via Henry
The Lost History of the Freemasons
The Seven Liberal Arts – The Trivium
There is a real affinity for the goals of Freemasonry and the Seven Liberal Arts. From earliest teachings, we see that they are the foundation of many degree rites, the first of which is the FellowCraft Degree. To understand why this is, I think we must first understand the structure of the Seven Liberal Arts and what their history is.
The Liberal Arts have been, from antiquity, been the foundation stone upon which knowledge of the natural world rests. The seven liberal arts have been utilized since ancient Greece. Plato and Pythagoras were first in codifying their importance; the flowering of our western understanding of the liberal arts took place in medieval education systems, where they were categorized into the Trivium and the Quadrivium. Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric are the Trivium, and Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy are the Quadrivium. The Trivium combines the use of the senses with knowledge to…
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Grammar and the Trivium
Previously, I posted about the Seven Liberal Arts in general and the Trivium in particular. Recently, a challenge was given to me about providing examples of how the liberal arts are part of our everyday life, and why the human seeking to enlighten their mind might care about them. The challenge was to provide short essays on each. Three-hundred word essays are always a challenge but the gauntlet has been picked up. We’ll call these Liberal Arts: petit fours.
Therefore, for today, I give you Grammar.
Grammar is the skill of knowing language. In order to form sound reasoning, one must be able to learn the words, sentence structure, and forms that make up their language and thereby, communicate clearly and with confidence. In classical training, Grammar is the “who, what, why, when, and how” of understanding and knowledge. Grammar is taught more mechanically in the modern age, which does a disservice: …
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Trivium: Logic or Dialectica
Today’s theme is Logic, or as seen the picture here, Dialectica. As the New Catholic Encyclopedia states, “Logic is the science and art which so directs the mind in the process of reasoning and subsidiary processes as to enable it to attain clearness, consistency, and validity in those processes. The aim of logic is to secure clearness in the definition and arrangement of our ideas and other mental images, consistency in our judgments, and validity in our processes of inference.”
Aristotle is generally considered the “Founder of Logic,” although many others before him put themselves to the task of thinking about how we think. One of these, Zeno of Elea, was considered to have developed reductio ad absurdum, or the method of indirect proof. If something cannot be both true and false, then an argument can be made from reducing the statement to the absurd.
For example, “The earth…
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Beethoven’s Last Work – Ode to Joy
As a classically trained musician, I often frame the way I think about the mysteries of the universe in terms of music. I love the quote of Einstein where he says, “I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.” A world without music would be lifeless, silent, and depressing. Almost every moment in a person’s life is continually underscored by music — from birth to death, at weddings and other celebrations. The ancients were convinced that music could become internalized by the individual; the music influencing, as it were, the manner of our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Ode to Joy
The “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, first performed on May 7, 1824, is one of those musical treasures that invites me to dream, to turn within and to contemplate my mortal coil. The chorus was the finale in…
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Trivium: Rhetoric
We’re back with the third part of the Trivium: Rhetoric.
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion through communications, either written or spoken. There are always two components to rhetoric – the rhetoric and the audience. Rhetoric’s aim is to make comparisons, evoke emotions, censure rivals, and convince their audience to switch a point of view. Rhetoric takes the form of speech, debate, music, story, play, movie, poem; nearly anything that can be written or spoken may be a piece of rhetoric. In fact, it may be the rhetoric that makes the art.
In the poem, The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost, the author provides a brief insight into life’s travels:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
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The Quadrivium
What scholars call the “foundation of Liberal Arts” – the Trivium – is taught in order that one may expand to other subjects, building upon the skills learned. These subjects have been varied over time, based on the philosopher teaching them but they are now generally accepted as mathematics, geometry, music, and astronomy – the Quadrivium. While these subjects were taught by ancient philosophers (Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, etc.), they became “the Quadrivium” in the Middle Ages in Western Europe, after Boethius or Cassiodorus had a go at translation.
(Encyclopedia Britannica has an excellent article on Mathematics in the Middle Ages, which discusses the Quadrivium briefly.)
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (usually known simply as Boethius) (c. 480 – 525) was a 6th Century Roman Christian philosopher of the late Roman period. Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator (c. 485 – c. 585), commonly known as Cassiodorus, was a Roman statesman and writer…
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Mathematics and the Quadrivium
Personally, I struggled with Math in school. Faced with a math test, any math test, I froze, cried, banged my head against the desk, and ultimately gave up. I saw mathematics as an isolated “thing” to be conquered. You were either good at math, or you were not.
How little I knew, and how little I was taught, about true mathematics. More than numbers, factorials, and fractions, Mathematics is about relationships – of numbers: how they work with each other, work for us, against us, and can talk about any situation. There are mathematics of money, elections, government, science, music, agriculture, capitalism, socialism, any -ism. Math is language and structure: it is a bridge between all aspects of liberal art. Which leads us to the Bridges of Koenigsberg.
Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician of the 18th Century solved, sort of, the problem of the Seven Bridges of Koenigsberg (Russia…
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