In contemporary colleges and universities, higher studies typically begin with, or are often accompanied by, courses in writing and thinking. These courses in writing or thinking usually begin by directly teaching the student “how to think” or how to write or how to understand his own experience of things; sometimes, modern higher studies might also start from other directions, like from mathematical representations or from discussions of “critical thinking” or from each person’s felt need to express himself and engage with the world.
But the classical tradition of Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas begins from speech. Human teaching and learning are fundamentally linguistic; and so that is where the tradition begins. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric are arts of language (or, to use the more proper traditional term, arts of speech), ordered to truth and to persuasion in a community of speakers.
Grammar is the art of speaking and writing correctly and of the interpretation of the great authors; its matter is significant speech. Logic directs the acts of reason (terms, propositions, and arguments) toward truth. Rhetoric is ordered to persuasion and truth, especially since the true and the just are by nature more powerful than their opposites (cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric I.1).
This introduction lays out the foundations of the classical trivium (which is the coordinated studies of grammar, logic, and rhetoric), and in particular makes clear why the classical tradition begins all inquiry from words and takes words as its fundamental instrument.
The trivium described here is the trivium in the classical sense: the three arts of language, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, each an art with its own matter and its own end, as they were taught from antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is not the trivium of Dorothy Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning,” in which grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric are matched to stages in a child’s development, the “Poll-Parrot,” the “Pert,” and the “Poetic” ages. The classical authors do not present the arts as stages of childhood, and each art can be studied at any age, by a beginner or by a master. The order of the arts is an order of dependence, which is the sense in which grammar is first, and it is not a schedule for the growth of a child. This takes nothing away from Sayers’s proposal, which clearly has educational value; but the approach taken here is the more general one, that of the classical tradition.
Modern linguistics began with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, who distinguished the system of a language shared by its speakers (langue) from the particular acts of speaking in which that system is used (parole), and who held that linguistics should take the system as its object. Its method is chiefly descriptive: it records how a language is used and how its parts are related. The classical art of grammar includes such description, but it is also directed to speaking and writing correctly and to interpreting the great authors, and so it asks what is correct as well as what is common. Modern linguistics has made real discoveries about the structure of languages and has certainly advanced our knowledge of the world’s languages. What the classical tradition adds is an account of what signs are and what they signify, which Saussure’s own account leaves out; what words relate together are concepts and things in the world, and that is precisely what is needed to ground the correctness of speech and the truth of our utterances. Ars Grammatica takes up this question in Section XI, “Universal Grammar and Modern Linguistics.”
But, first, what is a liberal art? A liberal art is an art that makes a man both more free and more able to pursue his highest end, understanding the world. How can an art make someone more free? Every art in a way frees a man from ignorance or inability to do something. But a liberal art makes a man more free, not just in some ways or in giving him more capacity to do good things like paint or play the piano; a liberal art makes a man more free because it enables him to realize better his potential for the highest things. The liberal arts perfect reason, which belongs to every human being as such, and so they make a man more free as a man. That is the goal of the liberal arts. And the arts of language take pride of place.
Many contemporary students need to begin from starting points that differ from the classical tradition, given what they have already learned. The first set of pages allows the student either to explore modern starting points and why they are not the best places to begin, from the classical perspective, or to go directly on to begin how the tradition has always begun.
Ideally, you would have a teacher to lead you through these studies; but in our time it is often not easy to find a teacher; and this is especially true for older students.
The three courses of study
After this introduction to the trivium, students can progress to these three courses of study in the arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric themselves.
This interactive overview is expository. At the proper places this course turns to three courses of study now available, one in each art; these interactive courses provide an important foundation in the liberal arts. Neither this introduction nor these courses replace study of the classic texts. The study of the classic texts is and must be more meditative than is possible here.
The right order to proceed through the exposition is to begin with Grammar, then move to Logic, then, finally, Rhetoric. Sometimes, an excursus may be warranted, to answer objections, consider other perspectives, and in general to clarify and confirm what you have already learned.
The quadrivium (the arts that begin from quantity, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) is discussed at the end of this introduction but has its own course of study.