This month was a tough pick. Honorable mentions go to both Cicero’s De Senectute and Littlejohn and Evans’ Wisdom and Eloquence. But the winner for the top book is Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon.
I’m a teacher, which makes me a sucker for books on teaching. Hugh, along with Quintilian and John Milton Gregory, is one of the best. He was the head instructor of a small but famous community—St. Victor’s—just outside of medieval Paris in the early 1100’s. His Didascalicon de Studio Legendi (translated as something close to “The Compendium of Teaching of the Study of Reading") focuses on the foundations of learning. What is the purpose of education? What are its essentials? How should these essentials be imparted to others?
For Hugh, all of philosophy is concerned with the problem of growing to know God—an aim harkening back to Augustine and De Doctrina Christiana. In this quest, each human faces two fundamental obstacles. First, we have fallen from our original nature which could effortlessly know God; this must be restored. Second, we have to deal with many evils in this world, not least of which is our own bodily weakness. “Of all human acts or pursuits, then, governed as these are by wisdom, the end and intention ought to regard either the restoring of our nature’s integrity, or the relieving of those weaknesses to which our present life lies subject…this is our entire task: the restoration of our nature and the removal of our deficiency.” (I.v)
To accomplish this, he proposes work in four areas of knowledge or “philosophy:”
1) The theoretical arts—theology, physics, and mathematics (the quadrivium), which train the mind and soul
2) The practical arts—ethics, economics, and political science, which train men how to live together in harmony
3) The mechanical arts—cloth-making, toolcraft, commerce, agriculture, provision of food, medicine, and theatrics, which provide for the current weakness of the body
4) The logical arts—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, which enable us to learn, classify, and test the other arts
Hugh briefly lays these twenty-one arts out so an aspiring scholar will know what and how to read in order to master all necessary knowledge of this world. The second part of the work is a similar introduction to the sacred Scriptures, which give the knowledge of the next. The system laid the foundations for what would blossom into medieval scholasticism over the next three centuries.
Interspersed throughout are bits of caring wisdom from a born teacher. Bits of advice to not overcomplicate a subject or to make sure your students get time away from their books are as timeless as when Hugh scratched them onto parchment, as are his warnings against your readings giving you an impression of omniscience: “Many are deceived by the desire to appear wise before their time. The therefore break out in a certain swollen importance and begin to simulate what they are not and to be ashamed of what they are; and they slip all the further from wisdom in proportion as they think, not of being wise, but of seeming so.” (III.xiii)
Given the nine centuries that have elapsed since it was composed, a newcomer might expect this book to be a difficult grind. But Hugh’s clear, logical progression and kindly demeanor throughout make it anything but. If you’re a teacher, pick this text up.
