The spirit in which Isidore approached the task of furnishing a comprehensive treatment of the secular subject-matter of education was the one proper to his age. He held that its place was a subordinate one. He seems to be expressing his own and not a borrowed view when he says that “grammarians are better than heretics, for heretics persuade men to drink a deadly draught, while the learning of grammarians can avail for life, if only it is turned to better uses”.[149] The same depreciation of the independent value of secular studies is reflected in his statement that the order of the seven liberal arts in the curriculum was one intended to secure a progressive liberation of the mind from earthly matters and “to set it at the task of contemplating things on high”.[150] He evidently believed that it was the function of the seven liberal arts to raise the mind from a lower or material to a higher or spiritual plane of thought.[151]
In the Etymologies, as has been noticed, Isidore has combined the encyclopedia of education, as exemplified in the works of Martianus Capella and Cassiodorus, and the encyclopedia of the whole range of knowledge, of which the works of Varro, Pliny, and Suetonius are leading examples. The first three of the twenty books which are comprised in the Etymologies are evidently educational texts; the last twelve as evidently belong to the encyclopedia of all knowledge.[152] The question is in which of these divisions the intervening books should be classed. If we look to Isidore’s predecessors for guidance on this point, we find that Capella gives only the seven liberal arts, while Cassiodorus gives not only a comprehensive account of preparatory studies in the form of the seven liberal arts, but adds in his De Institutione Divinarum Litterarum a treatment of the higher, or religious, education of the monk. The supposition that Isidore followed the example of Cassiodorus is the more natural one. Their educational purpose was much the same: Cassiodorus had in mind the training of the monk, while Isidore was concerned with the education of the priest. It is, all things considered, more natural to suppose that Isidore is giving in Books I-VIII of his Etymologies a comprehensive survey of the education of the secular clergy, than to suppose that his educational texts stopped short at the end of the seven liberal arts.
If this supposition is correct, the outline of this survey is as follows: Grammar (Bk. I), Rhetoric and Dialectic (Bk. II), Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy (Bk. III), Medicine (Bk. IV), Laws and Times (Bk. V), the books and services of the church (Bk. VI), God, the angels, and the orders of the faithful (Bk. VII), the church and the different sects (Bk. VIII). The inclusion of medicine, law, and chronology, which were not in the corresponding plan of Cassiodorus,[153] meant merely an enlargement of his scheme to fit it for the slightly different purpose which Isidore had in mind. The reason for the inclusion of these subjects is the practical one: in the absence of any other educated class priests were obliged to have some slight knowledge of medicine and law, while the intricacy of the church calendar of the time made chronology a professional necessity.
At first sight this plan of educational subjects would seem to be at variance with our accepted idea that the seven liberal arts covered the whole field of preparatory training. A closer examination shows, however, that in form at least Isidore kept them in a class by themselves; and when he passes from them to medicine he is careful to specify that it is not one of the liberal arts, but forms a “second philosophy”.[154] By this he means that medicine—and the same may be assumed for laws and times—is placed in the higher and not the preparatory stage of education, and that in this sphere it plays a minor part.
If, then, this view of the subject-matter of the first eight books of the Etymologies is correct, it will be admitted that in Isidore’s organization of education a significant step has been taken. In the education of the Greek and Roman world there was nothing to parallel the medieval and modern university development, which has been characterized until recently by the three professional schools of law, medicine, and theology. In Isidore’s plan we have, for the first time, as professional studies, first, what corresponds to the later theology, and, in subordination to this, the subjects of law, medicine and chronology. It is evident, therefore, that we have here in embryo, as it were, the organization of the medieval university; law and medicine have only to be secularized and freed from their subordination to theology, and the medieval university in its complete form appears.
PART II
THE ETYMOLOGIES
BOOK I
ON GRAMMAR