There is a general distrust and uneasiness among conservative Christians surrounding the pursuit of knowledge through intentional higher education. “Knowledge puffs up” they say, “And those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know” (1 Corinthians 8:1-2). It is a genuine concern, and their distrust of universities is not unmerited. But together Anselm of Canterbury and Hugh of St. Victor create a convincing counter to that unease and distrust. Though dated from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, their works Proslogion and Didascalicon (respectively) provide relevant insights into how a Christian can avoid the common pitfalls of education today and use it instead as a means for knowing God. On the basis of these writings, it can be illustrated that when approached wisely, the pursuit of knowledge can conduct us both in nature and in spirit ever closer to God. To achieve this end, an education must be built upon the proper foundation, pursued for the right purpose, governed by wisdom, and characterized by humility. Approached in this way, the pursuit of knowledge need not be feared. These requirements will be discussed under the following two titles: Basis (foundation and purpose) and Practice (as governed by wisdom and as characterized by humility).

Basis

All study should be based on faith in God and subsequently, the desire to know God, to see him, experience him, and love him. Anselm calls this approach to philosophy “faith seeking understanding.” He writes, “I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For I believe even this: that unless I believe, I shall not understand.”¹ Hugh of St. Vincent calls it “seeking wisdom.”² He writes, “Of all things to be sought, the first is that Wisdom in which the Form of the Perfect Good stands fixed.” Hugh sees Wisdom personified to be God himself. Understanding can only be built on a foundation of initial faith in God. Today we can understand the Christian as having a great advantage in the quest for knowledge and understanding because he already has this foundation of belief. If a person knows his point of origin and the point of his end, the line he walks will be a straight one and his footsteps strong and sure. He does not need to fear any knowledge that he encounters because everything can be interpreted through this anchoring truth. Unless God is our foundation and the end that we are pursuing, nothing will make sense. Isaiah 7:9 says, “If you are not firm in the faith, you will not be firm at all.” Hugh pointed this out as well and in so doing gives an explanation from nearly one thousand years ago to why many Christians do lose their faith in universities today and why the most highly educated societies are becoming increasingly confused and cynical. “[T]he man wishing to attain knowledge, yet who willingly deserts truth in order to entangle himself in mere by-products of art, will find . . . but exceedingly great pains and meagre fruit” (88). It is important to recognize at the outset that all understanding comes from God and that we can know nothing unless God reveals himself to us. Anselm is convinced of this when he prays, “Teach me to seek You, and reveal Yourself to me as I seek; for unless You teach [me] I cannot seek You, and unless You reveal Yourself I cannot find You” (92).  He goes on to refer to God as the “Light” that illuminates the rational mind (103). Hugh also favors the idea of “illumination”. “Wisdom illuminates man so that he may recognize himself” (1). In recognizing himself, man in turn recognizes the God who created him. To some, the idea of knowing God through knowing yourself could have a humanistic ring to it. Those who already have a mistrust for philosophy might use this to confirm their assumption that the pursuit of reasoning and knowledge is a slippery slope.  But Anselm points out that we were created in God’s image. “O Lord, I acknowledge and give thanks that You created in me Your image so that I may remember, contemplate, and love you” (93). He believes that it is through God’s image in us, that we remember God and recognize Him when we see Him. Hugh believes that it is in knowledge and virtue that we find our likeness to the “eternal and divine substance,” and he says it is by the means of knowledge and virtue that we can attain our integrity. “This is our entire task—the restoration of our nature and the removal of our deficiency” (52). Thus, we come full circle; we seek to understand God so that we can understand ourselves so that in turn, again we can understand God. Anselm’s prayer was that God would grant him understanding “to the degree You know to be advantageous” (93). For these two men, education is not an exultation of man and his reason, but a means by which man exalts God and becomes more like him. To the degree that it produces this worship and restores man to God is the degree to which it is advantageous. Any man who desires to pursue knowledge today should have a solid grasp on his foundation and the purpose which drives his pursuit.

Practice: Governed by Wisdom

Education then cannot be extracted from the whole of a man’s life, but will inform his daily practice, coloring every consideration and defining his every action. The influence education will have over us is not something we need to fear. The character of a man is being shaped regardless of his education, and regardless of his initiative or inactivity. Hugh recognizes that as created in the image of God we have “natural endowment” or aptitude for comprehension and memory, but what is natural is not enough, only the soil (90). He says that their cultivation will “either [restore] our nature’s integrity, or [relieve] of those weaknesses to which our present life lies subject” (52).  Anselm says that these specific traits were given to us for the purpose of learning to know God and finding our enjoyment in him. Aptitude gathers wisdom and memory preserves it (93). Therefore, let today’s critic of education consider that taking responsibility for our own agency and managing what grows in our soil is a far less fearful thing than allowing any old thing to flourish, which is bound to happen educated or not. 

Hugh would not have held that education alone guarantees our success. He stressed that one must have discipline even in his pursuit of knowledge. Where Anselm’s work is written as a prayer and describes in poetic and lofty terms the yearnings of a philosopher’s heart and his highest ideals, Hugh’s work is more practical and focuses on how one effectively pursues these ideals. He likely wrote Disdascalon as a manual for those young men who had been under his care and were moving on to other areas to study. He cautions them that high ideals do not replace hard work, effort, and intentionality. According to Hugh, unless there is a plan and method towards reaching those ideals, a good intention won’t be enough. “It is bad to pursue something good negligently; it is worse to expend many labors on an empty thing” (87). He sees not an evil heart, but a lack of wisdom to be the primary cause of falling short of success. He warns, “Today there are many that study, but few who are wise. This is because they fail to hold to a fit method of study” (89). Not only that, but the teachers also lack wisdom. They take “some small matter and [drag] it out through long verbal detours, obscuring a simple meaning in confused discourses” (88). This tendency has apparently been common to man throughout history and not unique to our current generation. As was laid out before, all learning should be seen through the lens of a faith in God, however in practice, the study itself should be based on the seven core liberal arts according to Hugh. These arts, he argued, “reveal pure and simple truth and comprise the tools of all philosophy” (89). There are an infinite number of things one can study. This is probably truer today than it was in Hugh’s day one thousand years ago. But unless those things are interpreted through this foundation of the core arts, other pursuits at best will be meaningless and at worst will lead us away from our purpose and desired end. Because people do not have a good grasp and understanding on these foundational concepts, they fear education. Hugh says the answer is in being properly ordered. “Do not strike out on by-ways until you know the main road. You will go along securely when you are not under the fear of going astray (90).” This is good advice beautifully communicated, and if followed today would perhaps give rise to a more favorable opinion of education among Christian critics. The one who is eager to learn but has been denied the foundation of the “main roads”, will pick up any random “by-way”, imbibe it, and with no basis of truth to keep him accountable, come to cherish any manner of erroneous ideas. This is the way it happens, and those critics feel validated in their concerns little knowing that they have unwittingly become truth’s enemy.

There is more to discipline than having a secure foundation. Wisdom is also needed in how one practices collecting knowledge. Hugh sees practice as reading and meditation; reading presents material to understand and mediation is the tool by which we remember. He says, “Don’t rejoice over having read widely, but only if you are able to retain what you have read. Otherwise, there is no profit in having read or understood much” (94). The American philosopher John Dewey from the twentieth century wisely noted that experiences only shape our character as we reflect on them and understand their significance. Likewise, Hugh understood that what we read will only shape us if we meditate on them and apply them to our experience. In this way the rules for living should be joined to the rules for study “in order that the student might know both the standard of his life and the nature of his study” (94). What is the standard of his life and the nature of his study other than to seek out and understand God through the things he has made and rejoice in it? Wisdom does not forget philosophy’s purpose. Each thing feeds into the other so that everything begins and ends with God. For Hugh it is a spiritual experience.

This especially it is which takes the soul away from the noise of earthly business and makes it have even in this life a kind of foretaste of the sweetness of the eternal quiet. And when through the things which God has made, a man has learned to seek out and to understand him who has made them all, then does he equally instruct his mind with knowledge and fill it with joy. From this it follows that in meditation is to be found the greatest delight (93).

Anselm ponders this great wonder and breaks out in an earnest prayer, 

[L]et me know and love You, so that I may rejoice in You. And if I cannot in this life [know, love, and rejoice in You] fully, at least let me advance day by day until the point of fullness comes. Let knowledge of You progress in me here and be made full [in me] there. Let love for You grow [in me here] and be [made] full [in me] there, so that here my joy may be great with expectancy and there may be full in realization (112).

Anselm recognizes that we will never fully realize this fulness of joy in this life. As Paul writes in I Corinthians, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for them that love him.” But this should not deter us from practicing and preparing for that joy in the life to come. Only as our education is governed by wisdom will it ensure our intended end and have the potential to bring us this level of delight.

Practice: Characterized by Humility

While pursuing these ideals, the student of philosophy should take special care to avoid the vices of pride and arrogance to which he will be especially susceptible. Hugh stresses that learning is part of a lifestyle and a person’s disposition towards it will determine what he learns. Hugh is not unaware that knowledge can “puff up”.

Many are deceived by the desire to appear wise before their time. They therefore break out in a certain swollen importance and begin to simulate what they are not and to be ashamed of what they are; and they slip all the farther from wisdom in proportion as they think, not of being wise but of being thought so (95). 

Both Anselm and Hugh stress that the object of our pursuits is to know God. The man who forgets and puts his own greatness first will not learn anything of eternal value. Pride has always been man’s worst enemy both in the eleventh century as well as today, and Christians do well to fear its power. After all, was it not the desire to be wise that brought about Adam and Eve’s fall in the garden? And to the one who renounces learning in an attempt to remain humble, let him be reminded that pride and arrogance is found among the unlearned as well as the scholars and forsaking knowledge is no cure. Hugh faced this argument as well among certain religious people and had this to say about it: 

In our days certain people accuse our forefathers of simplicity . . . They say that the divine utterances have such a simple way of speaking that no one has to study them under masters, but can sufficiently penetrate to the hidden treasures of Truth by his own mental acumen. They wrinkle their noses and purse their lips at lecturers in divinity and do not understand that they themselves give offense to God, whose words they preach—simple to be sure in their verbal beauty, but lacking savor when given a distorted sense. 

Take care that your flaunting of humility is not in itself a form of arrogance. The greatest cure against arrogance and vanity is for a man to know who he is, and in seeing himself, to be reminded of the God whose image he bears. But a man who has knowledge paired with humility is very nearly a perfect man. Hugh writes that the humble student “seeks what he sees he lacks, and considers not how much he knows, but of how much he is ignorant” (95). He goes on to admonish, “You will be wiser than all if you are willing to learn from all” (96). The truly wise student will not sabotage any potential sources of knowledge by judging it to be inferior to him. No, humility in learning will respect all knowledge sources, be willing to learn from anyone, and will avoid arrogance when knowledgeable. 

The humble student must also be on the alert for pride and arrogance as it pertains to his wealth. Wise and educated men are bound to be successful and success is accompanied by wealth and in turn, position and power. For this reason, the educated are often found at the top of society, living lives of luxury, boasting not only in what they know but in what they have earned. Hugh addresses this danger as well. A common saying in his day was: “A fat belly does not produce a fine perception” (100). Meaning that the overly satisfied and superfluous man does not seek truth and knowledge so much as wealth and fame. Once he has acquired it, he will be satisfied and will cease to pursue knowledge. He will cease to seek God. Hugh says that to grow wise through education, a man must denounce the transient things of this world (101). In this way he will not be distracted, and his earnestness will not subside. Humble students will confess that they are strangers and pilgrims here, looking for their homeland. Like the saints depicted in the book of Hebrews “they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.” Hugh says it this way, “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” (101). Thus, we come full circle again with our pursuit of knowledge pointing us ever upward to God. The secret to being true to this theme is combining moral behavior with knowledge. In so doing, Hugh says, we will have lived a praiseworthy life (90).

Conclusion

In conclusion, through the writings of these two educators, Anselm of Canterbury and Hugh of St. Victor, it has been made clear that the pursuit of knowledge is good for making one wise and for becoming like God. Some sensitive hearts will tremble at this description because it is all too reminiscent of the garden scene where man grasped for what was forbidden. But neither wisdom nor becoming like God are forbidden to us. The Apostle Peter writes that grace and peace will come to us through the knowledge of God and that we have been given all things through knowledge of Him. As we live in glory and virtue, we will become partakers of His divine nature and will thereby escape the lust that has corrupted our world (2 Peter 1:3-4). As we pursue knowledge in humility and wisdom with God as our foundation and as our intended end, we can share in this special gift of philosophy that God has given to every man through natural endowment.

1.  Anselm, Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Anselm of Canterbury, trans. Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson (USA: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 2000), 92, (All other quotes from Anselm will come from this work). ↩︎
2. Hugh, The Didascalon of Hugh of Saint Victor, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1, (All other quotes from Hugh will come from this work). ↩︎