It was stressed in the lecture that the monks of the “dark ages” were keen with copying religious works in order to give glory to God – but something that I want to add is that the copying and understanding of these works was only made possible by the copying and reading of pagan works. We are told of latin manuals of style and grammar. These were not “textbooks” invented by the monks – but rather the great works of antiquity, typically Seneca’s letters, Vergil’s Aeneid and Cicero’s works (Logic, Grammar, Rhetoric respectively). The monks had an understanding of the Aeneid, considered the greatest extant vessel of the Latin language, comparable to their understanding of the great Book. The quadrivium was also informed by pagan works: Aristotle, Claudius Ptolemaeus and Plato. The monks ostensibly copied these “flea ridden” works in order to serve the church, but that doesn’t explain the reverence these works have attributed to them. Here’s an illuminated manuscript from the early 14th century depicting the intellectual pillars of the time:

Note: Thomas Aquinas is not pictured.

Thank goodness that the monks fell in love with these great works of antiquity – otherwise many of them would be lost to us today, and thus a great wealth of the liberal arts. In our time we tend to study these men as part of the ancient past (secluded into this field we dub “philosophy”), but during the age of the manuscripts they were synonymous with knowledge and history itself. The monks learned their disciplines and crafts by studying the ancient past and so derives the whole corpus of Christian writings. Amusingly, the dialectical methods the Christian apologists used and use to justify their faith derive from Seneca’s lineage of stoic logic, inherited from the Socratic line.