FIGURE 8. Tomb of the Baker Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, late first century CE. Rome. Reproduced by permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY.
The loss in some instances of a thoroughgoing understanding of classical thought proved to contribute to a more positive appraisal of the arts generally in the Middle Ages, although it is important to stress that we should not overstate the magnitude of the historical change. As the content of much classical thought became inaccessible or unintelligible in the early Middle Ages, even though the organizing principles and underlying social and moral hierarchies of antiquity remained largely in place, writers occasionally responded in a pragmatic manner to the concept of the arts and revealed in the process some enthusiasm for them. In thinking about the arts, these writers responded often enough not to philosophical interests but practical needs and hence, in their putative ignorance of the content of classical culture, were somewhat liberated from prior prejudices and could alter classifications in an unfettered manner.26 In other instances, as classical thought became increasingly accessible in the later Middle Ages and as more and more thinkers appreciated it and adopted both its content and categories, the profound ambivalence of classical culture toward the arts as a concept—its “flexible and ambiguous” treatment of it, as Elspeth Whitney has astutely put it—allowed for a “creative, positive revision and development by medieval writers.”27 As a result, even the productive arts—or, more precisely, the “mechanical arts” (a term only adopted in the ninth century in John the Scot’s commentary to Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii [On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury])—became more extensively examined and cast in a somewhat more positive light than they had been in the classical period. Nevertheless, we still need to recognize that when it comes to evaluating the concept of the arts over the long run, we can ultimately trace as much continuity as change between periods as we move from Greek and Roman antiquity to the Middle Ages. Overall, as Birgit Van Den Hoven has cogently cautioned, much remained the same regarding basic attitudes about the arts as the concept fit into moral and social hierarchies within the broad and sometimes elaborate classifications of knowledge crafted during those periods.28
To be sure, we find many of the old ambivalences about the arts intact throughout the Middle Ages, albeit infused with matters of religious concern. For the key church father Augustine of Hippo, “ars” in the De civitate Dei (City of God) constitutes a mark of the superiority of humankind because it revealed our “natural genius” to transform the environment. And Augustine does indeed wax eloquent about this fact in a long, inspiring, and influential passage praising the arts, much as he does in a number of his writings when he talks about all sorts of honorable forms of work. Yet in the very same passage from the De civitate Dei, Augustine also deems “ars” to be “superfluous, perilous, and pernicious,” presumably because it potentially binds us to worldly matters rather than automatically directing us on an upward and uplifting path toward spiritual enlightenment and thus toward God.29 In the Augustinian framework familiar to many modern readers of medieval literature, particularly those indoctrinated into his seminal De doctrina christiana (On Christian Teaching), the arts needed to be used (uti), we can say, not enjoyed (frui)—a notion certainly not lost on Dante’s edified wayfarer as he journeys through the other-world. Other medieval thinkers, including those indebted to Augustine, approached the productive arts in particular with more hostility, perpetuating the longstanding hierarchies that privileged intellectual work (the so-called liberal arts, whose features could change in antiquity) over physical labors (the artes sordidae, vulgares, and illiberales). And yet gradually thinkers in medieval culture worked to soften some aspects of the harshness of much of classical culture toward the productive arts in particular, especially in and after the Carolingian renaissance, when philosophers and theologians developed new and more positively inflected categories for thinking about crafts and manual labor. And by the twelfth century, especially with the writings of Domingo Gundisalvo, Hugh of St. Victor, Albertus Magnus, Vincent of Beauvais, and Robert Kilwardby, we seem to witness, if only haltingly at times, a more comprehensive exploration of the virtues of the productive arts generally, even if we cannot always attribute to this period a completely innovative recalibration of the value of them as a full-fledged expression of the dignity of man or, for that matter, attribute to the period a radical reconfiguration, much less social upscaling, of certain forms of work and the arts underpinning them.30
In the end, then, by the thirteenth century, thinkers in the Middle Ages had at one time or another reconceptualized the arts generally in more positive terms. They had validated the productive arts in particular as expressions of reason and as valuable forms of knowledge. They had justified them as integral parts of elaborate and comprehensive systems of thought. They had awarded them prominence within their systems of thought, thus partly breaking down the ancient classical opposition between, on the one hand, unworthy productive and practical arts that served the body, financial gain, and pleasure and, on the other hand, worthy intellectual arts that nourished the soul and enhanced virtue. They had legitimated them as vehicles contributing to salvation, while still placing a number of them, such as the productive arts, at the bottom of a conceptual ladder on an ascending hierarchy that elevated humans step by step from matter to spirit. They had, in keeping with many from the classical period, designated some of them as occupying a middle ground between illiberal and liberal arts (such “semiliberal” arts as medicine, husbandry, architecture, navigation, painting, sculpture, gymnastics, and the like). They had assigned them a positive moral value by envisioning them as part of God’s plan for humankind to both recapture a prelapsarian state through applied specialized knowledge and take advantage of an opportunity for humans to perfect nature and care for themselves through their ingenuity. They had deemed them conducive to the virtuous life in a variety of ways, much as they embraced them as part of an overall theology of work. They had secularized them by lauding their utilitarian and exploitative value for humankind generally insofar as they furnished humans with the means to use available natural resources for positive practical ends. And, finally, they had articulated a model for them to be integrated into, and viewed as interdependent with, the theoretical sciences.
A number of contributing socioeconomic and religious factors, it has been argued, led to this treatment of the arts—especially the productive arts—in the Middle Ages. Monasticism, and more broadly a variety of institutionalized Christian religious practices, proved influential—a number of scholars have contended—by exploring and configuring work as crucial for spiritual development, perhaps most vigorously beginning in the eleventh century with the seminal writings of Peter Damian.31 Serious scholarly pressure, however, has nevertheless been applied to crediting the culture of cenobitism with fundamentally redefining the perceived value of work generally and thus with reevaluating the various forms of knowledge underpinning different manifestations of specialized work. Certainly there is little evidence that monasticism constituted the seedbed for the eventual growth of capitalism in the West.32 Another important factor, scholars have also maintained, was the increased mechanization of Europe in the Middle Ages and thus the concomitant value placed on technology as people invested in and modified all sorts of inventions, from watermills to windmills, and in the process innovated technologically in order to find better and more efficient ways to exploit their environment and