International Catholic University
I've been talking to you for the last six lectures about the history and philosophy of the liberal arts. We have seen how the liberal arts are primarily arts of learning, especially of intellectual learning. For that reason they are arts of signs, the use of signs and symbols. We have seen that there are two main groups of arts, the linguistic arts of the Trivium, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and then the mathematical arts. We've considered how these arts can be identified and described in terms of the way they use the signs that they employ.
Now in this lecture dealing with theology and the liberal arts I want to consider with you how the arts can be put to work to serve as means to the end, in this case of theology. The arts serve all the purposes of knowledge diversified through the many forms of poetry, the various ways of using knowledge to achieve a practical action and the many kinds of science. In short the purposes are as many and different as the kinds of knowledge. Nothing less than a review of all knowledge would suffice then to indicate all the purposes that the liberal arts can serve. We have seen some of these purposes in considering signs at work, since any use provides an example of signs serving some purpose. In analyzing the element of sign use, for example, we have also seen that the general purpose leaves its mark within the sign structure itself.
Now to consider theology is to investigate one of the purposes that the arts of science may serve. Given the claim of theology it raises the question of ultimate purpose. Plato found it necessary to warn many centuries ago that there is nothing wrong in using reason to analyze the divine. If we take theology broadly for any knowledge of God, it may be well to ask first whether theology has any need for the liberal arts. There is only one case in which it would not, that namely of the theological knowledge in which there is no use of signs whatsoever. In this case God would have to be known immediately as addressing the soul in its innermost depths, flooding it with his presence.
Such would appear to be the kind of knowledge that the mystical writers described as coming through the annihilation of the self, the world, and all their works, and a turning away from all signs and symbols. Such a direct and immediate experience would be strictly ineffable. If such an experience is theological then it might be claimed that it affords an instance of theology having no need for the liberal arts.
However, to remain so the ineffable character would have to be preserved. It would have to be cut off completely from any prior knowledge or experience which might be retained through signs. Neither verbal nor mental prayer could be involved since with them the activity of the signs would enter. No effort to communicate it to others would be allowed, for this too calls for signs and their arts. In other words, if theology wants to claim that it has no relation with liberal arts it will have to limit itself to the direct and immediate experience of God.
The nature and possibility of such an experience is heavy with theological and philosophical problems. Saint Paul tells us that we will see God face to face, but does such a vision rule out entirely the use of signs? It is difficult to separate even our physical sight from perception so as to divorce it from our previous experiences which are involved with signs.
But such questions do not have to be answered in order to see that theology depends on the liberal arts. Even though the whole endeavor of theology were to enable us to achieve such an experience, such an ineffable experience, it would still remain a learning and teaching tradition, yet of itself never supplies the experience itself. Compared with the actual experience even the greatest works of theology appear as so much straw, as Saint Thomas declared at the close of his life. And the straw out of which they are composed constitutes the work of the liberal arts; it is a work that has achieved in sheer bulk a tremendous magnitude.
Even a mystical theologian endeavors to tell others of his experience of God. To do so he has to use words and with them the liberal arts. For a revealed religion such as Christianity the revelation of God to Man is contained in a book, the reading and writing of which demands the use of signs. If, as Christians believe, the Bible is the greatest of all books, then it is also among other things a supreme manifestation of liberal art. A theologian who is also highly conscience of the tradition of liberal arts occasionally seeks to expound it in these terms. Saint Augustine, for example, seeks to show that its rhetoric, the rhetoric of the Scriptures, equals the best that pagan antiquity has to show. But whether expounded as such or not theology in developing through the use of signs depends on the arts of their use, that is on the liberal arts.
Yet among theologians there have always been men who claim that theology should have nothing at all to do with the liberal arts. The Medieval Saint Peter Damiani is a forceful representative of this position. He has nothing but contempt for the arts. He wrote, "If you think highly of grammar consider that the first teacher of grammar was the devil when he declined Deus in the plural by saying to Eve, 'You will be as Gods knowing good and evil.'" Nor does Damiani limit his attacks to grammar. "Plato," he writes, "scrutinizes the secrets of nature's mysteries, determines the limit of the planet's orbs, calculates the courses of the stars, but I reject him. Pythagoras devised the latitudes of the terrestrial spheres, but that is nothing at all. Euclid investigates the properties of geometrical figures, but I shun him likewise. As for the rhetoricians with their arguments and sophistical scoffing, they are the most unworthy of all."
Even in attacking the arts, the theologian is compelled to use the linguistic arts. He may deride grammar and rhetoric but he has to use them to do so. In this respect, the liberal arts shared the same quality that Aristotle noted in philosophy -- that of being used even when it is being denied. For Saint Peter Damiani offers one more purpose that they may serve, even though it is the purpose of denying the arts. Damiani's contempt of them however marks a certain uneasiness that theology feels in the presence of these arts, even among theologians fully aware of their debt to them. No theologian is more aware of them in their tradition than Saint Augustine. In reading his work we may well wonder at times if he is not rather more the rhetorician than the theologian. Yet for all his love of the liberal arts, perhaps also because of his love of them, he never fails to warn us against them. In any and all use of them he tells us we must always be careful to observe the maxim, "ne quid nimis," nothing too much. Even in warning, he quotes here from the Latin poet Terence and so appeals to a poetic use of the arts.
Though necessary these arts may be too much, theology warns. This too much may occur in many ways. One of particular interest to theology apears when the work of the liberal arts is measured against the object of theology, the infinite guide. Theologians mindful of the teacher of their Master know that there is only unum necessarium, only one thing necessary, to seek first the Kingdom of God. The arts may be necessary to reach that Kingdom, but they do not constitute it. What is more, it often seems that the arts make such demands, offer such attractions, that the one necessary thing is forgotten.
Augustine voices this worry that his love of music leads him to forget his God even while he is signing psalms to him. Furthermore Christ Himself chose to live not among the learned but among the ignorant and simple of heart. Theology in its most subtle speculations is always haunted by the paradox that a simple and ignorant woman may in fact be closer to God and share more intimately in His life than even the most learned of theologians. Ne quid nimis, and the "nothing too much" that theology addresses to the arts is grounded in the experience that they may easily prove too much. In needing the arts and using them for its ends theology provides an environment in which the arts themselves may develop.
In reviewing their history we have seen that this development may be viewed in terms of the different ends that the arts pursue and of the ways that they function to achieve those ends. The end itself may be considered in either of two ways, as the perfecting of the human subject who acquires the arts or as the knowledge that is achieved through them. In the first respect they constitute the means by which the mind attains intellectual health in its use of signs. As such they are constant, at least in their basic elements throughout history. In this sense their end remain the same and their history consists in a narration of the various ways in which they are developed, utilized, and ordered to achieve intellectual health.
However any use of the arts achieves some kind of knowledge, and accordingly as one knowledge rather than another is viewed as supreme the history of the arts becomes the story of their functioning in varying ways for the achievement of different ends. In tracing the lines of this history we saw how theology provides a different kind of wisdom as the end of the liberal arts. Something of the extent of the difference can be illustrated by considering its effect upon the classical conception of the arts.
There is an ancient allegory by a fifth-century writer, the Handbook of the Arts by Martianus Capella, in which the arts appear as the bridesmaids at the marriage of Mercury, who is the Logos, the word, of both words and reasons. The marriage of Mercury with Philology, the love of the world, the love of the Logos, representing all learning. The theological trappings of the allegory are pagan; there is no sign of Christian influence in the work. And yet the allegory remains current from its appearance in the fifth century down to the sixteenth. By interpreting it in light of the demands placed upon it by Christian theology, it is possible to see how Christian theology transforms the arts. According to Martianus, the liberal arts come to the service of Mercury, who is God, the Logos. For the theologian the arts are also servants of the Logos, but the Logos is no longer the ambiguous figure of Mercury, but Christ, the Logos who became flesh and dwelt among us.
The liberal arts still remain the arts of words and reason, but they now serve the Logos who is Christ. Theology thus transformed the arts in their use by supplying them with a new end identical with God, the ultimate purpose of the universe. The effect of this change in the end becomes evident in the work of Augustine following his conversion. Among the first tasks that he set for himself after his conversion was that of composing books on each of the liberal arts. The De Musica, the one on music, is the only one he completed and that is still extent. The treatise constitutes an effort to show how the study of the proportions in numbers of music and prosody may lead the mind to God. The arts are undergoing the influence of theology and being directed now to the God of Faith. They remain arts of signs, operating words and reasons, but they are now used to achieve union with God. Not the God of the philosophers: they were used for that purpose by Plato or Aristotle, Plotinus. But now the end is the God of Faith, the Christ who Saint Paul identifies with wisdom himself.
It remains to be seen however whether the new ordination influences the activity and work of the arts themselves. It may be that the arts are patient of any use and as it were neutral to any interpretation that may be given to them. It is conceivable that they could be put to a new use without being affected in any way in their own character. However, this does not seem likely. A little knowledge of architecture suffices to show that it experienced a new development when it turned to the construction of the cathedral. Theology put new demands upon architecture as an art and it responded in new ways. The same thing might be expected to happen to the liberal arts.
We might expect, for example, that a new impetus would be given to the linguistic arts. Christian theology has its source in a review of religion, and the greater part of that revelation is contained in a book. If God has availed Himself of human words to make known his ways to man, language and reading are elevated to a new dignity, they are sanctified and raised to an eminence they do not have of themselves. The writings in which God makes use of human words become an object of special veneration and are called antonomastically The Book, Bible.
The Greeks and Romans each had in Homer and Virgil one book that was the basis for their early education. But neither made such claim as the Revelation to the Jews does. No other book can compare with the Bible and the dignity of its author. For this reason it enjoys a special character that sets it apart from all others and makes the reading and understanding of it a special problem. The first challenge, however, remains one of reading. Even though faith is necessary for understanding it, the Bible must first be read in some fashion for faith to have something to work on. Augustine in his book On Christian Doctrine shows how all the liberal arts can be organized to the end of reading and teaching the Sacred Scriptures.
The Bible, as a result of its own claims, has been read with the thoroughness and intensity given to no other book. Evidence of this can be observed in the work of Saint Augustine himself. In his Confessions he relates how he first took up the Scriptures and was repelled by the grossness of their style. He could make nothing of them because he did not know how to read them. It was not until he came to Milan and heard Saint Ambrose interpreting the Bible that his eyes were opened and he became aware of his ignorance. From Ambrose he tells us he learned how to apply the principle that "the letter killeth but the Spirit giveth life." By means of it he tells us he was able to draw aside the mystic veil laying open spiritually what according to the letter seemed to teach perversity.
In the last books of the Confessions Augustine shows at length how he had learned to interpret Scripture. For the influence of theology on the arts, it is significant that he learned how to read Scriptures from Saint Ambrose. He had first gone to hear him because of Ambrose's fame as a preacher. Augustine came away with a new skill in the linguistic arts which his own training, in which he had prided himself, had not provided. Although the problem was one of reading a text, it was only from a theologian that he learned how to read it.
Among the things that he learned he is especially thankful for the doctrine of multiple meanings. In the phrase "increase and multiply" in Genesis he finds justification for the possibility that any given text may have multiple interpretations. By this blessing upon the first parents to increase and multiply, he understands beyond the little sense of human generation that God has granted us a power and a faculty both to express in many ways what we understand in one way, and to understand in many ways what we read expressed obscurely in just one way. An example of this power is provided by Augustine's interpretation of "increase and multiply."
These multiple meanings that Augustine marvels at are developed systematically by theology into the doctrine of the various senses or levels of Scripture. According to Aquinas they are peculiarly the prerogatives of the Bible, since God can signify his meaning not by words only, as man also can do, but also by the things themselves which God has made. The whole world thus becomes a symbolic structure which is open to be read by those who possess the art. Indeed, Saint Paul describes the world as the poema of Christ, as the poem, the making of Christ. The ambiguity of the Greek allows this to be taken as poem as well as making. Augustine for example talks about the Carmen Universitatis, the Song of the Universe, in his book on music.
So understood the doctrine of multiple meanings can be used to read The Book of Nature as well as the Bible. Although elaborated for unlocking the secrets of Scripture, the doctrine of the multiple meanings, the levels of reading Scripture, becomes an instrument of the linguistic arts. Dante, to cite but one example, writes that the four senses are functioning throughout the Divine Comedy. What is organized and developed as a means of interpreting the Sacred Text thus becomes a device for searching the depths of meaning and language.
Men using these arts afterwards, unmindful of their theological origin, benefit nevertheless from their long theological development. The seven types of ambiguity which the critic William Empson analyzing in poetry might be described as a descendent of this theological doctrine. The theological use develops not only theology but the liberal arts themselves. Theological knowing, like any other knowing, offers a context in and through which the liberal arts can perform their activity. That context is a very large one in the Western tradition, and its extent alone makes it worth investigating for anyone interested in the life of the arts.
To put it so may make it seem that theology is important because it helps to develop the liberal arts. This for theology would constitute a clear case of too much. Even apart from any ultimate judgment of the place of theology in the hierarchy of knowledge it still ranks as one of the great achievements of the liberal arts. Considered as such theology at once reveals the presence of the arts and the influence of their own development. Their internal and mutual relation of the arts show up within theology and the predominance of one art over another produces different kinds of theology. The history of theology can thus be viewed as a part of the history of the liberal arts, and differences among theologians can be interpreted in terms of relations among the arts.
The work of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas provide an especially clear example. Both are theologians, both seek the knowledge and love of God, both start from principles provided by supernatural faith, both use their reason and intellect in every way to advance that knowledge. Yet in form and structure their work is remarkably different. Considered as works of liberal art, they fall under the domination of different arts. Rhetoric dominates in Saint Augustine's work, logic in that of Saint Thomas.
The rhetorical intention in ordering of Saint Augustine's theology appears in all his work, nowhere more so than in the Confessions. This first autobiography is a narration of a rhetorician's search for God. At the same time that is as an eloquent example of the art of rhetoric. Rich in exploiting literary devices for achieving special effects, the book is a narration of his conversion, an exposition of many parts of Christian Doctrine, an argument of their truth against opposition and distortion. And above all it is a prayer -- a prayer of penitence, thanksgiving, and praise all caught up within a continuing meditation. On the first page we find him declaring, "the heart is restless until it rests in Thee." And on the last he is uttering his trust "to rest in Thy great hallowing." The whole book can be described as an effort to persuade the reader that his heart is restless, and to invite him and incite him to seek God and find and set his heart at rest. The book is a prayer, Augustine's prayer. It aims in effect at making his reader to pray with him. It is possible, as many Christians have found, to be reading him and suddenly to find that you are no longer reading the words as his, and that his words have become yours, and you are suddenly lifting up your heart to God in prayer and in praise.
We will continue to discuss the predominance of rhetoric in the theology of Saint Augustine, especially in his book, the Confessions. For in this book his art aims to make his reader seek the faith and having found the faith to use the intellect to rise to God, and, having faith and understanding, to search the Scriptures to know and to love God better. The Confessions is an account of the soul moving to God; it is also rhetoric in the service of faith.
When we turn to the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas we seem to enter a different world. The sense of movement is gone; there is no narration. The unit of the text has become the article, consisting all but invariably of the statement of a question in a form that admits of alternative answers; the presenting of answers on both sides of the question, usually only one for the side that the author develops at some length in the body of the article; and finally refutations of the answers offered on the contrary side. We are presented with the materials, even the form, of a disputation and called upon to engage in and follow the argument of reason.
If the process can be described as a motion, it is a movement not of the heart and passions, as often it is in Augustine, but the movement of the inquiring mind. Stating the problem, arousing inquiry by formulating a question, Saint Thomas seeks to show how the question can be resolved. Among the hundreds of questions in his book, the constant effort is to reach and establish a conclusion as a rock upon which to anchor the mind. The work possesses its own rhetoric, but it is not one that aims beyond itself to move the whole soul to God. It concentrates on providing conclusions and the reasons for them and approximating as closely as possible to rational insight and demonstration. Language and literary device exuberant in Augustine had been pruned to a minimum dictated by the needs of reason in theological matter. Theology is reconstructed according to an ideal of science which has logic at its basis. The Summa is a monumental effort of the mind to know God. It is also logic in the service of faith.
This difference between Augustine and Thomas appears most vividly, however, when we compare their commentaries on one and the same text. Both wrote commentaries on the psalms, and we need look at little more than the structure of their expositions on one of them to see that different arts are predominant.
Consider, for example, their treatment of the Forty-second Psalm, the Judica Me, which reads as follows:
Judge me, O God! Distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy. Deliver me from the unjust and deceitful man. For thou art God my strength. Why hast thou cast me off? Why do I go sorrowful while the enemy afflicts me? Send forth Thy light and Thy truth: they have conducted me and brought me unto the Holy Hill and into Thy tabernacles. And I will go into the altar of God, to God who gives joy to my youth. To Thee, O God, my God, I will give praise upon the hearth. Why art thou sad, O my soul? Why do you disquiet me? Hope in God, for I will still give praise to Him the salvation of my countenance and my God.
Augustine's exposition of this psalm falls into three parts. The first, by way of introduction, considers the causes of sadness in the world which can lead a Christian to cry out, "Judge me, O God!" The second and main part of his commentary expounds the Psalm. Augustine begins with the first half of the opening verse and proceeds to explain the Psalm piece by piece until he reaches the end. The five verses yield him ten pieces, although no reason is given for this division, little is said of their relation to each other, and no effort is made to see the psalm as a whole of related parts. In paraphrasing, expanding, explicitating the spiritual meanings of the terms of the psalm, Augustine frequently employs all three persons of address. Sometimes it is what the psalmist is saying. Then again, he will make the words his own and speak in the first person. And at times he addresses the audience directly. Having progressed through the psalm he closes with a moral application for his audience by telling them what they need to do to realize the teaching of the psalm in their actions.
Now the exposition of Saint Thomas of the psalm lacks anything corresponding to the introduction and conclusions of Augustine's. After linking the psalm to the preceding one, Thomas at once divides the psalm into two parts, not into the five parts of Augustine. The two parts, in the case of Thomas, the first stating a prayer and the second its effect. Then he breaks the first part into its parts and proceeds until he has divided the whole psalm into parts and explained the relations between them. Throughout his exposition he is always talking about the text and with but one exception always in the third person. In the first sentence it is David who first says the prayer, but after that no subject is named, it might as well be the psalm itself which is proposing, asking, saying, etc. Once a doubt is raised it seems presumptuous to call for a judgment, and Thomas replies in the first person, I respond it must be said, and this is the personal form he uses in the article of the Summa, and proceeds to answer in the familiar way by drawing a distinction.
The great difference between the two commentaries on the same psalm lies in the style of interpretation and the effect it achieves rather than in actual content. Both read the psalm as a way of finding Christ and for this purpose exploit the doctrine of multiple meanings. For some of these Thomas in fact seems to draw upon Augustine or upon a common tradition that goes back to him.
But after all the likeness is noted, the difference still remains striking. Augustine's comment is itself a prayer, and a psalm offers an occasion and the matter for Augustine to pray, for his audience to pray with him as well as with the psalmist. The analysis of parts and determination of meanings are offered only to intensify the prayer. The exposition of Thomas is all analysis in the literal sense. The text is taken as an object to be investigated with parts to be discerned and related to each other and to the whole and with terms to be elucidated to manifest these relations. The effect is not that of a prayer but of an understanding of a text which happens to be a prayer.
Augustine expounds a prayer by offering another prayer, Thomas by analyzing a text. For anything approaching an adequate explanation of these differences it would be necessary to go beyond the text. The audiences are not the same. Augustine's is the more popular one. Thomas's audience consists of students specializing in theology. Behind the authors are different scholastic traditions with different methods of exposition and intentions. Behind Augustine are the grammatical and rhetorical schools of late antiquity, behind Thomas the commentary tradition that developed with the rise of scholastic logic. Behind both are different views of the principles, methods and aims of theology itself.
But without going beyond the text it is evident that the differences arise in part from the predominance of different parts. The prayer as a form belongs to rhetoric in a special sense that it aims to incite a movement, to lift the heart to God. General rhetoric, as we saw when we were discussing rhetoric in the third lecture, can be described as an art of effects. In both respects Augustine's method of expounding the psalm is rhetorical: it aims at reproducing the effect of the psalm, and a wide range of devices is exploited to achieve that effect. The text of the psalm in some ways becomes only an occasion and disappears as an object of investigation.
For Saint Thomas, however, the text exists, at least for the purposes of exposition, as primarily an object. It is a sign structure with distinct parts having relations with each other and with the whole psalm. The primary work of his method lies in articulating these parts and their relations, in showing how one follows from another. It is a constant search for reasons. Such concern for the sign structure as an object, for the connectives that join it together and form a whole, and for reasons all reveal the presence of logic.
If Saints Augustine and Aquinas represent different types of theology, one can be characterized as rhetorical and the other as logical. Names derived from other aspects are more frequently used. The Augustinian theology is called affective or patristic theology, and the Thomistic intellectual or scholastic. In the history of Christian theology representatives of both tendencies can always be found, although at any given period one may tend to dominate. In fact a large part of Western intellectual history can be told as the story of the relations between these two types of theology. Yet their differences should not be overemphasized; their similarities are still greater. Both are supernatural in principle and ultimate purpose. They start from principles derived from revealed faith and operate in different ways. Both seek to further the understanding of the faith for the love of God; both are examples of faith seeking understanding. Although the phrase is usually applied to Augustinian theology, it is no less descriptive of the over-all purpose of Thomistic theology.
We have looked to theology's need for the liberal arts and the different effects that the predominance of one art over another has upon the work of theology. Now I want to look at the needs of the arts -- the arts' need of theology rather than theology's need for the arts. The ways in which theology influenced the liberal arts and in turn is influenced by them -- all of this belongs to history. The question may be raised, however, whether it is any more than this, any more than a matter of historical interest. It may be admitted, for example, that theology contributed in some ways to the development of the arts.
The same can also be said for philosophy, which today possesses a common stock of ideas and problems which owe their existence to the existence of Christianity. But for many of them there is no need to be a Christian in order to philosophize. So too it might be argued that although there is an historical connection between theology and the liberal arts: it is no more than this historical matter of the same sort as that between philosophy and Christianity. This of itself does not show any continuing need for the connection; it only shows that theology provides one of the possible ends of the art to pursue. For anything more than this it would have to be shown that theology somehow provides a condition and establishes a relation within which the arts are better able pursue their activity and worth.
The liberal arts are arts of the discursive sign, the signs that work in the discourse of reason. As such the liberal arts reach their greatest achievement in science and theoretical knowledge. Although necessary for science, they do not as such constitute science, although science may turn to the analysis of them, as we have the science of grammar in linguistics, or the science of logic in the formal study of logic. They only provide signs by whose structure the sciences achieve, whatever science it is. The arts are necessary for stating, analyzing, solving the problems of science. But the object itself, the principles of its analysis, come not from the arts but from the things that science studies. We learn about man by looking first at man, not at signs by means of which we conduct the investigation, although a study of the language man uses can tell us much about man himself.
Something first has to be said before there are any signs that can be investigated in themselves. In these elements of the signs the time arises when it is useful for the sign itself to consider its sign structure. But this is always a sophisticated development, as is the reflexive act by which the arts take their own operations as objects for analysis and develop the sciences of grammar, logic and rhetoric. For the most part and normally the arts function as a means of knowing, of knowing something beyond themselves to which they are directed and controlled by science, and ultimately by the highest sciences, philosophy and theology. These arts serve all knowledge, all science, but they are meant to serve not to master. To load them with cares that they cannot bear is but to weaken and eventually to destroy them, cutting them off from the sciences of the real.
But to point out this danger does not remove the cares. They may appear disguised, but appear they will, and the mind will try to answer them. Cut off from science, the arts of signs will try to find their answers by and within themselves. Then they indeed become loaded with cares that they cannot bear and falter in their own work. Trying to become ends, they will not operate effectively as means. They fail as arts, and we find ourselves in the condition described by Virgil in which the arts we need turn to harm and the masters fail.
But if the arts for their own health must serve a science beyond themselves, why must it ultimately be theology? Theology alone among the sciences demands all the other sciences, all the other arts. Any science specializes in some concern and method. Although theology is likewise, it also calls upon the other sciences in order to accomplish its own work. Theology thus assures, or should, full sweep to the scope of the arts, but even more important theology concerns itself directly with the great concerns and cares of men. With the existence of God and his nature, the nature and destiny of men, what separates men from God, and how this separation may be overcome. These are questions that the arts and other sciences cannot answer -- cares they cannot bear, questions and cares that cannot be avoided which constitutes the main concern of theology.
Aristotle argues that you must philosophize whether you want to or not. Newman extends this argument and develops it to hold for theology. Applied to the liberal arts this amounts to saying that if they are separated, if the arts are separated and isolated from philosophy and theology, they will endeavor to supply the place of these disciplines. The great questions of existence are then reduced to questions of language and manipulation of signs. This is bad, not only for theology and philosophy: it is also bad for the arts themselves. In trying to be more than they are capable of, they end up by being less than they should be. Jonathan Swift does a fable of the spider and the bee in his little work, The Battle of the Books, and that fable provides a parallel. As long as the arts work with theology the arts are like the bee. Theology provides him with fields in which to wander and gather the sustenance of their sweetness and light. Separated from theology, they become like the spider; having only themselves to fall back upon, they spin webs out of themselves and catch nothing but flies.
Theology thus frees the arts for their work of freedom. As Saint Augustine writes, "the soul enjoys nothing with freedom but what it enjoys with security." Theology provides security for the arts; it provides freedom from cares that they cannot bear. They then can carry on their work and achieve for the intellect freedom from bondage to signs and through their skillful use freedom from bad habits, prejudice and ignorance. Thus, in part at least, they earn their name as a liberal art, an art that frees, a freeing art.
The liberal arts are essential for the free man since they liberate the mind for its work. But the free man is more than just a liberal artist. He possesses also mastery over his passions, or should, which is provided by the moral virtues. But both intellectual and moral virtue are subsumed under the grace of God which theology serves and studies. This leads to promises and confers still another freedom revealed in the Word of God: "If you remain in my Word you shall be my disciples indeed, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," as our Lord Himself declared.
This freedom, though of a different kind, is not without relation to that of the liberal arts. The Word and Truth, however, that grounds this freedom is studied by theology as a source of freedom that flows out to and perfects both acts and virtues in their own liberating work. All three are combined in the free man so that he may be described in the words of Saint Augustine as "the one who lives well, prays well, studies well." It is by the moral virtues that we live well, by the liberal arts that we study well, and by the grace of God who is the object of theology that we pray well. And it is by living, studying, and praying well that we acquire the virtues, arts and graces by which we become free men.