Hugh of Saint Victor's Didascalicon: Wisdom First, Then Order

Hugh of Saint Victor's guide to reading: wisdom as the first thing sought, the seven arts before their offshoots, each text read from letter to sense to inner meaning, and what a student needs.

The Didascalicon is a guide to reading. Hugh taught in the school of the Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris, and his translator, Jerome Taylor, dates the book to the late 1120s. Its Preface names the two ways a person advances in knowledge: reading and meditation. The book treats reading, "setting forth rules for it". Three of its ideas still serve any reader. Wisdom comes first. Reading has an order. And the reader needs certain habits.

Wisdom first

Book One opens with its aim: "Of all things to be sought, the first is that Wisdom in which the Form of the Perfect Good stands fixed" (I.1, trans. Taylor). Hugh then says what wisdom does: "Wisdom illuminates man so that he may recognize himself" (I.1). Philosophy is "the love and pursuit of Wisdom, and, in a certain way, a friendship with it" (I.2).

The sequence is the lesson. Hugh does not draw up a syllabus and then ask what it is for. He names the end first and fits every study to it. In Book Two he divides philosophy into theoretical, practical, mechanical and logical: "These four contain all knowledge" (II.1). Even the mechanical arts belong to the search.

For Hugh, Wisdom with a capital letter is finally divine. A reader need not share that theology to keep the method: decide what a study is for before deciding what to read. This site's own aim starts from the same sentence.

Order: the arts before their offshoots

Book Three turns to what to read, and when. The ancients, Hugh says, judged the seven liberal arts "so to excel all the rest in usefulness" that a student well schooled in them "might afterward come to a knowledge of the others by his own inquiry and effort" (III.3). The arts also "so hang together and so depend upon one another in their ideas" that if one is missing, "all the rest cannot make a man into a philosopher" (III.4).

He sorts secular writings into two kinds (III.4). The first are the arts themselves. The second are their appendages: the songs of the poets (tragedies, comedies, satires, lyric), fables and histories. These touch philosophy only at a tangent, though a simple narrative can "prepare the way for philosophy". So effort "should first be given to the arts, in which are the foundation stones of all things and in which pure and simple truth is revealed". The rest may follow, "if time affords".

Hugh's complaint sounds modern: "the students of our day, whether from ignorance or from unwillingness, fail to hold to a fit method of study" (III.3). He also blames teachers who lecture on everything while teaching one art. They "do not know how to give each art what belongs to it" (III.5).

Method: letter, sense, inner meaning

Order also governs a single text. "Exposition includes three things: the letter, the sense, and the inner meaning" (III.8). The letter is "the fit arrangement of words". The sense is "a certain ready and obvious meaning which the letter presents on the surface". The inner meaning is "the deeper understanding which can be found only through interpretation and commentary". Inquiry runs in that order: letter, then sense, then inner meaning.

"The method of expounding a text consists in analysis" (III.9). It starts from what is defined and works towards what is not. Two habits make the reading last. Meditation is "sustained thought along planned lines" (III.10). Memory works by gathering: "reducing to a brief and compendious outline things which have been written or discussed at some length" (III.11). The completion standard in Reading Great Books asks for the same in modern form: a one-sentence thesis, and notes in your own words that carry the reasoning without the book open.

What the student needs

"Three things are necessary for those who study: natural endowment, practice, and discipline" (III.6). Endowment means grasping easily what you hear and holding firmly what you grasp. Practice means cultivating that capacity by steady effort. Discipline means joining a praiseworthy life to your knowledge. As Hugh puts it, "Aptitude gathers wisdom, memory preserves it" (III.7). Practice here is plain effort, not a technique; Deliberate Practice for Learning and Mastery adds what modern research says about making effort count.

Discipline gets the longest treatment. Hugh quotes "a certain wise man" on the method of study (III.12):

A humble mind, eagerness to inquire, a quiet life, Silent scrutiny, poverty, a foreign soil. These, for many, unlock the hidden places of learning.

Humility comes first. It teaches the reader three lessons (III.13):

"that he hold no knowledge and no writing in contempt";
"that he blush to learn from no man";
"that when he has attained learning himself, he not look down upon everyone else".

The foreign soil is the hardest item. "The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land" (III.19). Read as advice for study, it means holding no place, school or opinion so dear that it closes the mind. That reading is an interpretation. Hugh's sentence reaches further, to the whole world.

The seven arts and the five acts

As he tells it in VI.3, he learned some of the arts by hand. He drew triangles on the pavement in coal to tell obtuse, right and acute apart. He listened to strings on a wooden frame to "note with my ear the difference among the tones". The site's monochord repeats the second exercise; Geometry, Euclid and Trigonometry carries on from the first. For his account of why the arts are called ways, see the Order of the Seven Arts.

His reading method also maps, loosely, onto the five acts every level asks for. The letter and the sense are the first act, understanding exactly. Analysis and the inner meaning belong to the second, examining the reasons. Gathering prepares the third, since a reader who can outline a text can restate it. Discipline, a good life joined to knowledge, is the fifth, acting and reviewing. The fourth act, checking claims against measured evidence, has no clear counterpart here. This mapping is the site's synthesis, not Hugh's scheme. The Levels path sets Book Three among its first readings and Books One and Two near the end of Foundations. The Lost Tools of Learning: Sayers's Trivium and Her Stages makes a modern case for teaching the arts before subjects, and The Trivium as One Art asks whether grammar, logic and rhetoric are really three arts.

Where this could be wrong

The strongest objection. Hugh's order assumes knowledge forms one ordered whole, with seven arts at its base. Modern fields do not hang together that way, and "learn everything" is impossible now. The Levels path itself departs from him: Level 1 is a short poem, read slowly, though Hugh files poems among the appendages.

The best reply. Hugh ranks where effort goes first, not what may be read at all. A poem read for its letter and sense is practice in the art of grammar. That fits his remark that a simple narrative can prepare the way for philosophy. "Learn everything" warns against contempt for small things. It is not a demand to know every fact: the next sentence is "A skimpy knowledge is not a pleasing thing" (VI.3).

What would settle it. Compare learners who take the arts first with learners who start from texts they enjoy. Test both a year later on reading a hard text, and count how much each group reads. No such comparison is cited here, so the order stays Provisional. What Hugh says is Established from Taylor's translation.

Try this

Take one hard paragraph. Write its letter (parse its longest sentence), its sense (one plain sentence), then its inner meaning (what it implies, and what commentary you would need to be sure). Keep that order.
Gather a chapter, as in III.11: reduce it to an outline of five lines. The next day, rebuild the chapter's argument from the outline alone, then check it against the book.
List your next ten study sessions. Mark each as an art or an appendage in Hugh's sense, and say whether the order serves the art.
Name one kind of writing you dismiss unread. Read one example of it this week, as humility's first lesson asks.