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The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Guide to the Arts

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Here, in Hugh of Saint Victor, we find philosophy comprises four parts: The theoretical, whose study is the divine, the practical, whose study is human ethics and morality, the mechanical, whose study is the relieving of human misery, and last the logical, whose study is the operation of Mind. Included in this writing is an exposition of medieval cosmology; where the empyrean and the infernum are discussed, the superlunary and sublunary are highlighted, and the anima mundi is but hinted at.

There is a difference between the intelligible and the intellectible and between study and discipline. There is a method and an order to studying the liberal arts, whose apprehension is to insure nothing less than perfection, if not strength.

I've not read a book that covers Everything with such Little. Here there is breadth and depth, the concrete and the abstract, the particular and the universal.

Confused with how to proceed in your studies? Let Hugh of Saint Victor point the way.

Jerome Taylor's Introduction is almost better than the translation. It gives a very profound trans-epochal understanding of very difficult issues. Clearly Taylor was a great and very profound scholar of the best of the medieval era.

This book doesn't only give one a better understanding of the state of theological learning and didactic literature of the twelfth century but is itself a useful teacher of the studier of Scripture today however a lot of this does not directly bear on Scripture or theology proper e.g. talk about mechanical arts.