The medieval curriculum of grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, which Steiner read as inner exercises rather than school subjects.
The Seven Liberal Arts in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of the medieval higher-education curriculum, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, as a graded sequence of inner exercises rather than a list of school subjects. Steiner set it out in So That Man may Become Fully Human (GA 82), at The Hague on 8 April 1922. There he places the seven arts in a historical succession: the breathing exercises of ancient Yoga trained one soul-constitution, the seven arts trained the next. Grammar was the practical use of language, rhetoric its artistic use, dialectic language as a tool of thought. Arithmetic and geometry were entered into inwardly rather than abstracted. Astronomy set the student's own head, lungs and heart in relation to the cosmos, and music, at the seventh stage, was the perception of the Divine Being weaving through the world. The residue of that training is the free mobile thinking modern people inherit without effort.
The Seven Liberal Arts are usually filed under the history of universities: the trivium of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, then the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Steiner's account keeps the list and changes what the list was for. Each art named a practice the student performed on his own soul, and the whole seven-step ladder was the successor of a still older discipline of the breath.
In Steiner's Own Words
From this there remains a kind of deposit, little understood now, in what were called then the Seven Liberal Arts. They had to have been mastered by everyone who claimed to have received a higher education. Grammar meant the practical use of language. Rhetoric meant more: the artistic use of language. Dialectic was the use of language as a tool of thought. And when the student had practised these inwardly, as exercises, Arithmetic followed; but this, again, was not our abstract arithmetic, but an arithmetic which entered into things and was clearly aware that man shapes all things inwardly.
What it Means Today
The clearest living descendant of the medieval seven is St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, which rebuilt its entire undergraduate curriculum in 1937 under president Stringfellow Barr and dean Scott Buchanan. That Program still refuses electives and majors. Every student reads the same books in seminar, then sits tutorials in exactly the three disciplines the medieval arts named: language, mathematics and music. Mathematics runs four years, music two. The laboratory works from original texts, recreating Archimedes, Newton and Einstein rather than summarising them, and in the mathematics tutorial a student constructs a proposition of Euclid at the board.
Barr and Buchanan restored the syllabus, and this is where the two accounts part company. Thalira synthesis: a Great Books table can hand back the texts of the quadrivium, but the medieval student was not reading about geometry, he was performing geometry inwardly until the figure became a tool his own thinking could hold, and no reading list by itself restores that inner performance. Steiner's practical suggestion in the same Hague lecture points the other way round. Begin where certainty is still granted, with mathematics, and work it as the medieval student worked it, slowly and inwardly, until number and figure are entered rather than manipulated. The seven arts were never information. They were things done to oneself, and astronomy, the sixth, asked the student to find his own head, lungs and heart in the sky.
Where to Read More