The Newman Rambler

The Liberal Arts and the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit

18 June 2021 ‖ Matthew-Anthony Hysell

Fr Matthew-Anthony Hysell, a native of Michigan, is a priest of the Archdiocese of Edmonton, Alberta. After completing a B.A. in philosophy at City University of New York—Hunter College, an M.A. at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, and an M.Th. at Newman Theological College, he entered St Joseph Seminary and was later ordained Canada’s first Deaf priest in 2012. He is currently completing his doctoral dissertation on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit in the soul of Christ and will return to Edmonton in the fall to teach at Newman Theological College, where he will also resume his chaplaincy with the local Deaf Catholic community in Edmonton as well as the International Catholic Deaf Association—Canadian Section and will serve as administrator at St Emeric’s Hungarian Parish in Edmonton. Fr Hysell is also a professed tertiary of the Order of Preachers and is active in the Lumen Ecclesiae fraternity in Michigan, which is under the care of the Province of St Albert the Great.

Over the south portal on the west façade of Cathédrale Nôtre-Dame de Chartes in France is a tympanum featuring the Sedes Sapientiae sculpture—the ‘Seat of Wisdom’—with the Blessed Virgin seated and Christ, the Incarnate Wisdom, enthroned upon her lap.  The outer archivolt shows an alternating series of seven men and women.  The men represented are historical pioneers:  On the left and ascending to the apex are Aristotle, Cicero, and Euclid, each paired with a woman called ‘logic,’ ‘rhetoric,’ and ‘geometry,’ respectively.  From the apex and moving downward toward the right are Boëthius, Ptolemy, and either Priscian or Donatus, again paired with women called ‘arithmetic,’ ‘astronomy,’ and ‘grammar.’  Squeezed into the inner archivolt on the right side is Pythagoras with ‘music.’  These are, of course, the seven liberal arts (ars libertas); since ars is feminine, the each of the ‘courses’ is personified by a woman—the most famous one, perhaps, being ‘grammar’ who holds an upraised switch ready to beat two misbehaving students for not learning how to write properly!

Chartres Cathedral was home to one of the more famous ‘cathedral schools’ mandated by the Emperor Charlemagne—the so-called ‘Chartres School.’  Charlemagne found justification for promoting the liberal arts in Matthew 12:37, “…for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”  Anxious for the careful and prudent use of language, Charlemagne wrote to Abbot Bangulf of Fulda:

For although correct conduct may be better than knowledge, nevertheless knowledge precedes conduct.  Therefore, each one ought to study what he desires to accomplish, that so much the more fully the mind may know what ought to be done, as the tongue hastens in the praises of omnipotent God without the hindrances of errors.  For since errors should be shunned by all men, so much the more ought they to be avoided as far as possible by those who are chosen for this very purpose alone, so that they ought to be the especial servants of truth.[1]

It would be an oversimplification to attribute the Church’s patronage of education to merely a spirit of progress.  Rather, the Church was anxious for “the liberty of the glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:21).  It is in this sense that we are to understand the expression “liberal arts” because it refers to a kind of learning which liberates us by training the soul to function properly.  It is also a play on words since the verb liberare bears a stem similar to liber, ‘book,’ giving the idea that literature and literary skills are liberating.[2]

In the classical and mediaeval periods, education was less about acquiring ‘job marketability’ and more about personal development; it saw thinking skills as key to human integration.  The modern world, in contrast, has come to approach higher education as a means to moneymaking or sociopolitical initiation.  When National Socialism became dominant in Germany, many teachers worried that ‘government schools’ would create a deformed educational system more interested in inoculating students with social policy instead of liberating minds.  We have certainly seen this take place in many parts of North America, where assimilation to public opinion takes precedence over integral human development.

How does learning effect human integration?  In a word, virtue.  In his Summa theologiae, St Thomas Aquinas agrees with Aristotle that there are at least three ‘intellectual virtues’: Wisdom, knowledge, and understanding.  The intellectual virtue of ‘understanding’ is cognizance of the first principles of things—much like how the behaviour of numbers gives us mathematics or the laws of physics enable us to predict what would happen if we conducted an experiment.  The result of understanding is the accumulation of conclusions, giving us an assemblage of facts, and this is ‘knowledge.’  But we would be more inclined to call a walking encyclopedia more ‘erudite’ than ‘intelligent’ if such a one is unable to see the bigger picture creation’s rhythm—and for that we need the intellectual virtue of ‘wisdom.’[3]  Hence Aquinas often repeated the famous words of Aristotle, “It pertains to the wise man to set in order.”[4]

Yet, as Charlemagne said, “although correct conduct may be better than knowledge, nevertheless knowledge precedes conduct.”  Experience tells us as much:  The boor is invariably vulgar.  This is why St Thomas thinks that the intellectual virtues are precursors to what he calls the auriga virtutum, the ‘charioteer of the virtues,’ namely prudence.  Defined as “right reason about things to be done”—

Consequently, an intellectual virtue is needed in the reason, to perfect the reason, and make it suitably affected towards things ordained to the end; and this virtue is prudence. Consequently, prudence is a virtue necessary to lead a good life.[5]

Prudence, in turn, guides the other powers in the soul, namely the will and the emotions.[6]  Taken together, these aid individuals in the project of becoming human.  At one level, humanity is embedded in our DNA; at a deeper level, we aspire to a more integrated human experience by ‘re-calibrating’ our soul to function properly by learning, and with grace.  The goal of human integration, says St Thomas Aquinas, is happiness.

Thinking about our favourite subjects—whether it be Fermat’s Last Theorem for a mathematics major or Victor Hugo’s Romanticism for a French literature major—indeed brings happiness, but not completely.  Why else does the genuinely curious learner strive to understand and know her or his field of research and so become expert unless it instigates happiness?  And why else is it more exciting to register for electives or major requirement courses than core requirements?

Thus, early mediaeval monasteries and cathedrals developed schools, and universities developed under the auspices of the Church near the beginning of the High Middle Ages, the first being the University of Bologna in 1088—because learning holds the promise of happiness.  But only a promise, as there is a still fuller happiness to be had.  The link between learning and happiness lies in the fact that its beginning is found in the right exercise of the soul’s powers—including thinking, especially about abstract things.[7]  This is because “the object of the intellect is ‘what a thing is,’ i.e. the essence of a thing, according to De Anima iii, 6.  Wherefore the intellect attains perfection, in so far as it knows the essence of a thing.”[8]  Thus the imperfection of happiness in the intellectual life lies in the fact that there is still more to know and that the essence of the “Supremely Knowable”[9] can never be discovered by sense-experience, though it sets the human person off on the discovery of God:

If therefore the human intellect, knowing the essence of some created effect, knows no more of God than “that He is”; the perfection of that intellect does not yet reach simply the First Cause, but there remains in it the natural desire to seek the cause.  Wherefore it is not yet perfectly happy.  Consequently, for perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause.  And thus it will have its perfection through union with God as with that object, in which alone man's happiness consists.[10]

Something, then, is needed to create this “union with God” or connaturality by grace in order to reach the divine essence as the “First Cause” behind all the liberal arts.  Hence Aquinas says that

in the attempt to arrive at some knowledge of God, the human mind is greatly assisted when its natural light is fortified by a new illumination:  namely, the light of faith and that of the gifts of wisdom and of understanding, by which the mind is elevated above itself in contemplation, inasmuch as it knows God to be above anything which it naturally apprehends.[11]

The key words above are “the gifts of wisdom and of understanding,” which are two of the ‘Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit’ enumerated in the Greek version of Isaiah 11:2-3a.[12]  We hear of these Seven Gifts, for example, in the ‘Golden Sequence’ sung before the gospel at Pentecost:

On the faithful who are true

And profess their faith in You,

In Your sev’n-fold gift descend![13]

Whereas wisdom as an intellectual virtue makes a “right judgment about Divine things after reason has made its inquiry,” it belongs to gift of Wisdom to “judge aright about them on account of connaturality with them.”[14]  In other words, the intellectually wise person appreciates that there is a Creator behind the wonderful arrangement of the universe, but the person having the gift of Wisdom is united to that Creator in friendship.[15]

At the same time, there exists no dichotomy between wisdom as an intellectual virtue and Wisdom as a gift of the Holy Spirit because the “moral and intellectual virtues precede the gifts, since man, through being well subordinate to his own reason, is disposed to be rightly subordinate to God.”[16]  If we look at the Seven Gifts individually, we can see how they make us “connatural” to God:  Wisdom is cognizance “of divine things”[17] and Understanding is the “sound grasp of the things that are proposed to be believed.”[18]  The gift of Knowledge is a “sure and right judgment on them, so as to discern what is to be believed, from what is not to be believed.”[19]  These three gifts inform that of Counsel as it gives a sense of its practicality such that one is “counselled by God as to what he ought to do in matters necessary for salvation.”[20]

Since “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it,”[21] these ‘intellectual gifts’ of the Holy Spirit work in dialogue with the intellectual virtues in such a way that in retrospect the Christian intellectual can interpret her or his field or speciality in relation to God as well as use them to form analogies of things they come to know supernaturally.  This would explain why, for example, Jesus used agrarian metaphors to explain the Kingdom of God—because He was raised in rural Galilee and knew well the basics of farming.  Hence the gift of Knowledge plays a special role in helping us to interpret creation in light of the Creator:    

Right judgment about creatures belongs properly to Knowledge.  … It is by forming a right judgment of creatures that [one] becomes aware of the loss (of which they may be the occasion), which judgment he exercises through the gift of Knowledge.[22]

Therefore, the graced intellectual can transform her or his experience of creation though the liberal arts by applying the gift of Knowledge and thus discover spiritual joy in the life of learning.  The gift of Wisdom, then, so arranges truths about the Creator and creation in an orderly way in the mind, which the gift of Understanding allows us to perceive and discern at a much deeper level.

This is why the seven liberal arts surround the ‘Seat of Wisdom’ at Chartres’ south portal:  It is by graced learning that we come to know not only the Creator but the Creator who became a member of creation by the Incarnation:  “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14; cf 1 Jn 1:1-3a).  Moreover, the entry of the Creator into creation affirms the essential goodness of the universe and, therefore, legitimises our exploration of it by the liberal arts.  It is only by the Seven Gifts that we can befriend the Creator who, in reciprocal friendship with us, further enlightens us about creation’s beauty and goodness.  Therefore, Aquinas was able to say that

Created goods do not cause spiritual joy, except in so far as they are referred to the Divine good, which is the proper cause of spiritual joy.  Hence spiritual peace and the resulting joy correspond directly to the gift of Wisdom: but to the gift of Knowledge there corresponds…consolation, since, by his right judgment, [one] directs creatures to the Divine good.[23]

So much about knowing good things.  What about doing good?  Mediaeval scholastics generally believed that Agere sequitur esse—“action follows being.”  Therefore ‘Being gracefully learned’ ought to yield graced behaviour.  Hence the remaining three gifts of Fear, Piety, and Fortitude all have to do with doing good based upon that cognizance gained by Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge and Counsel.  “Fear of the Lord” is a “reverence for God’s pre-eminence.”  Piety relates to God as Father (cf Rom 8:15-17; Gal 4:5-7) and to other people as created in God’s image.  Fortitude is a certain moral courage to do what is right—a timely gift in academia when public opinion sometimes overrides research conclusions.

Let us return to where we began—at the Sedes Sapientiae sculpture surrounded by the seven liberal arts over the south portal of Chartres Cathedral.  The fact that it faces westward is not haphazard.  For almost the entirety of the Church’s history, Christians prayed eastward.[24]  The prophet Micah foretold the Incarnation by comparing it to a dawning:  “But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings” (Micah 4:2).  The Magi sought Christ by following “His star in the east” (Mt 2:2).  The place of Christ’s Ascension, on Mount Olivet, was east of Jerusalem (Lk 12:45); the Evangelist notes that Christ will return to the same place at the Parousia (Acts 1:11; cf Zech 14:4).  The direction of the sunrise was therefore co-opted by the Church to symbolise the enlightenment that Christ brought by His Advent.  For this reason, churches were often built facing east, with the main entrance facing west, the place of sunset and, therefore, a symbol of darkness.  The very act of entering a church, with one’s back to place of dusk, was a liturgical gesture of the Christian’s repudiation of darkness, processing towards the east, towards “the true Light which has enlightened every one” (Jn 1:9). 

Accordingly, the sculptures on the west façade of Christian temples tended to depict the Church’s ‘missionary programme.’  Thus, the façade of Chartres Cathedral depicts this ‘missionary programme’ in a triptych:  The imminence of the first Advent in view of conquering the cosmic darkness resulting from humanity’s alienation from God (tympanum, north portal), of ‘Christ in Majesty’ (tympanum, central portal) showing the Church’s central proclamation that “Jesus is Lord!” (cf Rom 14:7-9) who in fact conquered this darkness, and the ‘Seat of Wisdom with the Seven Liberal Arts’ continuing this theme by showing the Church as the supreme patron of that learning which dispels sin’s corollary—the darkness of ignorance.

Rather than being an appendage to the Church’s mission, education is integral to it, since the Holy Spirit is the inseparable companion of the Gospel’s proclamation, whose Seven Gifts enlightens minds no less than hearts.  The recent celebration of Pentecost, therefore, celebrated grace’s renovation the whole person, thus bringing us to the fullest human integration.  And so we sang in the sequence Veni, Sancte Spiritus before the gospel on Pentecost Sunday—

Holy Spirit, Lord divine,

Come from heights of heav’n and shine

 Come with blessed radiance bright![25]

Notes:

[1] Charlemagne, De litteris colendis.  On the Web at https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/carol-baugulf.asp, accessed 8 May 2021.

[2] For St Thomas’ take on why the liberal arts ‘liberate,’ see his Metaphysica, I.3 (58-59).

[3] Today, one who is expert in her or his field would be called a “specialist”; Aquinas, on the other hand would say that one who “knows the highest cause in any particular genus, and by its means is able to judge and set in order all the things that belong to that genus, is said to be wise in that genus, for instance in medicine or architecture” (Summa theologiae, 2a2æ, q. 45, art. 1, resp., italicised emphasis added).

[4] Aristotle, Metaphysica, I.2.

[5] S[umma] th[eologiae], 1a2ae, q[uestion]. 57, art[icle]. 5, resp[ondeo].

[6] Aquinas identifies two ‘sets’ of emotions:  The ‘concupiscible appetite’ whereby we look for pleasing things, and the ‘irascible appetite’ which is a fight-or-flight instinct in the face of potential harm.  For a good introduction to Aquinas’ anthropology, see M. A. Neenan, The Nature of the Human Soul:  Philosophical Anthropology and Moral Theology (Cluny Media, 2017).

[7] Even an earnest gardener who digs in soil and plants seeds in a certain way speaks of abstract things such as the different species of flowers or what kind of environment various kinds of plants best thrive.

[8] S.th., 1a2æ, q. 3, art. 8, resp.

[9] The “Supremely Knowable” is one of Aquinas’ descriptions of God.

[10] Summa contra Gentiles, III.119.1.

[11] Super Boëthium de Trinitate, q. 1, art. 2, resp, emphasis added.

[12] “The Spirit of God shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and strength, the spirit of knowledge and godliness; the spirit of the fear of God shall fill him.”  See also the Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§1830-1831.

[13] «Da tuis fidelibus, / in te confidentibus, / sacrum septenarium!»  The English translation given here is by  Peter J. Scagnelli.

[14] S.th., 2a2æ, q. 45, art. 2, resp.

[15] “The wisdom which is a gift of the Holy Ghost, as stated above [2a2æ, q. 45, art. 1], enables us to judge aright of Divine things, or of other things according to Divine rules, by reason of a certain connaturalness or union with Divine things, which is the effect of charity” (Summa theologiae, 2a2æ, q. 45, art. 4, resp.).

[16] S.th., 1a2æ, q. 68, art. 8, ad 2.

[17] S.th., 2a2æ, q. 45, art. 2, resp.

[18] S.th., 2a2æ, q. 9, art. 1, resp.

[19] S.th., 2a2æ, q. 9, art. 1, resp.

[20] S.th., 2a2æ, q. 51, art. 1, ad 2.

[21] S.th., 1a, q. 1, art. 8, ad 2.

[22] S.th., 2a2æ, q. 9, art. 4, resp.

[23] S.th., 2a2æ, q. 9, art. 4, ad 1.

[24] See, for example, an explanation of this by St John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith, IV.12.

[25] «Veni, Sancte Spiritus / et emitte caelitus / lucis tuae radium!»  For those interested in an exploration of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, I recommend W. Farrell and D. Hughes, Swift Victory:  Essays on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit (New York:  Sheed and Ward, 1955) and R. E. Brennan, The Seven Horns of the Lamb:  A Study of the Gifts Based on St Thomas Aquinas (Milwaukee:  The Bruce Publishing Company, 1966).  For a good introduction to the practise of the liberal arts, see M. Joseph, The Trivium:  The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric (Philadelphia:  Paul Dry Books, 2002).