3. Hugh who?

If my dam work hadn't occurred where it did, it's unlikely that I would have come across a particularly interesting early 12th century theologian of Augustinian tendencies and French situation (though perhaps not origin), Hugh of St. Victor. Bear with me, for the connections between my own roots and my encounter with Hugh are several and such that a more theistically inclined mind than my own might see some sort of holy guidance behind them.

From the website of Highland Woodworking, a shop in Atlanta that's highly regarded nationally as a source of fine tools (and which I just visited for the first time a few days ago, a near religious experience), I learned of a fairly recently created boutique woodworking magazine called Mortise and Tenon, which focuses on historical and hand-based aspects of the craft. Poking around its website I found reference to a program in "mechanical arts" that one of the magazine's creators is lending his expertise to at the Greystone Theological Institute. Though I'm not opposed to institutions (and occasionally have been told I belong in one), those of the theological flavor aren't my usual cup of tea, but this one, the piece I was reading told me, is located in Coraopolis, PA – or "Cory" as it was referred to, when it was the town across the Ohio river from where I grew up. (I can't help but note the discrepancy between TGI's "grow where you're planted" motto and the website's image of a mountaintop retreat that is most decidedly not a hill that rises up from the banks of the Ohio.) If it hadn't been for this geographical coincidence, I likely wouldn't have gone any further, but thinking of these reformers looking out across the valley to the hills where I was raised somehow made my little home corner of the world feel cared for, and I wanted to know more. So I clicked through to a 5-part podcast that featured the M&T fellow talking with the GTI theologians on topics that seemed handmade for me, including "Workmanship of Risk and Workmanship of Certainty" and "Durability, Diversity, and Value of Work.” And thus later that day, as the speakers in my car podcasted me home through the Michiana countryside, I came to learn of Hugh of St. Victor. A week later, thanks to Better World Books and a wife happy to facilitate any intrusion of Latin texts into our lives, I had my own copy of Hugh's Didascalicon (though in translation, as my Latin was acquired late and incompletely and is mostly dead to me now).

A few days after that, while being held aloft by the principles of fluid dynamics in a device that shows just how far our own mechanical arts have developed since Hugh’s time, I learned that he  identified these arts as follows: fabric-making, armament, commerce, agriculture, hunting, medicine, and theatrics. Can you spot the ordering principle? He’s a medieval philosopher, so you know there must be one. No? What if I note that "armament" includes the wall-building crafts of carpenters and stone-masons and "hunting" all aspects of preparing food for consumption? Still no? Well for Hugh, it's obvious: the first three are arts (founded on sciences, i.e., bodies of articulated know-how) by which we protect ourselves from external harms; and the other four – including theatrics, oddly enough for a Christian influenced by Plato – have to do with how we "feed" and "nourish" ourselves internally. All are "adulterate" arts, as Hugh puts it, though I am loathe to tell my wife this given my own interest in them and the possibility for verbal confusion. But for him, this means only that matter and form are not intrinsically united: "their concern is with the artificer's product, which borrows its form from nature." Clothing, for instance, is made of some material that is not itself inherently protective of our bodies. Instead, the weaver, knitter, or sewer takes that material and in-forms it so as to imitate the function of the fur of the beasts or the feathers of the birds. (Biomimicry very much avant la lettre.) Likewise the wood made into a pitched, rain-shedding roof, whose form the carpenter takes from the sloped sides of the mountain down which its waters flow. Though perfection of our bodies is never fully realizeable, through such mimicry Hugh thinks these mechanical arts can nevertheless help "restore within us the divine likeness, a likeness which to us is a form but to God is his nature." The fullest achievement of this is accomplished only in our internal intellectual nature by the non-mechanical arts through which Wisdom is found, but even the mechanical have their role, insofar as they help align our bodily nature and the parts of the mind dependent on it with the true and the good and allow us to live well as the world-dependent creatures we are. And so from that TGI’s interest in Hugh is clear, and the idea is understandable of incorporating instruction into a theological curriculum of the mechanical arts he identifies.

What's striking to me, as with much 'applied' Christian theology, is how much sense this makes when stripped of the weird trinitarian metaphysics that it is attached to (which, of course, Christians think is not weird or, if they think it's weird – or "absurd" as Kierkegaard would say – they see that weirdness as a feature not a bug). One can be the sort of good Augustinian atheist I think of myself as being, or, if one insists on some real metaphysics, a committed but pagan Neo-Platonist, and still see two powerful ideas in Hugh's understanding of the mechanical arts. First, we could do a lot worse than think that our human good resides in work through which we try to maintain our fit with the natural world, which work must at some deep level be imitative to accomplish that end. And second, we ought to see the knowledge required for such work to be an essential component of the curricula through which we shape our children and ourselves. For when we emphasize only the economic or the theoretical (whether in Hugh’s pre-modern analyses of them or our own), we can't but as selves and societies find ourselves out of whack with the whole of which we are always somewhat awkwardly a part. Whatever else we must learn on our way to being upstanding citizens and productive workers, we need what can only be taught through the dust and oil of shop class and the sun and dirt of the garden.

Thus, though they may be indifferent to the offer, I happily reach a hand from my recollected home side of the Ohio Valley across to the TGI in secular support of their mechanically artful mission.