. Literary scholars, like Rita Copeland and Marjorie Woods, have therefore been very motivated to study exactly what the language disciplines of Grammar and Rhetoric entailed and precisely how they were taught in order to have a better sense of what the study of literature must have looked like in this period. Their works are indispensable for the study of medieval literature and truly are the bulk of where instruction in poetics lay in the Middle Ages. And yet, once cannot stop there.

Knowing exactly where to put poetry was something that clearly bothered many medieval philosophers. While today we might assume that poetry would clearly be associated with the Trivium, or the arts dedicated to words, specifically grammar and rhetoric, certain medieval thinkers located it within logic and also the Quadrivium, or the arts of number. Understanding why can help us to understand the multi-faceted way in which the medieval mind approached poetry in particular and the literary arts more generally.

Étienne Colaud, “John of Salisbury teaching philosophy,” frontispiece miniature of the Policraticus by John of Salisbury, BnF  Ms.1145, folio 3 recto, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the twelfth century when there were major curricular changes afoot in schools and universities, John of Salisbury maintained that poetry belonged to the art of grammar although it was closely allied with rhetoric. “Art,” writes John of Salisbury, “is a system that reason has devised in order to expedite, by its own short cut, our ability to do things within our natural capacities. Reason neither provides nor professes to provide the accomplishment of the impossible;” Instead, reason pursues the possible by means of an efficient plan, what the Greeks would call a methodon (Metalogicon I.11, p.33). As J.J. Murphy writes in the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. II: The Middle Ages:

In medieval terminology the Latin word ars (plural: artes) denoted a body of principles relating to a specific activity such as painting, music, preaching, or writing. By extension the term was also used for a written treatise on the subject of a particular art […] The term ‘art’ or ars when applied to such a treatise indicates a discussion of what the ancient Greeks would have called techné ––‘technique’ or ‘craft’ –– rather than an abstract or theoretical discussion of a subject (p.42).

The practitioner of an art is therefore called an artifex or craftsman, and the study of the art consisted of both the intrinsic principles for practice and the extrinsic practice of the art itself.[1] When art is understood in this way, craftsmen generally agree that the person able to produce art is more skilled that the person skilled at conveying the principles underlying art. While poetry was clearly a craft that required a practitioner to study a method of practice, it was by no means clear where it ought to fit in the medieval curriculum of the arts.

John of Salisbury reports that some people thought poetry should be its own subject (shockingly!) because so much of it is clearly a “product of nature’s workshop” (Metalogicon I.18). The close tie between poetry and nature formed the basis of their argument, but John of Salisbury warns pragmatically that if poetry is removed from grammar, “its mother and the nurse of its study,” the study of poetry could be “dropped from the roll of liberal studies.” In other words, everyone studies grammar, which in those days often included a careful study of works like Virgil’s Aeneid. If poetry became its own subject, people might not take it at all!

English: Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Poetics by Abu Bishr Matta
Français : Poétique (Aristote) en arabe – Abu Bishr Matta
العربية: فن الشعر لأرسطوطاليس نقل أبي بشر متى – من مخطوطة باريس ٢٣٤٦
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8422956q/f273.image

Some philosophers thought that poetry actually belonged to the subject of logic. These people were especially concerned about how to classify Aristotle’s Poetics. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle had written a group of works (one might even say lecture notes) on logic when teaching at the Lyceum. His followers, the Peripatetics, classified these works as the Organon, meaning instrument or tool, because they saw them as instrumental in preparing for the study of philosophy. The Latin West had only select works from the Organon until their increased contact with Arabic philosophers like Avicenna, who wrote a commentary on the Poetics. Following the Greek commentators on Aristotle, most of the Arabic (and subsequently Latin scholastic) commentators saw Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics as the seventh and eighth works of Aristotle’s Organon. In their zeal, therefore, to comment on the entirety of the Organon, some Latin scholastic commentators, like Herman the German, viewed poetics as a part of Logic.

As surprising as it might be to think that poetry should be considered primarily within the context of “logic,” there is strong evidence that poetry was also studied within the context of the quadrivium. And yet, many medieval thinkers, the Pythagorean believed that number lay at the root of creation itself. For example, Dante writes in the Convivio when commenting on the beauty of a canzone:

All of you who cannot perceive the meaning of this canzone, do not reject it on that account, but consider its beauty: considerable for the way it is constructed, which is the concern of the grammarians; the ordering of its discourse, which is the concern of the rhetoricians; and for the metrical numbering of its parts, which is the concern of poets. (II.xi.9–10)

The key word to focus upon here is numbering. Familiarity with the Commedia and its frequent references to the starsis enough to convince a reader that one aspect of the numbering that Dante had in mind was the medieval discipline of astronomy, but there is also good reason to think that Dante had music in mind. Some of this evidence is textual…the numerous references to music in the Purgatorio and Paradiso…, but some of this evidence can be found in Boethius.

This blog post is excerpted from the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute Research Blog.

Categories
Medieval Platonism Quadrivium

The Quadrivium and the Stakes for Ordering the Mathematical Arts

 Fyodor Bronnikov, Pythagoreans’ Hymn to the Rising Sun, 1869. Oil on canvas.

Legend has it that Pythagoras sentenced the first person to discover irrational numbers, Hippasus of Metapontum (c.530-450 BC), to death. He was tossed overboard a ship to drown. Why? Pythagoras taught that number was the essence and cause of all things, and for Pythagoras and his followers, numbers meant integers. Hippasus’ discovery of irrational numbers appeared to undermine the very core of Pythagoras’ teachings about the numerical nature of the universe. The secret could not get out. Hippasus had to die.

Imaginary engraving of the philosopher Hippasus of Metapontum. From the 1580 book Illustrium philosophorum et sapientum effigies ab eorum numistatibus extractae, by Girolamo Olgiati. Reprinted 1583.

The existence of irrational numbers became a Pythagorean secret. They were called “unutterables” because in Greek, the ratio between two integers was called logos, and so, irrational numbers were called, alogos, which can be translated as either “irrational” or “not spoken.” The worry caused by this secret knowledge was somewhat alleviated by Eudoxus of Cnidos (408-355 BC) when he argued that the basis of reality was a ratio of magnitudes. In effect, Eudoxus made geometry replace arithmetic as the highest mathematical discipline, the foundation of all others. Geometry and arithmetic were hardly even separate disciplines at the time. This change of emphasis allowed Pythagorean teachings about the numeric nature of the universe to continue.

Philosophia et septem artes liberales (Philosophy and the Seven Liberal Arts), as illustrated in the Hortus deliciarum. The order of the arts here are: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. A more detailed study of this image can be found here and here.

         The idea that the mathematical disciplines have some orderly relationship between each other is essential for understanding the medieval concept of “quadrivium.” While it is well known that the medieval liberal arts curriculum, at least in its ideal established by Boethius, taught that a student must study both the trivium and quadrivium before progressing to philosophy and theology, the exact nature and rationale for the quadrivium is often less understood. Lists of the arts comprising the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music/harmony) are consistent, but the exact order for these lists can vary. While there is no doubt that sometimes there is truly no rationale for a given order of the mathematical arts, attention to the mathematical art considered the principle or highest can reveal at least three identifiable streams of quadrivial traditions coming from the ancient world (similar to Chenu’s identification of different kinds of Platonism): the Boethian, the Calcidean, and the Capellan. The mathematical art considered “principle” is the one closest to metaphysical reality of the universe and serves as the foundation for all other mathematical disciplines. While the problem of irrational numbers may not have been on the forefront of anyone’s mind in the Middle Ages…it was a closely guarded Pythagorean secret after all…the problem of the principle mathematical art, inherited from Pythagoreanism, was readily available in the source texts.

This content is excerpted. Read the full article here at the University of Notre Dame’s Research Blog

Categories
Dorothy Sayers

The Medievalism of Dorothy L. Sayers

The cover of the biography of Sayers written by her student and friend, Barbara Reynolds (Amazon.com).

            On October 14, 1920, the words, “domina, magistra” were spoken by the Vice Chancellor of Oxford University at the first ever graduation day for women. The grammatically feminine gender of these Latin words marked a major twentieth-century transition for university education. Among this first group of women was Dorothy L. Sayers. She was awarded a first-class MA degree in modern languages, a degree that she had earned in its entirety at Somerville College, Oxford University five years before but could not receive at the time merely because she was female. While her degree was in modern languages, at the time, and especially under the influence of the medievalist at Somerville College, Mildred Pope, an undergraduate degree in modern languages would have contained quite a bit of medieval studies, and this influence can be seen throughout her varied career. Whether Dorothy was writing advertisment campaigns for Guiness Beer (she did the Toucan campaign) or Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels or radio dramas on the Life of Christ for the BBC or translating the Song of Roland and Dante’s Commedia, the Middle Ages seems to never be far from her mind.

The first female graduates from Somerville College, Oxford University (https://www.some.ox.ac.uk/about/a-brief-history-of-somerville/degrees-for-women/).

            Perhaps my favorite example from the Lord Peter mystery series occurs merely in her early characterization of Lord Peter in Whose Body? (1923). Dorothy Sayers admitted later than one of her motivations for writing Lord Peter, besides the need to earn money, was a certain kind of wish fulfillment during her own economically uncertain times. She imagines a character who has the means to live a life that she can only dream about. And what does Lord Peter do? He has his man, Bunter secure the purchase of rare books from an auction house while he follows up on a lead for his murder investigation:

“Thanks. I am going to Battersea at once. I want you to attend the sale for me. Don’t lose time—I don’t want to miss the Folio Dante* nor the de Voragine—here you are—see? ‘Golden Legend’—Wynkyn de Worde, 1493—got that?—and, I say, make a special effort for the Caxton folio of the ‘Four Sons of Aymon’—it’s the 1489 folio and unique. Look! I’ve marked the lots I want, and put my outside offer against each. Do your best for me. I shall be back to dinner.”

She even gives a footnote:

Aldine 8vo. of 1502, the Naples folio of 1477—”edizione rarissima,” according to Colomb. This copy has no history, and Mr. Parker’s private belief is that its present owner conveyed it away by stealth from somewhere or other. Lord Peter’s own account is that he “picked it up in a little place in the hills,” when making a walking-tour through Italy.

Notice that this isn’t an example of high-level scholarly influence. It is about the formation of her loves and passions soon after leaving Oxford. When she could fantasize about doing anything with money, she fantasizes about having enough money to buy expensive incunabula of Dante and de Voragine!

            In addition to writing mystery novels, one of Dorothy Sayers’ earliest jobs after graduation was working at an advertising firm, the one for which she developed the Guiness Beer campaign. It appears from a paper given years later at a Vacation Course in Education at Oxford in 1947, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” that medieval studies may have given her a unique perspective on the advertising industry. She gave this paper almost twenty years after personally working in advertising (and writing Murder Must Advertise based upon her experience) but only a few years after the end of World War II, when the powers of propaganda in the modern world were first beginning to be fully recognized. With these experiences in mind, she writes:

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate that to-day, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of or unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechancial fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?…Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a “subject” remains a “subject,” divided by water-tight bulkheads from all other “subjects,” so that they experience great difficulty in making an immediate mental connection between, let us say, algebra and detective fiction…between such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art?

Sayers suggests that the susceptibility of modern people to advertising and propaganda may be the result modern education. She even goes so far as to suggest that a return to the medieval trivium might be the best antidote! While realizing her proposal might be laughable, Sayers suggests that the issue is that “modern education concentrates on teaching subjects, leaving the method of thinking arguing, and expressing one’s conclusions to be picked up by the scholars as he goes along” whereas “medieval education concentrated on first forging and learning to handle the tools of learning, using whatever subject came handy as a piece of material on which to doodle until the use of the tool became second nature.” The medieval trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric was not really a series of “subjects” but rather a way to train students in the verbal arts, enabling them to then apply those arts to whatever subject they studied. Without this kind of medieval training, the modern person is enslaved to those with the ability to spin words most effectively.

This is an excerpt from my research blog for the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. Read the full story here.