Trivial Authority

Jesus, the trivium, manual labor, and philosophy

Our Lord Jesus Christ and St Joseph Working Brushed Aluminum Icon tektōn (τέκτων) carpenter, woodworker, or builder, by HolyRosaryTeam.

In a wonderful essay, Matthew Kaul, writing for his own newsletter The Good Teacher, explores the nature of authority in teaching and where it comes from. He turns for an example to the scene in St. Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus, finished with His famous Sermon on the Mount, stands before the gathered crowds, minds freshly blown with mouths agape, ready to catch Galilean flies. He—a local former-child-prodigy-turned-manual-laborer-nobody—had opened the Scriptures to them in a way their own highly respected, highly trained teachers had never done. Jesus had taught them “as one who had authority, and not as their scribes” (Matt. 7:29).

From whence came this authority? What was different about Him that made His homiletic powers qualitatively different from the scribes’ own? Matthew (the Substacker, not the Gospel writer) asks,

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How did Jesus obtain this authority that astonished the crowds? It’s not like he had been teaching for decades: the Sermon on the Mount is presented as the first substantive teaching of Jesus’s ministry.

But if we look more broadly at Jesus’s life, we can see a spiral path that has three mutually reinforcing components, each of which is necessary for growth in wisdom & authority:

1. Thinking

2. Creating

3. Teaching

Each of these builds on the others: the best teachers are reflective makers. The best makers are also philosophers and mentors; the best philosophers are teachers who make and form—communities, schools, disciples.

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This is, I think, a helpful and concise way of framing the matter. Thinking untethered from action risks being out of touch with how things really are; creating without thought is just plain irresponsible; and, unless you’re a parrot, you can’t really speak to what you haven’t done and subsequently reflected on. Authority in teaching, then, comes from “reflective makers.” It’s what philosopher Richard Sennett calls “authority in the flesh.”¹

Matthew then points to three scenes recorded for us in the Gospels that correlate to each one of these stages: Jesus’ capacity for thought demonstrated as a child in the temple when He asked unsettlingly perceptive questions; His implied, but never explained, decades of labor as a tektōn (carpenter? stonemason? handyman? we don’t really know); and finally His teaching ministry, which started with a bang on an Israeli mountainside overlooking the Sea of Galilee. It was after this, His first sermon, that the people recognized Jesus’ authoritative teaching and He…well, He kind of went viral.²

I was talking to a long-time social media mutual, Anglican priest Father Wesley Walker, about Hugh of St. Victor, as he is writing his thesis on Hugh’s thought, and the subject of the trivium and quadrivium came up. These are important ideas in the Medieval world, grouping the seven liberal arts—grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—into the first three (hence TRIvium) and the latter four (hence QUADRIvium). In the classical education world today, these, especially the trivium, still form the basis for a well-informed, well-rounded education, and its from these that we get our modern Liberal Arts degree (although it bears little resemblance to its medieval predecessor). For Hugh, the trivium “is concerned with words, which are external things”³ precisely because they take what is hidden inside a person and, constructed with words and properly ordered, bring them to bear in the world, hopefully in a persuasive and sensible fashion.

I had just read Matthew Kaul’s essay earlier that day, and as we were discussing Hugh it occurred to me: the trivium maps rather nicely onto these three stages in Jesus’ life.

Grammar

The study of grammar is the study of the building blocks of language, the way words relate to other words, contain and define meaning, and make sense of what is perceived. It’s the mechanics of communication. I don’t want to stretch this too far as Jesus was clearly capable of abstract thought at this point, and yet it seems to me that His childhood questions in the temple were just this: early attempts at defining meaning and making sense of what He perceived, whether that was from the teachers or the Torah. His time spent in the religion of His people—indeed, the religion whose God He was—immersed Him in a common lexicon with which He could launch into His penetrating inquiry into reality.

Logic

And then there is logic. How does Christ’s time as a manual laborer coincide with the second piece of the trivium? Isn’t logic (also called “dialectic”) the art of thinking? Doesn’t this require careful instruction? As far as we know, He didn’t advance into formal education centered on the Law or the intricacies of Jewish theology. He never traveled to Athens to study in the then-extant, venerated schools of Greek philosophy. So what does logic have to do with His labor in the material world?

Hugh is helpful here. For him, the mechanical arts—fabric making, armament, commerce, agriculture, hunting, medicine, and theatrics—had no mere tangential relationship to philosophy, but rather were properly situated within the philosophic project of seeing and possessing and acting in the world according to: Wisdom.

In the Proverbs, the creation of God accords with Wisdom, seen in her delight in all that God has made⁴ since she could not delight in anything contrary to God. Hugh says, “…before there was arithmetic, there was knowledge of counting; before there was an art of music, they sang; before there was geometry, they measured fields; before there was astronomy, they marked off periods of time from the courses of the stars.”⁵ All of these imply engagement with the material world so that the arts could “[take] their rise in usage,”⁶ practitioners extracting the principles of Wisdom from reflection on their work in the world. What Hugh was after in the practices of the mechanical arts was not the arts per se, but as one scholar said, “the ratio in the light of which they become sources of a knowledge that leads ultimately to God.”⁷ The arts were valuable, beyond caring for the needs and weaknesses of humanity, for the wisdom discernable in them.

I’d like to propose that it was precisely this worldly engagement, Christ’s dutiful and mindful practice of St. Joseph’s trade, that fits perfectly into the trivial scheme. By taking up tools and applying them to the stuff of this world, Jesus would have learned wisdom not merely in the form of propositional statements but in His body. A deeply sensate, tacit sort of knowing. Jesus took the mandates of the Law, which largely dictated outward action, and deepened them to the level of the heart (which is what God was after all along), and from where did He draw these insights if not from His own life? From the workshop; from being a son and a cousin and a friend and the interactions that come with such relationships; from walking the streets of Nazareth; from splinters in His fingers and sheep’s wool under His hands and soil under His nails. His acquisition of logic came as Hugh suggests, by way of practice. By being in the world. Sister Miriam Joseph in her The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric (2002), describes logic as being “concerned with the thing as-it-is-known,” and it was in His life as a worker and worshiper among the people of Galilee that things became known to Him. His embodied labor and love made things make sense.

All this, says Hugh, is for “the sake of eloquence,”⁸ but why? Because “every human activity is servant to eloquence wed to wisdom.” ⁹ All that we do in the world ought to serve as a participation in and an example of God’s wisdom about which we can eloquently speak, and through those bright words cause the hearers to be illuminated. Wisdom thus articulated restores in us the divine likeness.

Rhetoric

And so we find ourselves in rhetoric’s realm. It is the happy marriage of grammar and logic, expressed outwardly that others might become wise. By our Lord’s cultural and religious lexicon, applied thoughtfully to both His manual labor and His relationships, He apprehended the Wisdom of God and was thus able to speak it forth authoritatively. “He was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.” Presumably, the scribes were unable to teach this way because they lacked logic, things as they are known; perhaps they could speak of what others knew, but they did not possess tacit-level knowledge of their own on which they could reflect and from which enlightened utterances could issue forth. Jesus had what they lacked, Sennett’s authority in the flesh.

As a Christian, I think it’s important to also acknowledge the Spirit of God in all of this and to say, as Jesus Himself did, that all authority in heaven and on earth was given to Him by His Father. I believe that to be true. I also believe that He was like us in every way, excepting sin, and therefore shares with us, in His human experience, the ways of growing and learning common to us all, and that this is exactly why Matthew Kaul could draw his thinking/creating/teaching pattern from His life and apply it to us all generally, and why I can try to map the trivium over it.

God’s Wisdom is warp and woof, thread and loom, discoverable in and behind and under all of creation. By grammar we can know it; by logic we can understand it; by rhetoric we can wisely communicate it. By the elements of the trivium we become reflective makers. And this trivial authority, refracted through the words and lives of philosophers—men and women in loving pursuit of Wisdom, even those who labor with their hands like Jesus—illuminates us all.

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1. Richard Sennett, Chapter Two ‘The Workshop’ in The Craftsman, (New Haven: Yale University Press), pg. 54.

2. It felt weird to write that.

3. Hugh of St. Victor, Chapter Twenty of Book Two in Didascalicon, translated and edited by Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pg. 75.

4. cf. Proverbs 8, especially vv. 30-31.

5. Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon, pg. 60.

6. Ibid. pg. 60.

7. Winthrop Wetherbee, ‘Philosophy, Cosmology and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance’ in A History of Twelfth Century Western Philosophy, ed. by Peter Dronke (Cambridge, UK 1988), pp. 21–53, at 23.

8. Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon, pg. 153

9. Ibid. pg. 75